Thomas Mair, the right-wing "Britain First" yelling white supremacist who killed Jo Cox refused to talk in police interviews, then he refused to enter a plea or give evidence in his trial.
This cowardly refusal to explain himself hasn't left many people in doubt about his motivations. The masses of extreme-right propaganda in his house, his associations with extreme-right political groups, the fact that he gave his name as "Death to traitors, freedom for Britain" on the one occasion he did decide to speak ... These things all point to a man so filled with right-wing hate that he decided to plot and execute the assassination of a local MP to prove some kind of political point.
It's difficult to have any sympathy with a person so filled with hate that they consider the murder of their political opponents to be a legitimate tactic. It's also very difficult to have any sympathy with a person who is so much of a coward that they're unwilling to explain their actions, and just sit there in silence pretending that they're the victim.
Apparently Mair had been the single occupier of a three bedroom council house ever since his grandmother died in 1996. The Daily Mail theory goes that Mair had been asked by the local council to consider downsizing to a smaller property, he got enraged that immigrants were going to steal his house, then he went out and killed Jo Cox because she wouldn't help him.
This appalling attempt to blame Mair's actions on immigrants, and on Jo Cox herself, is extraordinary, even by the Daily Mail's utterly disgusting standards.
The Daily Mail totally failed to provide a single shred of evidence that Mair had ever approached Jo Cox for help with his council house situation (if he had had previous contact with the MP I'm pretty sure it would have come out during the trial).
Mair is too much of a coward to explain himself, but the evidence paints a picture of a right-wing extremist who had been determined to carry out a politically motivated attack since the 1990s. The fact that the local MP Jo Cox supported Remain while his extreme-right buddies (like the Britain First Northern Brigade) repeatedly described Remain supporters as "traitors" was apparently enough to trigger his violent urges.
One of the most disgusting things about it is that under normal circumstances the Daily Mail would undeniably be stoking hatred against an unemployed person under-occupying a council house. But somehow in the case of a murderous neo-Nazi they're suddenly so full of concern about him that they're prepared to completely fabricate a story that he approached his murder victim for help to protect him from the immigrants who were trying to steal his house, and that she turned a blind eye to him.
Imagine the sickening mentality of people who would sympathise with a white supremacist killer and attempt to shift the blame onto his victim with an invented story about how she refused to help protect him from immigrant bogeymen.
The Daily Mail is an very harmful extreme-right propaganda rag owned by a tax-dodging billionaire called Jonathan Harmsworth. Don't read it and don't let anyone you love read it (if you can convince them to stop you'd be doing them a big favour).
If you find a copy of the Daily Mail on the train or the bus, bin it. Don't leave it there in case someone else gets radicalised by their hateful extreme-right propaganda.
You could also help to diminish the Daily Mail's toxic extreme-right influence by getting involved in the Stop Funding Hate campaign.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
In 2010 George Osborne promised that his absurd "let's cut our way to growth" austerity agenda would result in the UK budget deficit being completely eliminated by 2015.
By 2014-15 the Tories realised that Osborne's hubristic bragging was never going to come true, so they erased all traces of their promise to eliminate the budget deficit (and an awful lot of other broken promises too) and replaced it with the extraordinarily brass-necked boast that "we've cut the deficit by a third". Bizarrely millions of people accepted this new Tory boast at face value, and failed to consider the fact that it was actually an open admission that they'd failed to hit their original target by two thirds!
In Hammond's 2016 Autumn Statement he was forced to admit that the budget deficit will still be well over £20 billion in 2020-21, meaning the Tories will have taken over ten years to fail to achieve what they originally said they would do in five.
Amazingly, there's hardly anyone willing to hold the Tories to account for this spectacular ongoing failure. The mainstream media report this latest roll-back of the budget deficit elimination as if the Tories are innocent victims of Brexit (rather than the ones who brought Brexit though their reckless gambling about without even bothering to cobble together even a rudimentary plan of action beforehand either), and most of the opposition parties are to weak and ineffective to even set the public narrative that Tory economic policy has failed.
It appears that it doesn't matter how economically incompetent a government is, nor for how long. As long as the media are complicit in their silence, and the opposition parties are inept in their criticisms, that government will be perceived by the public as having done a good job no matter how badly they perform!
