The Lib Dems have started a campaign about the US/UK lopsided extradition treaty. Essentially the US can extradite a UK citizen without presenting probable cause. For the innocent, this can mean a multiple year trial (as well as expensive defence)…

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I slam the Iron Door on you!

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You’re wrong. Wrong. Chad Valley is a proletarian brand, being the intellectual property of Woolworths (Good Ole Woolies) as far as I’m aware from my visits to the toy section with my boy in tow. Admittedly Woolies in Crouch End is frequented by the discreetly-charming bourgeois as well as chavs (chav nots). But you’re still wrong.

Can’t remember where I read it recently (was it one of yours mac?) but I was taken by a blog description of some prog as being like The Waltons without the sex and violence.

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This Tory obsession with smelly old gypos is second only to that with the smelly old BBC. I beg your indulgence to quote from the splendid Kathryn Flett’s review in the Observer (Obbie? a hard paper to love) of the recent BBC3 drama Summer with the Johnsons (not a flyonthewall doco about the Boris clan on their jolly hols):

“Seeking out a ‘hood as diametrically-opposed to Wisteria Lane as possible, I found BBC3’s Summer with the Johnsons, the final film in a three-part series, Country Strife, which, according to the blurb, set out to ‘explode the myth of idyllic country living’.

I’m not sure that many people who earn less than a seven-figure salary still fall for that bosky wisteria round the door, Pimms under the willow, cricket on the green fantasy any more, given that we know the countryside to be filled with angry, disenfranchised, suicidal farmers, angry, disenfranchised crack-addicted teenagers dreaming of bumping into Pete Doherty in Starbucks and angry, disenfranchised everybody else who can’t afford to buy a house in the village they grew up in because every wreck with a bit of mangy thatch and some knock-through potential is being stalked by Relocation’s Phil and Kirstie.

But Summer with the Johnsons still showed us a corner of Gloucestershire unlikely to be visited by anyone not carrying an arrest warrant, a place where the scent of freshly cut hay mingles with the smell of burning rubber, and bird song is drowned out by the barking of pit-bulls.

The Johnsons are a notorious gypsy clan who live in a raggle-taggle collection of ‘wagons’ on somebody else’s land. Jimmy is the self-styled outlaw ‘king of the gypsies’, who oversees brother Ricky, nephew Chad, Chad’s two sons Mo and Dido, plus the rest of the extended family (the women, however, were all but invisible) and barely puts up with an occasional visitor, depressive psychotic pyromaniac Martin, who tends to get dumped at the site by the police when they’ve had enough of him.

Summer… started off as one would have expected, exploring all the cliches of gypsy life the Daily Mail classes know and fear – the pride, the crime, the cock-fighting, the hare-coursing, the bare-knuckle boxing, the generations of illiteracy (only the very youngest Johnsons have ever been to school) and the kind of wonky moral and ethical code that encourages very small children to swear and fight each other until tears before bedtime. (‘They gotta fight in this world’ explained Jimmy) but also insists they shouldn’t be exposed to Martin setting alight to his possessions and wandering around the site naked, presumably because he isn’t family.

But of course the cliches were there to be subverted, and soon enough we learnt that Ricky was a born-again Christian, and that Jimmy was working with the Flying Squad (in return for early parole) to locate millions of pounds worth of gold snuff boxes stolen from the Rothschild’s Waddesdon Manor in a ram-raid style robbery for which the Johnsons had been arrested, though never charged.

We also learnt that Ricky and Jimmy had been abused in a children’s home and that Chad, aside from being a ‘chicken-breeder, with a few dogs’ was something of an artist. But perhaps nothing could beat the revelation that seven-year-old Dido wanted to go to drama school. How had he heard of drama school? What did he think went on there? And could it be as much fun as being involved in a police chase, with helicopters and everything, alongside your uncle Steve?

Of course, the subtext of this occasionally lyrical and illuminating film(…) was that the Johnsons are a bit misunderstood. Though given they’re the closest thing to the Clampetts this side of the Appalachians, I can’t see that changing any time soon, even when the next generation learn to sign their name with something other than an angry X.”

