JFairfax posted:

he was a catholic mate, and he got to live the dream of starting a crusade in the middle east

The Guardian posted:

Ev'rybody must get stones

Nick Cohen

Sunday 8 December 2002 14.55 GMT

The most accessible entrance into the Blairs' spirit world of paganism, spiritualism, pseudo-science and quackery is through a chat with Cherie's 'homeopathic dowser healer' - one Jack Temple, aged 86. Temple is the possessor of a 'Neolithic stone circle', which, he assured me, captures the healing energies of the stars, sun and moon and holds them for the benefit of his paying customers. He discovered the 'magic' stones in Pembrokeshire and transported them in two lorries to his home in Pyrford, near Woking, Surrey.

'I'm sorry,' I interrupted. 'The local authority and the National Trust allowed you to run off with an ancient stone circle?'

'The stones weren't in a circle,' he explained. 'They had been cleared so the field could be worked. They were dumped in a ditch and a farmer sold them to me.'

'I see. A farmer said a load of old rubble was once a Stone Age religious site and you paid ready money to get your hands on it. How did you know the stones were genuine stones, so to speak?'

An irritated note entered Temple's voice. 'I dowsed them with my magic pendulum, of course. I made the amazing discovery that each of the 16 stones relieved stress in different parts of the body - the muscles, the brain and so on.' After he moved the stones to Surrey, Temple went to the garden centre and used his pendulum to divine the aura of the herb and alpines section. The trial of the plants was merciless. He found only wild strawberries had the strength to 'contain nature's energy generated by the stone circle'.

Temple duly planted his circle with strawberries. He will sell you a small packet of their dried leaves for £10 (plus £1 p&p). It's a bargain, as Cherie Blair knows. Temple said in his autobiography Medicine Man : 'I believe I've helped the lame to walk, the barren to conceive, and the sad to smile. I've been able to reflate the lungs of children previously condemned to a life constricted by asthma. I've even seen the bald pates of middle-aged and elderly men begin to spring hair growth again.'

Don't mock him. Fergie and, inevitably, the late Princess Di have acclaimed him as a healing genius. Temple is happy to allow everyone to share the inner harmony of royalty and the Blairs. For £85 he will sell you a pile of stones and instructions on how to lay them out in the garden. (This time he doesn't mention the cost of the post and packing, which I suspect will be steep.)

Cherie Blair was introduced to the doddering dowser by Sylvia and Carole Caplin. Sylvia, 67, is a former ballet dancer turned spiritualist. On 11 November, the Daily Mail published an extraordinary piece. According to a former client, Caplin Senior 'can bring the light down' and open channels with the dead. Mrs Blair regularly visits the mystic's £500,000 house in a gated park in Dorking. It, too, is filled with stones. 'There was a particularly active period in the summer when Sylvia was channelling for Cherie over two or three times a week, with almost daily contact between them,' the Mail reported. 'There were times when Cherie's faxes ran to 10 pages.'

This can't possibly be true, I thought. I phoned Downing Street and asked if they denied the story. The press officer promised to call back, but never did. I checked if the Mail had received a complaint. The paper hadn't heard a squeak of protest. I think we can take the silence as a confirmation.

Caplin's daughter is the former soft-porn model who became Mrs and Mr Blair's style guru and confidante in 1994. She has been a lady in waiting at the New Labour court since. Her boyfriend is Peter Foster, an Australian fraudster with a criminal record that goes back to 1983. After a week of stupendous lies, the Blairs admitted Foster had somehow secured them two flats in Bristol at £69,000 off the market price - or about three times the annual pay of a fire officer.

The mother is as alarming as her daughter's crooked lover. Cherie evidently believes Caplin senior is in touch with the other side, and Caplin may well believe she can natter with the dead herself. None of her clients has suggested she played on their fear and credulity. But, so what? Whether she is a sincere fool or a sly fraud doesn't matter. A con's a con whatever the mental state of the con woman. What spiritualists say is a lie whether they know it or not.

Modern spiritualism began in 1848 when two sisters from New York State announced that they had received coded tapping messages from the ghost of a murdered peddler. The scam was a great success. For 40 years Margaret and Katherine Fox made a good living from a fraud which inspired mediums the world over. At the end of their lives the Foxes admitted that the knocking sounds seance-goers had heard were made by Margaret - who had mastered the knack of snapping her toes. Their belated honesty did no good and spiritualism continued to flourish.

