The Rusty Wire Service

Not at the races.... Bookies’ favourite Enda Kenny romped home this weekend with the Blueshirts on track for their biggest General Election success since the early 80s. The safe money therefore is on a FG/Labour coalition for the next government. Anything other than the spectacular implosion of Fenian Failure would have been a major surprise. The Greens, having had their mouths stuffed with FF gold down the years, were also soundly hockeyed. And then of course there’s Sinn Féin.   Having comfortably beaten their stated target of seven deputies, the Shinners look like they are finally starting to make the significant inroads south of the border that they have long threatened; even if in the case of many of their wins, only just south of the border. With TDs elected in Louth, Sligo-North Leitrim, Donegal and Cavan-Monaghan, there’s a strong borderland vote for Sinn Féin out there and evidently getting stronger. Judging by Adams’ Louth performance, the Republicans might even be won...

Go to jail... 'Guy Linott' is the assumed name of a prisoner maintaining his innocence in an English gaol. The Rusty Wire Service was given this exclusive excerpt from his prison diary... “What’s the worst thing about being moved to a new prison?   Probably the lottery you face on arrival. What’s your new cellmate going to be like?   Will he be a serial killer or an unpredictable psychopath; or will he be some poor lad suffering from some kind of mental illness who really should be in a hospital? And if you’re really unlucky, you could be bunking up with a big bull homosexual on the prowl for fresh meat...Occasionally in prison; homophobia isn’t so much a prejudice as a survival instinct. When I first heard I was being moved to HMP XXXX, I wasn’t best pleased. At the time, I was only two years in on a life sentence but I’d already heard so many horror stories about this establishment that I just knew prison life was about to get a lot more difficult.   In this gri...

Return of the Old School Spalpeen? “When the soul of a man is born in this country, there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.”  (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) As the clock runs down to the General election in Ireland, it’s hard not to be apathetic.  Irish voters clearly remain mired in a civil war landscape. In spite of the painful shortcomings of all three big parties, the electorate seems content to play ‘ Lanigan’s Ball ’ on an interminable loop; Fenian Failure steps out and the Blueshirts step in again. The spineless complicity of the Dáil opposition in the country’s gang rape by international financiers and speculators doesn’t augur well for their imminent tenure in government. Even the grubby little spat between the Sinn Féin and Labour is just a thinly veiled re-run of the old Official and Provisional split of 1969/70. The Stickies or ‘Official IRA’ went o...

Barclays Captital announced obscene profits this morning. There is unfortunately no other word for it. Pirates' lair   The investment bank made £6bn in 2010 and the income of its bankers rose to 43% of Barclays revenues, compared with a mere 33% in 2009. Average pay per employee at Barclays Capital, the investment banking arm of Barclays, rose to £236,000 from £191,000 last year. The revelation that Barclays managed to up the overall percentage of revenue paid to these venal parasites, while still paying lip service to Project Merlin, has proved yet again -- if further proof were needed -- that sucessive governments in this country are either unable or unwilling to curb the banks’ rapine (possibly both).  Project Merlin is the toothless deal between ministers and bankers under which the latter are supposed to lend more to UK businesses and pay themselves less. But then, if The Deptford Croppy was a betting man, he would probably be putting good money ...

All these years later, rolling over the Thames into Charing Cross on the train still thrills me (idiot optimist that I am). I suppose it’s that perennial sense of possibility that entering the belly of the beast brings anew. Every day could be the day ; it is never is but never mind, because tomorrow could be the day. Spread out to my right on the railway bridge: The City, St Paul's and grey Belfast, like a squat bristling sentry at Tower Bridge's approach. On the other side; the London Eye on the South bank and then the Palace over the water. That mother of all parliaments; that endlessly photogenic clocktower; that one-time beacon of liberty and rectitude (allegedly). But nowadays, that (perhaps imagined) rectitude has been replaced by something else; an almost tangible essence of crime and corruption. And that’s me noticing it coming up from South London mind.   The news today that criminals are at work in the Commons was only surprising because this time, the ...

This week, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that banning Republican prisoners from wearing Easter Lilies was justified on policy grounds. Dangerous flower Christopher Donaldson, a serving Republican at HMP Maghaberry jail, in County Antrim, took his case to Strasbourg after he was punished for leaving his cell on Easter Sunday 2008 wearing the contentious symbol. The Lily, worn at Easter to commemorate the dead of the Dublin 1916 Rising , is seen as a provocative symbol of the conflict and the seven judges in the Strasbourg court thought the prison authorities were within their rights to ban the wearing of the lily in the interests of prevention of disorder and crime. In light of the lily’s apparently inextricable links to The Troubles, it was felt that their public display could be divisive and the United Kingdom's justification for banning inmates from wearing Easter lilies had been "relevant and sufficient". Patriotic gardeners on both sides of ...

