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11th September 2013: The world's gone mad and I'm the only one who knows
13th August 2013: Black is white. Fact. End of.
11th August 2013: Electric cars, not as green as they're painted?
18th June 2013: Wrinklies unite, you have nothing to lose but your walking frames!
17th May 2013: Some actual FACTS about climate change (for a change) from actual scientists ...
10th May 2013: An article about that poison gas, carbon dioxide, and other scientific facts (not) ...
10th May 2013: We need to see past the sex and look at the crimes: is justice being served?
8th May 2013: So, who would you trust to treat your haemorrhoids, Theresa May?
8th May 2013: Why should citizens in the 21st Century fear the law so much?
30th April 2013: What the GOS says today, the rest of the world realises tomorrow ...
30th April 2013: You couldn't make it up, could you? Luckily you don't need to ...
29th April 2013: a vote for NONE OF THE ABOVE, because THE ABOVE are crap ...
28th April 2013: what goes around, comes around?
19th April 2013: everyone's a victim these days ...
10th April 2013: Thatcher is dead; long live Thatcher!
8th April 2013: Poor people are such a nuisance. Just give them loads of money and they'll go away ...
26th March 2013: Censorship is alive and well and coming for you ...
25th March 2013: Just do your job properly, is that too much to ask?
25th March 2013: So, what do you think caused your heterosexuality?
20th March 2013: Feminists - puritans, hypocrites or just plain stupid?
18th March 2013: How Nazi Germany paved the way for modern governance?
13th March 2013: Time we all grew up and lived in the real world ...
12th March 2013: Hindenburg crash mystery solved? - don't you believe it!
6th March 2013: Is this the real GOS?
5th March 2013: All that's wrong with taxes
25th February 2013: The self-seeking MP who is trying to bring Britain down ...
24th February 2013: Why can't newspapers just tell the truth?
22nd February 2013: Trial by jury - a radical proposal
13th February 2013: A little verse for two very old people ...
6th February 2013: It's not us after all, it's worms
6th February 2013: Now here's a powerful argument FOR gay marriage ...
4th February 2013: There's no such thing as equality because we're not all the same ...
28th January 2013: Global Warming isn't over - IT'S HIDING!
25th January 2013: Global Warmers: mad, bad and dangerous to know ...
25th January 2013: Bullying ego-trippers, not animal lovers ...
19th January 2013: We STILL haven't got our heads straight about gays ...
16th January 2013: Bullying ego-trippers, not animal lovers ...
11th January 2013: What it's like being English ...
7th January 2013: Bleat, bleat, if it saves the life of just one child ...
7th January 2013: How best to put it? 'Up yours, Argentina'?
7th January 2013: Chucking even more of other people's money around ...
6th January 2013: Chucking other people's money around ...
30th December 2012: The BBC is just crap, basically ...
30th December 2012: We mourn the passing of a genuine Grumpy Old Sod ...
30th December 2012: How an official body sets out to ruin Christmas ...
16th December 2012: Why should we pardon Alan Turing when he did nothing wrong?
15th December 2012: When will social workers face up to their REAL responsibility?
15th December 2012: Unfair trading by a firm in Bognor Regis ...
14th December 2012: Now the company that sells your data is pretending to act as watchdog ...
7th December 2012: There's a war between cars and bikes, apparently, and  most of us never noticed!
26th November 2012: The bottom line - social workers are just plain stupid ...
20th November 2012: So, David Eyke was right all along, then?
15th November 2012: MPs don't mind dishing it out, but when it's them in the firing line ...
14th November 2012: The BBC has a policy, it seems, about which truths it wants to tell ...
12th November 2012: Big Brother, coming to a school near you ...
9th November 2012: Yet another celebrity who thinks, like Jimmy Saville, that he can behave just as he likes because he's famous ...
5th November 2012: Whose roads are they, anyway? After all, we paid for them ...
7th May 2012: How politicians could end droughts at a stroke if they chose ...
6th May 2012: The BBC, still determined to keep us in a fog of ignorance ...
2nd May 2012: A sense of proportion lacking?
24th April 2012: Told you so, told you so, told you so ...
15th April 2012: Aah, sweet ickle polar bears in danger, aah ...
15th April 2012: An open letter to Anglian Water ...
30th March 2012: Now they want to cure us if we don't believe their lies ...
28th February 2012: Just how useful is a degree? Not very.
27th February 2012: ... so many ways to die ...
15th February 2012: DO go to Jamaica because you definitely WON'T get murdered with a machete. Ms Fox says so ...
31st January 2012: We don't make anything any more
27th January 2012: There's always a word for it, they say, and if there isn't we'll invent one
26th January 2012: Literary criticism on GOS? How posh!
12th December 2011: Plain speaking by a scientist about the global warming fraud
9th December 2011: Who trusts scientists? Apart from the BBC, of course?
7th December 2011: All in all, not a good week for British justice ...
9th November 2011: Well what d'you know, the law really IS a bit of an ass ...