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Thomas Mair has been found guilty of the murder of the Labour MP Jo Cox and given a whole life sentence. It's obviously a good thing that this dangerous right-wing fanatic is going to be locked up where he can't kill anyone else for their political views, but the big objection many people have to this verdict is why he was tried for murder when his crime was quite clearly an act of extreme-right terrorism. The facts are absolutely clear.
The politically motivated killing of a politician by a person with connections to various extreme-right political groups and a house rammed full of radical extreme-right literature seems like pretty much the definition of an act of terrorism, yet somehow the Crown Prosecution Service saw fit to depoliticise the killing by trying it as a murder. We all know full well that it would have been a terrorism charge if the killer had've been from a Muslim background with links to extremist Islamist groups and a house full of radical Islamist literature. The obvious question is 'why the discrepancy?' Why is a radicalised right-wing white supremacist who kills a politician in the street any less of a terrorist than a radicalised Islamist fanatic who kills anyone else?
I'm not going to attempt to answer the question for you. I'll leave it to you to think about why the discrepancy exists; what kind of message this discrepancy sends to extreme-right fanatics like Britain First and their followers; and what effect such an obvious double standard might have on the perceived legitimacy of the UK justice system.
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There are many terrifying things about Donald Trump and the atrocious people he is picking for senior positions in the next US government, but the way that he so openly courts the fanatically right-wing white supremacist movement who call themselves the "Alt-right" is perhaps the most concerning of all. Much has already been made of Trump's decision to appoint Steve Bannon as his policy strategist given some of the outrageous "Alt-right" bigotry hosted on the far-right website Brietbart when he was boss there, so I won't go into it here other than to say that anyone who thinks that the "Alt-right" movement don't have an inside track to the White House is obviously delusional. Supporters of the "Alt-right" movement expend an awful lot of energy trying to deny that they're simply the latest neo-Nazi incarnation, but they're going to have a very difficult time explaining this video in which "Alt-right" leader Richard B. Spencer celebrates the election of Donald Trump by yelling "heil Trump" while numerous audience members make Nazi salutes in response.
If "Heil Trump" and the Nazi-saluting crowd aren't enough to convince you that these people are modern day fascists, just listen to the laughter that greets Spencer's comments about the press being "Golem" to protect Jewish interests, his use of the German phrase "lugenpresse" and his drivel about how America was always "a white country".
The most terrifying thing about this latest Nazi while-supremacist movement is that they're not the kind of violent skinhead street thugs of the 70s and 80s, they're wealthy politically connected white men (not many women in the audience is there) in expensive suits who now have an inside track to the White House.
There are ever fewer US veterans of the Second World War, but there are still many thousands out there. It makes me wonder what these guys who saw so many of their compatriots die during the liberation of Europe from fascism must think to see a bunch of modern-day fascists giving Nazi salutes in support of the next President of the United States.
What must these veterans think of the fact that so much of Donald Trump's hateful, divisive and bigoted rhetoric during the election campaign was designed to appeal to this growing neo-Nazi movement in American politics?
What must these veterans think of the fact that these modern day Nazis have an inside track to the White House through the appointment of the former boss of the biggest "Alt-right" propaganda platform of all as Trump's policy adviser?
I guess that the sad reality is that very few people care what these veterans of the war against fascism might think about the next President's ties to this neo-Nazi movement. After all, WWII veterans are a small and rapidly shrinking demographic. It's horrifying that Donald Trump surged to victory with the extremely vocal backing of these bigoted Nazi-saluting fascists (and other white supremacists like the KKK); it's alarming that Trump has given these extremists an inside track into the White House by appointing Steve Bannon as one of his closest aides; and it's disgusting that Trump's foul bigoted rhetoric has given these racist Nazi-worshipping scumballs such an elated sense of victory and validation.
Non-white and socially liberal people in America have every right to be afraid of the neo-Nazi white supremacists that Donald Trump has done so much to embolden. Just look at the embedded video above again to see the hatred and extremism of these people, and their unbridled joy that their man is in the White House.
