This one is coming out a day early, because as I've said, there's plenty of news these days to get through, and also because the library computer is so appalling it seems to be on the verge of a breakdown. I daren't even do a spell check for fear of making everything explode into goo.
Alright, so here is the long awaited Harriet Harman/Phil Woolas post. I did write it once, but then I lost it again. I'll give you a bit of background to it, for those who aren't particularly political, I'm pretty sure you'll still find some sick humour in it. I know I did.
Here's the dirt
So Phil lost his seat for being attempting to stir up racial tension, told a few lies and validated some bigots. That's not a bad effort, Phil. How is Satan and all his minions?
Anyway, in response, the Liberal Democrats - who have most-definitely never ever, ever, lied in forever - mounted a legal challenge. A one hundred year old law was invoked. Phil lost his job, there's a new election and yadda yadda. But realistically, Phil Woolas is strangely not the person that I feel particular malice towards. He is a politician, he did what politicians do. He lied, stirred up nationalistic sentiment and cheated his way into office. Is it bad? Yeah, course it is. Is it unusual - I'll leave that one up to you. The person I want to take a closer look at is Deputy Opposition Leader turned full blown one-person natural disaster is none other than Harriet Harman. I didn't realise she was the opposition leader until I ironically thought "God, I hope Harriet never gets anywhere" before BBC news came on and told me she was taking the helm of the Labour Party while Miliband was off looking after his bald and dribbling spawn, keeping it in dark places and feeding it fell meats*
Harman waded into the debate like anyone actually cared about what she had to say. And this is it:
""It is not part of Labour's politics for somebody to be telling lies to get themselves elected," the party's deputy leader said...
Srsly?
I have to admit, when I first heard that, I had to do a double take. Hypocrisy and empty rhetoric are commonplace in politics, and we've become so accustomed to it that we kind of just zone out a little bit, and pretend like it isn't there. But you can't dispute that the notion that the Labour Party doesn't elect liars is such a shamefaced lie in itself that it seems more like a cruel joke.
Mind you, the more you look at Harman, you realize that she does - like all politicians - suffer from some sort of acute political schitzophernia. On the one hand, she is prone to lying (see 25th June, 2007), in which she said that Labour should apologise for Iraq, but then denied saying it. She also said she would have been against the war had she been in possession of all the facts, an absence of WMD's not withstanding, apparently, meaning that what she wanted was factual evidence of non-existence. My head hurts.
But she does have bouts of unusual honesty, at least as regards her constituents and colleagues. Some would even say that she suffers from some chronic impulsion to speak her mind, although given she's the Deputy Leader of the opposition, this hasn't really harmed her in any way. Not even when she wore an optional stab vest while walking around Peckham, which would have offered protection from knives and bullets, but not from political commentators and really bad internet bloggers. But actual speaking-her-mind part has to be the best. In her defense she claimed that you'd probably want to wear a hard-hat at a building site, wouldn't you? Says a lot about what she thinks of Peckham, really.
More recently, this tactless streak has continued into some sort of outright vitirol against individuals, political persuasions and hair colours. She was forced to apologise for calling Danny Alexander a "ginger rodent", although not for calling Liberal Democrats "political mutants" in the same speech. The ginger rodent was a play on red squirrels, which would have sure made previously-mentioned squirrel genocide-ist Norris Atthey quite happy. Or quite angry, I suppose, depending on whether or not he agreed with Harman that Alexander was kind of like an uncute red squirrel.
There's a lot more that could be said for old Harriet. Motoring convictions that would have resulted in a lost license for anyone else, investigations for electoral fraud (oh delicious irony), and attempts to block MP's expense's becoming public all feature on her Wiki. It's worth a read, if you like getting angry. There's also a whole quagmire of gender related stuff of a pseudo feminist persuasion that she's churned out over the years, including the claim that the recession could have been avoided if the Lehman Brothers had actually been sisters, but to be honest, I don't think I'm totally qualified to talk about why I find her particularly disturbing in that regard.
Although, curiously, Harman wasn't always an twisted, evil old goat who lubricates her somewhat mercenary political career with lies, hypocrisy and opportunism.* She was once a legal representative for the organisation-formally-known-as the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL), which we can now just call "Liberty" although I wouldn't have been able to slip in the pop-culture "Prince" reference in an attempt to look cooler. She even was found guilty of being in contempt of court, and I suppose if you want to be anywhere it's there, at least for me. Especially if I was up for impersonating a Police Officer. Anyway...
Just goes to show there is some truth to that quote: "Be careful when you fight the monsters, lest you become one". Although with truth being a rather expendable commodity these days, I only really put it in for the Nietzsche reference.
*I make no apologies for the LotR reference.
* Bam! How many points to I get for so many insults, Harriet?
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