Wings Over Scotland

One of the most striking things about the current election is the BBC's total abandonment of even a pretence at impartiality with regard to the nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales (and other smaller parties like UKIP too), which is most obviously visible in the Corporation's determined exclusion of them from the defining theatre of the campaign – the leaders' debates.

In the light of protests pointing out that excluding what Ofcom defines as "main parties" in Scotland and Wales during an election is against broadcasting regulations, the BBC (and ITV and Sky, although the latter subsequently broke ranks – see above) hastily rebranded the programmes as "Prime Ministerial debates", and insisted that they were only for the politicians contesting the keys to 10 Downing Street.

The gigantic irony, of course, is that it looks increasingly as if NONE of the participants in the debates will actually be the next Prime Minister.

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Clue: it’s not because they like having sex with children.

It’s because, along with the war in Afghanistan, they’re one of the only two major campaigning issues on which there isn’t even a manufactured illusion of disagreement between the three main parties standing in the General Election of 2010. Everyone is singing in perfect harmony from the same hymn sheet on this one: the unemployed are dangerous and despicable criminals.

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I like this:

Much like Afghanistan, none of the London parties speak for the UK electorate on this important issue. Which is, y'know, kinda strange. You'd think wars and spending scores of billions of pounds on pointless weapons in a recession would be just the sort of thing that would come up during an election as points of contention. But maybe I'm missing something.

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Hang on. Is this classic reverse psychology? Does the Daily Mail actually WANT a hung parliament, for doubtless sinister reasons of its own?

Because it's hard to imagine that a major British newspaper could be edited by anyone SO stupid as to think this absurd, hysterical rubbish (based on an out-of-context quote EIGHT years old) could do anything but strengthen the feelings of anyone who's sick of the old Labour-Tory carve-up of this country. So let's help them, eh?

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Sure enough, it didn’t take long for the UK’s two big dinosaur parties – and the media – to react with fury to the unexpected Lib Dem surge.

We can but hope the curiously-proportioned bar graph and contradictory sets of figures are a biting satirical comment about the unreliability of opinion polls from Murdoch-controlled Sky News, but I fear that’s a touch optimistic.

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A number of commentators have in the last few days been attacking David Cameron for so actively pursuing the idea of live TV debates between the three "main" party leaders, on the grounds that – with the huge lead in the opinion polls the Tories had at the time the debates were agreed on – he had everything to lose and nothing to gain from tackling his opponents face to face in front of the nation.

To be strictly fair to Cameron, though (and I'm doing so purely as mental exercise), the debate wasn't theoretically such a bad idea.

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Malcolm McLaren RIP. This is a version of a piece I originally wrote for WoS a few years ago, reprinted in tribute to one of the world's great chancers.

The world would have been a much more interesting place if he'd managed to become the Mayor of London.

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On the face of it, it's a time for national rejoicing. After just 13 years in government, Gordon Brown has suddenly apparently discovered the secret of 100% employment – state jobs for all.

New Labour's latest attack on the voiceless poor is the stunning assertion that after 30 years of millions-long dole queues, it seems there was no need for anyone to be unemployed at all.

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The last bastion of global freedom was put in chains last night. Now, on a whim, a government minister elected by no-one can legally shut down absolutely any site on the internet, indefinitely, on the mere suspicion that it might, in the future, infringe someone's copyright, or in some way inadvertently assist some third party in the breaking of some other law. 

Of course, these powers will be used only sparingly and with the most careful and wise consideration. No further democratic scrutiny is or will be required. Authority has been wholly established.

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It's weird how bad people are at looking even a tiny bit below the surface. All you have to do is quietly mention in passing somewhere that Tetris, Columns, Bejeweled or any of their millions of clones and derivatives aren't actually "puzzle games", and all hell breaks loose.

Even nowadays, with a resurgence in indie games making abstract graphics (relatively) popular again, most gamers angrily insist that if something doesn't look like a traditional spaceship, it can't be a spaceship.

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When the ugly duckling becomes the swan.

Hats off to you, Dan Parks.

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With a tremendous sense of comic timing, the International Football Association Board this week ruled (despite the votes of the English and Scottish FAs) against any possibility of even experimenting with the use of goal-line technology, almost at the same minute as Birmingham City were denied a clear goal in their FA Cup quarter-final against Portsmouth that might have kept them in the competition.

It’s embarrassing that in the modern age such crucial refereeing errors, so simple to rectify, can still see teams knocked out of a nation’s biggest cup tournament. What’s more embarrassing still is that another sport has successfully demonstrated just how easily many of the niggling issues that dog the thankless task of football officiating can be solved.

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