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The former Tory Work and Pensions minister and prominent Brexit campaigner Iain Duncan Smith has once again demonstrated the absolute contempt that he has for the rule of law. In an interview on Sky News about the Article 50 case that is to be heard in the Supreme Court he had this to say about the Supreme Court judges:
"It is not their job to tell Parliament how they go about their business ...That's for Parliament to decide. I would simply advise that the Government should ignore it."
It's astonishing that somebody can be so completely and utterly wrong so many times in such a short statement. Reversal of reality
The first and most obvious flaw in Iain Duncan Smith's statement can be seen in his claim that "it's for parliament to decide" how they go about their business.
The original High Court ruling found that "it's for parliament to decide" and then Iain Duncan Smith and many other hard-right Brexiters had a series of massive hissy fits because they absolutely don't want parliament to decide, and now the case is being appealed by the government in the Supreme Court because Theresa May doesn't want parliament to decide.
The reason this case is going to the Supreme Court is that Theresa May wants to set the precedent that the Prime Minister can make and repeal laws to suit their own interests without parliamentary approval. For Iain Duncan Smith to pretend that the Tories are on parliament's side in this case is such a brazen reversal of reality it's extraordinary.
How utterly gullible would a person have to be in order to accept this complete reversal of reality at face value?
Contempt for the law
Iain Duncan Smith's claim that it's not the role of the courts to tell parliament how they go about their business is a clear demonstration of the utter contempt he has for the rule of law.
Anyone with the remotest understanding of how the UK political system works should know that the government introduces laws through parliament, and then it's the job of the courts to determine whether these laws are being applied correctly.
The courts found Iain Duncan Smith's workfare rules unlawful for two reasons. Firstly the rules he had introduced were unintelligible, meaning that people couldn't comply with them even if they'd wanted to. The second (and more important) reason was that Iain Duncan Smith hadn't even bothered to seek parliamentary approval before putting his hopelessly botched and unintelligible rules in place.
After all of the legal rulings that went against him during his time at the DWP, if there's anyone in Britain who should know that it's the job of the courts to oversee politicians and ensure that they comply with the law of the land it should be Iain Duncan Smith. But even after being slapped down by the courts on so many occasions, he still petulantly tries to claim that they have no right to compel politicians to actually comply with the law! Ignore the law completely?
Perhaps the most alarming part of Iain Duncan Smith's statement is the explicit appeal for the Tory government to simply ignore the Supreme Court if they don't like the ruling!
It's bad enough to see the likes of right-wing hacks, dictatorial Ukippers and fanatically right-wing social media extremists fostering hatred against judges and the legal system because they oppose the idea of parliamentary democracy, but seeing such a direct appeal for the government to act lawlessly from Iain Duncan Smith is something else entirely.
He's not some bloviating right-wing hack shilling for tax-dodging sociopaths like Rupert Murdoch (S*n, Times, Sky) or Jonathan Harmsworth (Daily Mail, Metro). He's not some politically clueless UKIP opportunist with no government experience whatever; and he's not some pathetic extreme-right keyboard warrior behind neo-fascist social media hate groups like Britain First.
This guy was actually leader of the opposition for a while. For over six years he was the head of one of the biggest and most important government departments of all. He's not just some pathetic blowhard calling for the government to abandon the rule of law because he doesn't know any better, he's a highly experienced politician who is actively calling for his own political party to wilfully ignore the rule of law because he doesn't like being constrained by the law. He thinks he is above the law, and that makes him an extremely dangerous fanatic.
Iain Duncan Smith has a long track record of displaying utter contempt for the rule of law. In any sane country there would be an angry backlash against any politician who explicitly called for their own political party to deliberately ignore the rule of law, but in Tory Britain the mainstream media just reported his extraordinary comments without any critical analysis whatever, leaving the job of pointing out his dangerously lawless attitude to independent writers like me.
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An awful lot has already been said about the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. One thing that really struck me was a comment by the US political commentator Van Jones.
In his reaction to Donald Trump's unfolding election victory he said "It's hard to be a parent tonight for a lot of us. You tell your kids 'don't be a bully'. You tell your kids 'don't be a bigot'. You tell your kids 'do your homework and be prepared' ... Then you have this outcome. You have people putting their children to bed tonight who are afraid of breakfast in the morning. They're afraid of 'how do I explain this to my children'."