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Way back in the mists of antiquity ,there used to be a ‘drawing room ballad’ type song entitled, ” Where My Caravan Has Rested”, a rather pleasant if boring ditty. Have you ever had the misfortune to have been in close proximity to one of these places,’Where their Caravans Have Rested?” The stench hits you , right where you recently dined: you part company with your last meal,,and you retire to a safe distance. The probability of one coming across such sites is becoming increasingly frequent, since they are getting ever closer to the settled population. What does the fat controller do? He endorses this
tendency, and gives encouragement for the perpetrators to make even more of a nuisance of themselves. By the way ‘intensely relaxed’ is , I think, an oxymoron, but I agree that there is a more relaxed atmosphere about certain
sections of the population.And quire right too. However, as for the feckless, the poor and the others mentioned: do you think that it is right that underage children give birth to more children, at public expense,(Is that feckless enough?,whilst that same public , in form of The Government, is getting blamed for the lack of creches in junior school. Legal immigrants and genuine refugees : Willkomen ; Bienvenu ,Welcome, come and receive the milk of human kindness.
Not so Illegal immigrants , who are so well versed in our airy fairy justice system, that even when they have exhausted every available long winded , expensive, avenue of the labyrinth which is our legal system ,( for which we pay, btw), and are then told to leave the country, they disappear into the warrens created by the criminal gangmasters; there to be preyed on by these same criminals , often themselves illegal immigrants.
” It’s not their fault” , I hear the woolly liberal tearjerkers cry, There are numerous examples of this sort of behaviour , which liberals are too frightened to address, for fear of appearing repressive. The rule of Law
and order is waning. The Fall and Fall of a once great Empire is happening before our very eyes, but this time not that of Rome or even Britain;that of the rule of order and self respect. It is no wonder that the numbers of people leaving the UK for more orderly countries are on the up.
Another rant , but I feel better now , NURSE !

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Or have you decided not to waste a keystroke responding to such PC guff?

OTY.

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After all, the Tory party is now intensely relaxed about people’s sexuality, n’est pas? Shame they still have hangups about the feckless poor/chavs/asylum seekers/gypsies [*insert your prejudice here].

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Exactly. This is disturbing, isn’t it, where 2 people from Left and Right actually find they fundamentally agree about an issue because they both espouse libertarian views? This leaves us with a centre-right, New Labour, which is increasingly authoritarian and ideologically incoherent (not that the Project was ever coherent for all the Third Way b****cks in the early days). NB: Asterisks adopted to avoid offence and possible Asbos being slapped on me.

To be fair to Aaronovitch – and I don’t like being fair to a New Labour fellow-traveller – I’ve just been impressed by the level of a late night telly debate (BBC of course) on Europe between him and the feisty Janet Daley, who argues like an ex-Marxist – I’d like to see her and Boris shoot the breeze together. Perhaps I’m getting soft in my old age. (“I’m 37. I’m not old…Help, help, I’m being repressed! Come and see the violence inherent in the system!”: M. Palin as uppity ‘bloody peasant’ confronting King Arthur in Monty Python & the Holy Grail.)

Where was I? Time for a cup of tea. Oh yes, Left and Right, living together in perfect harmony, etc.

Absolutely agree that public education about autism – and indeed mental illness in light of the new Bill – is necessary (Department of Health’s turf so don’t hold your breath) but it ain’t sufficient. There has to be a political will to treat minorities like people with autism (and Asperger’s) decently and I’m not sure this government will adopt this unless there’s real public pressure – it might not play well in the Daily Mule if New Labour is seen to be soft on dangerous machete-wielding loonies stalking our streets in droves.

I must differ with you over the gypsies issue as you people on the Right seem to forget that they were systemically slaughtered alonside Commies and Jews by the Nazis in the Holocaust. Howard’s campaign on this and immigration generally during the election was an utter disgrace.

Right, I’m off to bed. Musn’t be late for work or I might get an ASBO slapped on me…

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