The Judge RANTS!
Date: 27/03/09
Why, Why, Why?
I really don't know where to start.
OK, elections to the European Parliament are coming up in a few months, and the parties are beginning to gear up for the battle.
The Labour Party in Wales (LPIW) have launched a new website for their campaign.
I won't give you the link to it, for two reasons. One, I detest the LPIW almost as much as I hate the Conservative Party. No, wait: I detest them more, because of their hypocrisy, their arrogance and a long, disgraceful history of corruption and incompetence at parliamentary level and even more so in local government (where their definition of 'employee relations' was 'how many members of my family can I get jobs for on the Council?'). So I don't want to give the bastards any more publicity than the bare minimum.
The second reason is to spare you, my dear viewers (both of you). You see, the site contains the very, very worst video I have ever seen - from anybody.
So that you do not have to suffer, I sat through the whole, dreadful, cringeworthy two-hundred-and-six-second car-crash on your behalf. It contains a version of the famous song Delilah (perhaps 'a version' should be one word in this instance rather than two) with altered lyrics, allegedly penned by Eluned Morgan MEP. In the space of less than three and a half minutes, this wretched party hack manages to demolish forever the widespread perception that we are a poetic nation. The original lyricist should sue for slander. Morgan not only seems not to be able to rhyme or even scan, but seems never to have been made familiar with even the concepts of assonance and metre.
It's not just our national pretensions to being lyrical which are razed to the ground by this abortion: our reputation for being musical is put to the sword by some woman (possibly Morgan herself, who knows? It wouldn't need her to stoop much lower on the basis of her 'lyrics') attempting to sing over an artless midi file of the tune.
As to the matter of what the poor failure is singing, well sometimes words fail even me. Let me say that, back when I was about sixteen or seventeen years old, I fancied myself as a writer of lyrics. They were so bad that, when I rediscovered some of them years later, I held a ritual bonfire of them on a sacred site simply to exorcise the demons of mediocrity which lay coiled within them. Notwithstanding that, I would never, ever, even back in those days of innocent pretense, have admitted to having written words as bad as the ones on this video. It is one thing for the message they are promoting to be utterly risible and trumpery - how Labour saved Wales? As Billy Connolly would say, "Oh, d'ye bloody think so?" - but their sole tactic of 'debate' seems to be name-calling of its opponents (or at least of Plaid and the Conservatives; presumably the Lib Dems are either insignificant or beyond even the most witless parody - possibly both). So we have still images of Margaret Thatcher (note to Labourites; she's been out of power for nearly twenty years, buts, and she has had no greater acolyte since than one Blair - you remember, the 'pretty straight kinda guy' who led your party for twelve years?) with speech bubbles going "Boo!" and Hiss!" and a picture of John Redwood with Vulcan ears (oh, is it 1994 again?). We also have pictures of Plaid MEP Jill Evans, deputy First Minister Ieuan Wyn and other party members wearing clown hats. Even I could do better with Photoshop than that, and I don't even have Photoshop.
(Incidentally, with the pictures and the music, I do hope the halfwits in LPIW got the permission of the copyright holders. After all, we can't have people who want to run the country being cavalier about the law, can we? Erm...)
All in all, I doubt if the video would get anyone a pass mark in GCSE Media Studies, although it might be in with a chance of getting a reasonably good mark in the GCSE Home Economics 'Dog's Dinner' module.
The website this travesty appears on is a real hoot as well. For a start, they have called it 'Aneurin Glyndwr' (not 'Glyndŵr', note; they can't even be bothered getting the spelling right), thus seeking not only to arrogate to themselves the names of two men who wouldn't have been seen dead in this rabble's political milieu, but also using an arrogant cynicism to link the great hero of the Valleys Labourites with someone who fought for this nation's independence (which is more than Bevan did, and which is - ironically - something that LPIW anathematised out of their ranks a full century ago). I suppose in their Students' Union, spin-doctorly way they think that they're 'covering all bases'; to me, it stinks of calculated insincerity. Particularly when the site describes itself as "an antidote to unthinking Nationalism" and yaps on about 'internationalism'; this last being standard LPIW-speak for the past fifty years or more, and meaning 'concern for the freedom of every country bar our own', i.e., Brit Unionism.