The point he raises is an extremely good one. How is it possible to explain to children what has happened? It's not just the parents of American children who have been left asking this question either. Pretty much any child with access to a television or the Internet will have had countless hours of exposure to contemporary liberal American values and they'll have also have seen clips of Donald Trump behaving atrociously (like this one my kids showed me).
Practically every American kids' TV series is rammed full of moral messages promoting tolerant socially liberal values. The rude, bigoted, dishonest and lazy characters always get their comeuppance, and there's almost always rewards in store for characters who choose honesty, kindness or hard work. These are undeniably the cultural values American TV has been instilling in generation after generation of children all over the world.
The election of Donald Trump as President is a massive betrayal of these heavily-promoted liberal American cultural values. American kids have been indoctrinated into believing that the virtues Trump was so sorely lacking will be rewarded, and that bigotry, laziness and dishonesty are impediments to success. Yet despite having these cultural values drilled into them on a daily basis, American kids have just witnessed the adults around them prove American cultural values to be a load of rubbish by rewarding Donald Trump with the highest office in the land.
This betrayal is much worse than kids finding out that Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy are a pack of lies. Finding out that the presents and cash actually came from the adults in their lives is a disillusionment, but at least the kids know that the lies came from a parental desire to make them happy, and that their parents love them. There's no underlying positivity to finding out that the cultural values you've been instilled with for your whole life are a sham.
The brazen negation of so many almost ubiquitous cultural values that was necessary in order for Trump to succeed is going to have a profound psychological impact on millions of children in the United States and further afield too. One obvious implication is that of millions of kids all over the world have been shown that bigoted and narcissistic loud mouths can and do get what they want. How many of these kids are going to see Trump's victory as a vindication of their own rotten behaviour? How many kids are actually going to be inspired to begin acting like bigoted bullying little loud-mouths in the hope that they too will achieve great things like Donald Trump?
The fact that Trump's victory is teaching kids that dishonesty, bigotry, bullying, narcissism and arrogance are not vices, but recipes for success is not even the worst of it.
The worst of it is that millions of kids have had the adults around them prove themselves utter hypocrites who constantly promote one set of cultural values, but when it comes to something as important as the Presidential election they went and endorsed a candidate who negates pretty much every socially liberal value there is.
Any parent will tell you that it's possible to get away with being a lot of things. Grumpiness, forgetfulness, clumsiness, bossiness, busyness ... but one of the most vital things you should really try to avoid doing in front of your kids is being a total hypocrite, because when kids see through your hypocrisy they inevitably lose faith in you, and that makes things incredibly difficult for everyone (yourself and your kids).
Hopefully only a small minority of kids will end up seeing Trump's victory as an inspiration to behave like dishonest and narcissistic little bigots, but any teacher will tell you that it only takes a small minority of disruptive kids to wreck an otherwise productive classroom.
The problem obviously gets a whole lot worse if a significant proportion of the other non-disruptive kids are suffering disillusion at the fact they're surrounded by a bunch of brazenly hypocritical adults who always seem to expect kids to constantly behave in a decent and respectful manner, but just rewarded Donald Trump with the highest office in the land for doing precisely the opposite. This sense of disillusionment at the hypocrisy and double standards is bound to have long-lasting psychological impact on children. Every time an adult tells them to behave decently and respectfully, it is natural for them to want to ask "why should I?", and every time they suffer criticism for not being prepared and trying to bluster and bullshit their way through life, they're obviously going to see the utter hypocrisy of it if their critic is a Trump voter.
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On the 18th of June 1984 police launched an unprovoked mounted charge against striking miners at the Orgreave coking plant in South Yorkshire. The so-called "Battle of Orgreave" has been mired in conspiracy ever since. The inquiry into the Hillsborough disaster highlighted the fact that several police officials who had been involved in the Hillsborough cover-up had also been involved at Orgreave. This revelation hardly seems surprising given that the two incidents both included acts of mass perjury by police officers, deliberate victim-blaming, attempted cover-ups, interference by the Tory government and mainstream media collusion. Orgreave provided one of the most famous examples of mainstream media manipulation in British political history. The BBC News footage broadcast into millions of homes that night reversed the events of the day to show striking miners throwing stones at the police followed by the mounted police charge. The evidence is absolutely clear that the mounted charge came first and was unprovoked, then the stone-throwing came afterwards as an attempted fightback against extreme and unprovoked police violence. However despite the repeated revelations that the BBC News team had reversed the events of the day in order to paint miners in a negative light, just like with Hillsborough, there are still people out there to this day who insist on believing the mainstream media's distorted victim-blaming version of events.
