Thankfully, he is not with me.

However, for different reasons, I know he would be happy ensuring that hands are always cleaned after an exchange.

"That was fun and to round off the day, I am off to steal a charity collection box and then desecrate a place of worship.” - Smokey, The Selhurst Arms, 26/02/02

Coor, what a response

*meekly raises hand

I shall be voting UKIP and not as a protest vote either.

Same here.

The first four words I mean.

Big chest and massive boobs

[Link]

I know I'm not gonna convince a lot of you to not vote for UKIP in this post but this has been playing around in my mind for the past few days and I feel the need to put it down in writing.

Normally I'm a killer for facts but I don't think there's any use in trying to argue with UKIP on a factual level, quite simply because it hasn't worked. I don't necessarily think that UKIP are a racist party, but I do think that they are ideologically misguided. Because what they do is illogical and demonising. What they do is to take a fact, say, that there are immigrants who live in this country who don't work, or don't speak the language. Even as an ardent lefty I don't dispute that this is the case. But with that fact, they use it as sole and exclusive rationale for demonising and castigating these individuals of society. They're not interested in the people themselves; there is no empathetic tone in which they actually regard them as human beings, with reasons for their social situation, with responsibilities and difficulties that place them in that unwanted position. They are merely an unwanted figure, that must be mercilessly taken out of the equation.

And it's this lack of viewing human beings as actual human beings - living, caring, unfortunate creatures - that winds me up. Instead they are reduced to a sort of caricatured number on a sheet, proof of and intrinsic solution to our social issues, and most of all a threat to YOUR lifestyle. That's why when I walk down a street and see a poster saying ' 260 million European unemployed want YOUR jobs' I can't help but despair. In a previous world we may have had a bit of sympathy for those unfortunate enough not to have a job. Nowadays we just see them as a threat and a scourge on society. Whatever happened to 'love your neighbour'? It is the divisive tactics of targeting the very lowest in society that was previously only a tactic of the far right, but now seems to have ingratiated itself in to mainstream politics.

We don't seem to think how we can help people nowadays, more how we can deal with them. And UKIP are the major culprits of this.

Edited by serial thriller (08 May 2014 3.00pm)

If punk ever happened I'd be preaching the law, instead of listenin to Lydon lecture BBC4