Yesterday, prior to sitting through the yawnathon that was Aston Villa's inept performance against Manchester City (who for 94 minutes couldn't hit a cows arse with a banjo) I read 'Guards' by Ken Bruen. (Ignore the Amazon review by 'A reader from Slagelse' - it tells you more about the Danish than 1,000 Islamaphobic cartoons). What a cracking book! Bruen's central character is a dipso former Garda in Galway who stumbles his way through 300 pages either totally pissed or preparing to get pissed. How have I missed these books before? Here's a flavour.

I'm getting a bit pissed off with student lib dem supporters who say the sort of thing Doctor Vee said: "I’d far rather vote for the Conservatives than Labour at the moment. In fact, for the forseeable future. If it leads to a Conservative government, so what?" If you follow the link he gives to MatGB, he writes: "In 1997, I wanted Blair to win. New Labour appeared to be a refreshing alternative to a Conservative govt that had been in office too long and lost its way." Lost its way!!!!! Just exactly when did it do that; before of after Thatcher sent baton wielding thugs into the Yorkshire coalfields or to Murdoch's Wapping printworks? I'll condemn Blair for sucking up to George W Bush (and a lot more besides), but Thatcher sent Paul Channon to sit on Saddam's white sofa to try to flog him weaponary after they knew he had practised genocide against his own people. Of course, she was not beyong sipping tea in china cups with murderers and torturers like Pinochet, but hey, perhaps she had 'lost her way' by then. Where did these people learn their social history? Smash Hits? Do they think the Thatcher years were all New Romantics and David Bowie? Last year I wrote a post which pointed out that in 1979 some small Trotskyite sects used to wander around advising people to vote for Thatcher’s Tories in the General Election. The Labour Party under Jim Callaghan had “sold out the working class” betrayed the trade unions and danced to the monetarist tunes of the IMF. Murdoch’s Sun newspaper reached the same conclusion (albeit not, as you can imagine, for the same reasons), and come the election, Thatcher swept into Downing Street. Bloody good strategy that turned out to be! If you want Lib Dems... ask people to vote for them. They opposed the war (until it started, then they supported it) argued for increased taxation to fund public services (even though Labour invested more than they had promised) and wanted to drive us unthinkingly into a federal Europe and the single currency (although they became strangely silent on that as time passed). But to argue for the return of the Tories in the hope that they have 'found their way again'.... you must be barking! Say what you will about the SWP and Respect, at least they have class politics... not the politics of the classroom.