A former Merseyside police officer who had been drafted in at Orgreave claimed that South Yorkshire police had been "anticipating trouble and in some ways relishing it and looking forward to it" and that when the violence erupted "I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I was just seeing police officers attack people. These were people on the ground and even if they weren't doing anything – just walking away – police officers had their batons and they were just hitting people". Despite having instigated the violence themselves, the police then attempted to prosecute 95 miners for rioting and violent disorder, but the trial collapsed when it became clear that much of the evidence presented by police was fabricated. At the time Michael Mansfield QC called the malicious attempted prosecution "the worst example of a mass frame-up in this country this century", while the miners' solicitor Gareth Peirce claimed collusion between the objectives of the police and Thatcher's government by saying the malicious prosecution had been launched in order to "to make a public example of people, as a device to assist in breaking the [miners'] strike". In June 1991 South Yorkshire Police paid £425,000 in compensation to 39 miners for assault, wrongful arrest, unlawful detention and malicious prosecution. No police officers were ever prosecuted for any of these offences. In 2015 a review of court papers from the malicious trial of Orgreave miners by the Independent Police Complaints Commission found "evidence of excessive violence by police officers, a false narrative from police exaggerating violence by miners, perjury by officers giving evidence to prosecute the arrested men, and an apparent cover-up of that perjury by senior officers". In May 2016 the PCC for South Yorkshire Alan Billings admitted that police conduct at Orgreave had led to a longstanding high level public mistrust towards the police in the region and claimed that the battle was the closest the UK had ever come to having "a politicised police force" acting as a paramilitary wing of the government. It was then revealed that Margaret Thatcher and her Tory cabinet had attempted to intervene in the malicious Orgreave prosecutions in order to speed them up despite Thatcher's own assurances lies to parliament that "it would be quite wrong for politicians to interfere in such matters". Despite ever mounting pressure for an inquiry into Orgreave (especially the fabricated evidence during the malicious prosecution, the attempted cover-up and the links with the Hillsborough disaster), Theresa May managed to stall it until she was anointed Prime Minister by her fellow Tory MPs, leaving the job of refusing to hold an inquiry to her successor Amber Rudd. Rudd's refusal of an inquiry led Labour MP and Shadow Lord Chancellor Richard Burgon to claim that "the Conservative refusal of an Orgreave Inquiry is not about protecting the police of the past - it's about concealing orders and interference from the Thatcher Government".
It's absolutely extraordinary that Rudd could have decided that there was no grounds for an inquiry without even bothering to request or review two fundamental tranches of evidence. In fact it looks an awful lot like vindication of Richard Burgon's accusation that the Tories are still playing self-serving party politics.
The released cabinet papers have already demonstrated that Margaret Thatcher was intent on playing politics with the justice system by pressurising those who were conducting the malicious Orgreave prosecution to hurry it up, and now Amber Rudd is demonstrating that even after 32 years the Tories are still intent on playing party politics with the justice system by refusing to hold an inquiry into the undeniably appalling and unlawful police conduct at Orgreave.
