Recognition

A few years ago in a hotel bar with friends, despite never having met her, I instantly recognised Alison Goldfrapp from behind. I realised at the time that this might not cast me in the best light, although I still maintain that she is a distinctive enough shape and size for me to not automatically end up on the sex offenders’ register.

The prize for recognising from behind public figures you’ve never met, however, was summarily snatched last night by psychonomy’s brother, when from a standing start he recognised the figure walking away from him outside the pub as Londoners’ pet peeve, RMT leader Bob Crow, in under a second. Sterling work from the lad there.

The Union is dead

“The Union is dead,” says the workman next to me at the Commons cashpoint, Essex-accented, to his mate. “It’s okay to have a Scottish National Party, that’s all right, but as soon as there’s a British National Party, then oh God, they’re all Nazis.”

“Well, they are,” grins the other workman.

“No they’re not, John,” says the first one, serious and slightly hurt. “No they’re not.”

This tiny exchange illustrates a classic false belief on the part of disaffected Brits who see the BNP as in any way legitimate: that the party gets labelled “Nazis” by lefty liberals in Parliament and the media, rather than the awkward fact that many BNP members are real actual Nazis. And of course many of those in the party who aren’t actual Nazis are investigative journalists infiltrating it.

It also illustrates another truism: if MPs just hope the BNP will shut up and go away, it will feed off the way it is treated and use its ostracism to illustrate how it—and its intended audience—is shunned by Westminster. To engage with it and show its members for the hopeless racist idiots they are is not to dignify it with legitimacy; its lies should be countered at every opportunity and its bar-room demagoguery revealed for exactly what it is. Because at the moment it is slowly and insidiously gaining ground among people like the man at the cashpoint, who is probably not himself a racist idiot, but whose fears and insecurities are prey to those who are.

Asterix again

Asterix creator Albert Uderzo has been interviewed by the BBC:

“We are getting closer to bringing him back to life in a new album,” (says Uderzo), although he later admits that he's still looking for an idea for the next story. “That’s become a lot more difficult for me now—after 33 albums to find an idea is not that easy.”

No shit. I don’t like repeating myself too much, but we have established before that the last book was so catastrophically bad it couldn’t have been any worse if it had been this:



In the conversation that spawned that title we pondered the idea of sending it to Uderzo as a pitch to see if he had lost his judgment to such an extent that he’d accept it. The news that he’s contemplating another book makes that plan just a little more likely.