Back to normal? Mubarak held his first cabinet meeting today since 25 January. Cairo once again honks, throbs and roars with traffic and the protesters have begun talks with Mubarak’s stooges.   The curfew, which has been largely ignored in any event, has been shortened to run from 8pm to 6am. The Cairo Bourse took an enforced holiday on 27 January after it haemorrhaged   nearly 20% in two days trading but it is now set to reopen for trading on Sunday. Most people are thankful for these signs of a return to normality. According one Al Jazeera reporter in the city; "There are divisions. On one side, people do agree with the messages coming out of Tahrir Square, but on the other, Egypt is a country where about 40% of the population lives on daily wages." Nevertheless,   tens of thousands continue to occupy Tahrir Square and a memorial service was held there on Monday for 39-year Ahmed Mohammed Mahmoud: a reporter   for the state-run Al Tawuun newspaper who was...

Can someone explain this one to me please? Who are you? No, really, who are you? When a black or Asian man plays football or cricket wearing the much-vaunted Three Lions on his shirt, he is celebrated at the pinnacle of English prowess and endeavour. However, the vast majority of our ethnically diverse brethren -- even when they are part of the second or third generation born in this green and pleasant land -- can never call themselves English. They must settle instead for the mealy-mouthed consolation prize of 'Britishness'. Well sure, they can  call themselves English but they will not be taken seriously by the country’s self-appointed guardians of whatever ineluctable recipe for banality, conformity and prejudice that Englishness seems latterly to have become. We should also perhaps be questioning the bona fides of claims to deep national pride in a country where neither the Patron Saint nor the National poet are celebrated with a public holiday on 2...

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” What is this happiness that we pursue so relentlessly and yet so fruitlessly in the western world? Of course, there’s no single answer to that one and therein lies the beauty of the phrase. We are always led to believe that somehow implicit in that understanding is the idea that there are as many different kinds of happiness as there individuals. We’re not so sure.  On a cynical reading, the pursuit of happiness is a shameless huxter’s trick;  it is the archetypal spring from which all ad copy has flowed. It could easily be argued therefore that the so-called pursuit of happiness in the western world has been bound up almost inextricably in the expression of consumer choice. What we have as result is a mass-produced Model T individualism (my ‘Made in China’ hig...

Bristol, UK: 2011   Western civilisation reached a new pinnacle recently in the British Isles. Our lead picture shows Sipros Lombardo of the Jolly Fryer restuarant in Bristol, proudly displaying his concept: the ‘Uber Scooby Burger’; a good feed and a philosophical breakthrough. Even Elvis at the top of his game would probably have struggled with this one: eight 1/4lb beef patties, 16 rashers of bacon, 16 slices of cheese, 32 onion rings. For the health-conscious, there is also a selection of salad with three different sauces. This beast contains 5,000 calories; enough to feed and constipate a manual labourer for two days. It is a meal with a bigger carbon footprint than three Amazonian villages. For this 'ne plus ultra' of hamburgers, Sipros is likely to be celebrated in that parochial underdog way. The fancy-dan press in London might be all arch and ironic in their coverage but to the people in that part of Bristol which is home to the Jolly Fryer, he is probabl...

As violence escalated in Cairo this evening, it’s very clear that the mayhem has been sanctioned by the Egyptian armed forces and security services. All eyewitness accounts that have so far come from Tahrir Square have been consistent on one point and that is that the pro-Mubarak mob arrived from quarters whose approaches had supposedly been sealed off by the army. Whether you’re reading Al Jazeera, the BBC, the Telegraph or the Guardian, it is clear that agent provocateurs were both planted within the crowd of protesters already in the square as well as being given free reign by the army to attack the protesters, even being given enough freedom to mount a cavalry charge of camel riders against the pro-democracy protesters. The following anonymous eyewitness account was submitted to the Guardian: “They came into the square and we blocked them peacefully, forming a human line and peacefully pushing them back . A number of thugs had infiltrated behind our human line and all of a sudden ...

Mohamed Bouazizi Today, the Jordanian King Abdullah sacked his cabinet. The King told reporters in Amman that economic reform was a "necessity to provide a better life for our people, but we won't be able to attain that without real political reforms, which must increase popular participation in the decision-making." Of course, to further that end, he has asked his former ex-military adviser Marouf Bakhit to form a new cabinet. Zaki Bani Rsheid, a leader of the Islamic Action Front (IAF), was quick to point out that Mr al-Bakhit "is a not a man of reforms." The Islamists have long claimed that the 2007 election was rigged. It’s all beginning to sound a bit familiar. There are plenty of commentators out there who are drawing overheated comparisons with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and playing parlour games trying to guess what form the new Middle East paradigm will take. But somehow, somewhere along the way the point of all this is being lost. Six weeks...