Given its history, why does Cherie believe it? Well she is a Catholic and her husband is an Anglo-Catholic, and if you can believe that wine and a wafer are the blood and body of Christ you can believe anything. Or, indeed, everything. Until now, there has been an averting of well-bred eyes from the superstitions of our creepy PM and his gullible wife.

A year ago, the Times printed the following account of what they did on their summer holidays at the luxurious Maroma Hotel on Mexico's Caribbean coast. The Blairs visited a 'Temazcal', a steam bath enclosed in a brick pyramid. It was dusk and they had stripped down to their swimming costumes. Inside, they met Nancy Aguilar, a new-age therapist. She told them that the pyramid was a Mayan womb in which they would be reborn. The Blairs saw the shapes of animals in the steam and experienced 'inner-feelings and visions'. They smeared each other with melon, papaya and mud from the jungle, and then let out a primal scream of purifying agony. No one followed-up the Times's scoop - deference is not as dead as some people would have you think.

When the Blairs moved into Downing Street, a feng shui expert rearranged the furniture at Number 10. Cherie wears a 'magic pendant' known as the BioElectric Shield, which is filled with 'a matrix of specially cut quartz crystals' that surround the wearer with 'a cocoon of energy' and ward off evil forces. (It was given to her by Hillary Clinton, another political spouse who combines the characteristic Third Way vices of sharp prac tice and bone-headedness.) Then there have been inflatable Flowtron trousers, auricular therapy and acupuncture pins in the ear.

New Age Labour has spilled out of Downing Street and blighted public policy. In January 1999, for instance, the Government recruited a feng shui consultant, Renuka Wickmaratne, to discover a magical way to improve inner-city estates without raising taxes.

'Red and orange flowers would reduce crime,' she concluded, 'and introducing a water feature would reduce poverty. I was brought up with this ancient knowledge.' Three years later the Government announced that, for the first time since the creation of the NHS, 'alternative' remedies could be granted the same status as conventional treatments, despite the absence of evidence that they might cure the sick. According to the Sunday Times, 'The inclusion of Indian ayurvedic medicine, a preventative approach to healing using diet, yoga and meditation, is thought to have been influenced by Cherie Blair's interest in alternative therapy.'

The Blairs' interest, along with that of Di and Fergie (in mystics as well as allegedly neolithic circles), of Prince Phillip (a subscriber to Flying Saucer Review since the magazine began publication in the mid-1950s) and of Margaret Thatcher (in electro-shock bath therapy), show that superstition isn't always the preserve of the hopeless poor. It can appeal to the feeble-minded everywhere, from the 'anarcho-primitives' of the anti-capitalist movement to the supposedly tough Tories who turn from the exposés of the Blairs at the front of the Mail to friendly discussions of how the Bible Code predicted whatever happened last week at the back.

Nothing worth having can come from their babblings, and not only because 10 Downing Street is beginning to look like a tsar's court filled with shamans and holy-rolling petty criminals.

At the heart of New Age crankiness is a deep selfishness. The treatments favoured by the Blairs and so many from their natural constituency in the upper-middle class promise to release the true self, heal the abused self, pamper the stressed self and reassure the doubting self that deep down inside there is good. Others don't get a look in.

The only possible benefit is that at least I will stop hearing Labour MPs saying that Cherie will keep Tony's feet on the ground and make him stick to socialist principles. What's left of the Labour movement is going to have to face the weirdness of its leading couple without illusion and, I hope, purify itself by colonically irrigating the Blairs out of the system.

namesake posted:

forkboy84 posted:

Trigger warning for Nick Cohen please

Helsing posted:

I guess it's time to repost this:

exmarx posted:

Vitamin P posted:

That's an extract from Pretty Straight Guys, which is one of my favourite books about New Labour and legit a really funny read. It's almost sad to see how broken Nick Cohen has become since.

Byolante posted:

Is there going to be any blowback for the MP for Newcastle's insane editorial in the guardian?

namesake posted:

Party Boat posted:

Which Newcastle MP? We have three.