What you can do ... If you believe that Amber Rudd's decision to refuse an inquiry is completely unacceptable then please consider signing this petition.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
I've written before about the debasement of the poppy symbol and how the actual meaning of remembrance is gradually being subsumed under a tide of pageantry, intolerance, false-patriotism, political opportunism and empty symbolism. The debasement of remembrance started to become obvious when "poppy fascism" began to rear its ugly head. The idea of tabloid newspapers (some of which lauded Hitler and promoted the rise of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s) hurling abuse at TV presenters or football players for the "crime" of not wearing poppies is about as far from the spirit of remembrance as possible. We don't remember the fallen victims of war because we are compelled to under threat of character assassination by the right-wing press. We remember the fallen because we choose to. The enforced conformity of "poppy fascism" has been appalling enough to witness, but in recent years politicians, extreme-right fanatics and tabloid hacks alike have repeatedly demonstrated that the poppy symbol has been reduced to empty political iconography. In 2012 David Cameron wore a red poppy on his lapel as he was busy helping British arms manufacturers to hawk weapons to despotic Islamist dictatorships like Saudi Arabia,and talking of busting arms embargoes in order to flood the Syrian Civil War with weapons. The extreme-right hate group Britain First have co-opted the poppy symbol in order to hawk their disgusting political ideology. It doesn't seem to matter how many times the Royal British Legion condemn them for hijacking the poppy symbol and selling poppy memorabilia to make money to fund their neo-Fascist mob, these right-wing extremists just carry on doing it. In 2015 the right-wing press decided to hijack remembrance Sunday with absurd allegations that Jeremy Corbyn had supposedly insulted the war dead by not bowing deeply enough at the Cenotaph. These allegations were particularly galling coming from hacks working for the S*n given that Rupert Murdoch's idea of respecting the war dead involves bribing public officials into leaking the private details of dead British soldiers! In 2016 Theresa May decided to get in on the act by callously dismissing Jeremy Corbyn's question about the death of a former British soldier who died in appalling circumstances after suffering the Tory benefits sanction regime with a load of dismissive pre-scripted guff about "fairness" whilst wearing some kind of bling poppy. To make matters worse she then went on to put on an appalling fact-averse display of synthetic outrage about whether footballers should be allowed to wear poppy armbands during an international match as if poppy symbolism is infinitely more important than the appalling death circumstances of a former British serviceman. It's becoming ever clearer that the poppy symbol and the whole concept of remembrance is being appallingly debased. Right-wing hate groups hijack the poppy symbol in order to raise funds to bankroll their extremist activities; politicians like Theresa May and David Cameron wear the poppy symbol whilst hawking weapons or callously dismissing the plight of dead soldiers; and right-wing hacks hound people for supposedly not showing sufficient respect, despite their publications' recent histories of stealing the private personal details of dead British soldiers!
The poppy symbol doesn't exist to raise funds for right-wing hate groups, for politicians to create a veneer of conscience for themselves, or for right-wing hacks to hang their vapid character attack upon. It exists to remind us of the appalling suffering of war, the lost lives of the fallen and the trauma of those who lived through it and survived. In order to counterbalance this debasement of the true meaning of Remembrance and the poppy symbol we should try to consider the words of people who actually served in the First World War.
"The politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder." - Harry Patch
"War's stupid. Nobody wins. You might as well talk first; you have to talk last anyway." - Henry Allingham
"I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed." Siegfried Sassoon
"War is hell, and those who institute it are criminals" Siegfried Sassoon
"I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust." Siegfried Sassoon
"They are not often aggressive or offensively military. This is the dismal part of it: that these men, almost the best value in the ordinary upper class that we have, should allow themselves to suppose that all this is somehow necessary and inevitable; that they should give so much labour and time to the killing of others, though to the plain appeals of poverty and inefficiency in government, as well national as international, they are so absolutely heedless. How is it that as much blood and money cannot be poured out when it is a question of saving and helping mankind rather than of slaying them?" Arthur Greame West
"Patriotism, in the trenches, was too remote a sentiment, and at once rejected as fit only for civilians, or prisoners. A new arrival who talked patriotism would soon be told to cut it out." Robert Graves
"Opposite our trenches a German salient protruded, and the brigadier wanted to 'bite it off' in proof of the division's offensive spirit. Trench soldiers could never understand the Staff's desire to bite off an enemy salient. It was hardly desirable to be fired at from both flanks; if the Germans had got caught in a salient, our obvious duty was to keep them there as long as they could be persuaded to stay. We concluded that a passion for straight lines, for which headquarters were well known, had dictated this plan, which had no strategic or tactical excuse."
Robert Graves
"I never joined the army for patriotic reasons." Isaac Rosenberg
"How many have gone? How many more to go? The Admiralty is fast asleep and lethargy & inertia are the order of the day. However everybody seems delighted - so there is nothing to be said. No plans, no enterprise, no struggle to aid the general cause. Just sit still on the spacious throne and snooze." Winston Churchill (future Tory Prime Minister)
"If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori." Wilfred Owen
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