There are other chuckles to be had too, such as where the site is described as being "a modern platform for the politics of the progressive left". LPIW? Progressive? Left?. The bankers' friends and the wavers of the Union Jack? And what sort of 'platform' is it where there is no means by which visitors can post a comment on it? But then, LPIW's (and its London masters') idea of a debate is one where only they are allowed to speak - ask Walter Wolfgang.
Actually, at first I thought that the whole enterprise was some sort of attempt at a satire of the Labour Party's desperate attempts to get in on the on-line world in order to sell us more snake oil; I was sure that it had been put together by a group of smarties from, say, Conservative Central Office, or even the Daily Telegraph. But wait! The website is endorsed by, amongst others, First Minister Rhodri Morgan, the perpetually orange, twisting Saad Efrikan Peter Hain, and Paul Murphy, currently Secretary of State for Keeping The Colonials In Their Place and - and this I didn't know - 'Minister for Digital Inclusion', although Murphy's idea of 'digital inclusion' seems to be confined to keeping his digit up his ministerial arse rather than making more than the vaguest promises of genuinely high-speed broadband for most of Wales sometime around the year 2040 (BT shareholders permitting, natch).
So it's for real? One really doesn't know whether to laugh or weep. These are the people who claim some sort of natural right to rule us in perpetuity, and yet they come up with a website (and a video) which would have got the devisers thrown off their courses in any half-competent educational establishment. It can't be called 'sixth-form' or 'juvenile' without doing a serious discredit to the intelligence and ethics of all under the age of nineteen. All it speaks of is desperation and the same sort of rhetorical thuggishness to which we are long accustomed from LPIW.
They go so far as to claim that the launch of this wretched waste of data transfer will be their 'Obama Moment'. I think it's more likely to be their 'Custer Hour'. So much so, indeed, that I've changed my mind. If you really do have nothing better to spend your time on - feeding your pet woodlouse, for example, or counting the holes in your crocheted blankets - go to Aneurin Glyndwr (sic) (*) and marvel at what passes for intelligence, cogency, reason and 'debate' in what is left of the Labour Party in Wales.
Update (28/03/09): Hen Ferchetan gives LPIW's (s)hit song a good old fisking here.
P.S. (29/03/09): Guess what? Those wonderfully well-balanced contributors to Devil's Kitchen have got hold of the story with - I fear - predictable results, such as:
"The Severn crossings can be either demolished or mined and a watch set on the Bristol Channel for any illegal immigrants trying to escape." ("Angry Exile")
"I always thought these weird Taffs were a self-regarding bunch of parasitic creeps." ("Anonymous")
"It's never been my favourite part of England anyway" ("JD")
"Visited the land of the long dark cloud a couple of weeks ago.
Fucking terrible place." ("Captain Swing" - and we'd like to see you again soon, too - preferably in manacles)
"can we not dig a deep trench from wrexham to cardiff and just push it out into the irish sea?" ("Jules" - whose Caps Lock button isn't working)
"[I]f there was an earthquake, Wales cracked off GB along the border from Chepstow to Chester and sank below the waves, how long would it be before anyone even noticed?" ("David Gillies")
"At least it might win Eurovision, especially if the stage show had a bunch of semiclad Welsh tossers pursuing some very nervous sheep..." ("Willie" - by name and - clearly - by nature)
Further Update (30/03/09): They've now removed the video (both from their site and - apparently - from YouTube), whining that they'd had to because Plaid and the Tories had complained. What's the betting the real reason was because they were using copyrighted material without permission? Either way, they're trying to spin this as showing how wimpish the other parties are and how manly (sorry, personly) they are. It makes them sound like some zittoid adolescent trying to come over as The Big Man, which at least is in keeping with the way they've conducted themselves so far. Pathetic little wankers.
Historical Note: The Labour Party pulled the Aneririn Glyndwr site not long afterwards.