Byolante posted:

Chi Onwurah. Uses the all lives matter argument to say racism is worse than rape because the operation sanctuary report and an EDL march.

Byolante posted:

Chi Onwurah. Uses the all lives matter argument to say racism is worse than rape because the operation sanctuary report and an EDL march.

quote:

But to say, as Sarah Champion did, that “Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls” is either saying that Pakistanis are more likely to rape and more likely to rape white girls, or that the rape of white girls is more of a problem than the rape of, for example, white boys or brown girls. We have a huge problem with sexual violence against children and vulnerable adults. After tabloid headlines about “Muslim rapists”, one of my constituents who was himself raped as a child expressed concern that his abuse did not raise the same kind of outrage and therefore the same level of awareness.

Many of the perpetrators were identified by family and friends – members of the communities accused of supporting these criminals. Almost all the perpetrators were of Asian Muslim descent, and it is right that the serious case investigation should consider what shared values, background, employment or interests brought these men together, whether there was a criminal culture that “normalised” this abuse, and how that culture was formed. I will be writing to the investigating officer to ensure he does so.

quote:

So which is worse, rape or racism? The answer, of course, is to reject any such choice. We must seek out and eradicate misogyny and sexism wherever it may be; condemn absolutely those who would judge or disrespect women and girls on the basis of their appearance or background; recognise that male violence against women has no race and no religion; invest in the measures necessary to prevent others becoming victims; and protect, champion and honour the survivors who, through their bravery, are helping to make our imperfect society safer.

bump_fn posted:

I thought everyone in England was a white tea sipper

Irony Be My Shield posted:

It sucks that those 7 Labour MPs rebelled against Corbyn's whip but the bill would've passed even if they voted against.

Party Boat posted:

Racism also leads to life altering violent acts but I agree with Chi that it doesn't need to be an either / or thing

More importantly I find it very hard to believe that the police were genuinely stopped from doing their jobs because they were afraid that Polly Toynbee would skewer them in an op-ed, as opposed to the much more likely scenario that they were completely negligent and pointed the finger at Political Correctness Gawn Mad when called on it

jBrereton posted:

I assume the still below average police pay rise is going to make most of the newspaper front pages though not "they have absolutely jeffed democracy".

jBrereton posted:

The Tories have literally couped all the laws, it's great, really excellent stuff just smashing and top.

They get to stack all the committees on changing the laws away from European law exactly the way they like because not enough opposition MPs showed up to stop them. Livid.

Byolante posted:

In racism the life altering act isn't racism, it's assault, or judicial malice or any other small but meaningful act. The key is 'leads to' not is.

I would be totally on board with dodgy, lazy pigs who want to blame talk sports gripe of the day for why they wanted a cheese burger more than a safe community if it was just Rotherham or Bristol or Newcastle. There is a pattern there now but everyone is falling over themselves trying to say but what about how people acted in the 80s or Jimmy Saville or dinner other thing. Those are all important things that should be dealt with but the reason people are taking about Muslim immigrant rape gangs is because the exact same thing keeps happening and nobody seems to want to be proactive about it.

Party Boat posted:

Given how long they took to take any action against Ian Watkins I'm pretty sure the same thing that keeps happening is "plod is poo poo at investigating rape gangs"

It is of course tougher for the police to get people to cooperate with investigations when they're from marginalised communities. Combating racism in and out of the police force is one of the proactive things you can do to make it easier to catch these gangs

Party Boat posted:

The Casey and Jay reports also said that there was a huge problem with victims not being taken seriously due to their socioeconomic backgrounds and that a lot of key evidence was missed as a result, which is part of a wider trend that the police simply do not treat rape victims seriously.

I agree that the police should go where the evidence leads them (and I don't think anyone has argued that they shouldn't?), but pretending that the shocking oversights in Rotherham were purely due to the race of the perpetrators lets an awful lot of dangerously incompetent people off the hook.

On the other hand I don't think any action was taken against them so I guess the only lesson we learned from that is beware the rapacious Pakistani.

DesperateDan posted:

It's anecdotal, but I have seen a lot more front page press attention to the rotherham ring/other "foreign" groups than anything to do with government/celebrity/religious sorts in the last few years.

Jose posted:

https://twitter.com/LanaDelRaytheon/status/908280467589230592