I had better not say what I would like to happen to this woman

[fpb]

There is no more repulsive figure in British politics than Margaret Hodge. In the Eighties, as Labour boss of London's Islington Council, she not only aggressively covered up a major paedophile scandal in the council's care homes, but publicly libelled the victims - for which I for one have never forgiven her. Incomprehensibly (or rather, all too comprehensibly, since Tony Blair lived in Islington and was her friend) she not only survived this abomination, but was actually elected to the Commons and promoted to minister - and minister for children, at that! An outcry from people who, like me, remembered, forced her transfer somewhere else; but wherever she went, she left the traces of ham-fisted party conformity, grovelling ambition, and flatfooted political hackery. She is a born crawler, made to grovel before party bosses and to stomp on the common people who pay her wages.

This, however, is the straw that breaks the camel's back: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/03/04/nprom204.xml

Comments

[fpb.livejournal.com]

And the Union Jack is the symbol of the protection afforded by the law to every citizen and guest on British soil, whatever their origin. I am Italian myself and honour my country, and I admit that the words of the hymn are outdated ("wider still and wider let thy bounds be set, God Who made thee mighty make thee mightier yet" - silly froth on imperial overstretch about 1910), but I would bet not one in a thousand who sing it have anything but the contemporary Britain in mind when they sing it. Besides, anyone who knows anything about the Last Night of the Proms knows that all kinds of flags are waved besides the Union Jack - the last couple of times, I even saw a Vatican flag! Nothing could be more inclusive, in the good, old, wholesome sense that "nobody loves his country because it is great, but because it is his", and that a decent love of country neither encourages the oppression of others nor supports crimes or failures. That was even, in my view, what Stephen Decatur meant in his famous and misquoted toast: "Our country! In her intercourse with others, may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong!" We do not cease to love our parents even if they decline into addiction or crime. We may come to feel that they are in need of correction; but any correction we see as necessary will be on account of the love we bear them; and should they be in jail or in hospital, we, if we bear any resemblance to normal human beings, will still visit them, help them in their need, and hope for better days. Arturo Toscanini is my model. He went into exile rather than bow to Mussolini, and fought Fascism by every means he could; but he never rejected Italy for one minute, as anyone can hear in his epic 1943 recording of Verdi's Hymn of the nations. His homecoming concert in 1946, amidst the ruins of La Scala, was universally felt as the mark of the nation's rebirth. He never rejected his country, his people, or the values he identified with them. But this woman, while battening on political power and influence in Britain, all but spits on the symbols of the things and the values that made her and allow her to be what she is: and one could not imagine a more degrading display. (BTW, it is not even a matter of right or left wing, since Toscanini was decidedly leftish.)

[mrmandias.livejournal.com]

Thank you. Poor Decatur is much maligned.