 

 
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How nice to find someone agreeing with you. It's a bit annoying that he does it more eloquently than you did, but what the hell, it's just peachy to find that you are not, after all, a lone voice calling in the wilderness. Here's journalist Richard Littlejohn on the subject of Ken Clarke and his UKIP outburst, which we wrote about a couple of days ago ...
 

 
He likes a drink, smokes like a chimney and he’s not afraid to speak his mind. By common consent, he’s the kind of politician you’d most like to share a pint with.
 
No, not Nigel Farage. Ken Clarke.
 
With his scuffed Hush Puppies and ubiquitous cigars, Clarke stands out from the identikit crowd at Westminster. He’s more likely to be found stumbling out of Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in Soho at midnight than plotting Press regulation over pizza.
 
He’s taken on a few airs and graces along the way, but Ken is his own man. Even though I profoundly disagree with him over Europe, I accept that he’s a man of principle.
 
Clarke fervently believes Britain should be run by foreigners. He is in favour of our laws being made in Brussels by people we didn’t elect. He is quite happy to surrender what remains of our national sovereignty and open our borders to all-comers, even if that means a housing crisis, public services at breaking point and itinerant Romanian beggars using Hyde Park Corner as a public toilet. Ken thinks our courts should be subordinate to foreign judges, many of them from countries which until fairly recently were totalitarian Communist dictatorships. If he’d had his way a few years ago Britain would now be chained to the euro and our dire economic predicament would be ten times worse than it is already. So passionate is he about a European superstate that he couldn’t even be bothered to read the Maastricht Treaty before it was signed into British law.
 
You might think that neglecting to inspect the small print was a bit of a shortcoming in someone who trained as a lawyer and went on to become Lord Chancellor. But Ken’s not the kind of person to let the small print get in the way of a Big Idea. He even thinks turning Britain into a safe haven for international terrorists is a price worth paying for his principles. His devotion to Europe almost certainly cost him the chance to lead his party and become Prime Minister. So we must respect his opinions, no matter how strongly we disagree with him.
 
The problem with Ken is that he doesn’t extend that courtesy to others. He has nothing but contempt for those who believe Britain’s future would be better outside the European Union.
 
He epitomises the arrogance of the political class who are convinced they, and they alone, are uniquely equipped to rule. Clarke was at it again over the weekend, echoing Call Me Dave’s description of UKIP supporters as ‘fruitcakes and closet racists’.
 
He went on to say: ‘It is tempting to vote for a collection of clowns or indignant, angry people.’ UKIP, he alleged, is ‘against political parties, the political classes, it’s against foreigners, it’s against immigrants,’ blah, blah, blah. It was the typical, lazy response of traditional politicians towards anyone who threatens their cosy consensus.
 
Yes, UKIP does have its fair share of nutters. All political parties harbour a variety of extremists. There are plenty of Tories who could be described as ‘closet racists’. What are the Lib Dems if not a whole pantry full of ‘fruitcakes’?
 
As for Labour, the party is bankrolled by a neanderthal trades union leader who wants to take Britain back to the days of general strikes and public ownership and led by a weirdo last seen playing footsie with George Galloway, a freak show turn who has never met an Arab dictator he doesn’t like.
 
If voters really are ready to — as Nick Clegg claims — back UKIP only because they want to say ‘to hell with mainstream politics’, who can blame them?
 
To paraphrase the Monty Python ‘Romans’ sketch: what have the mainstream parties ever done for us? So-called ‘mainstream’ parties monopolise politics and reject any opinion which doesn’t chime with their narrow orthodoxy.
 
OK, so UKIP may not have a forensically honed manifesto containing policies for everything from the funding of diversity workshops to transgendered toilet facilities.
 
But getting the hell out of the EU, scrapping the Yuman Rites Act and dismantling ridiculous, ruinous wind farms is a start.
 
Whoever thought that in the 21st century we’d have an energy policy which includes automatically turning off our fridges by remote control rather than building power stations or exploiting our untapped resources of shale gas? All so that politicians can burnish their ludicrous ‘green’ credentials and feel good about saving the polar bears?
 
Ask yourself this: who is the real extremist — the politician who wants to give Abu Qatada board and lodging for life or the one who would rather put him on the first plane to Jordan? What’s extreme about wanting to make our own laws, set our own taxes, control our own borders?
 
Above all, most people just want politicians to listen to us for a change. Democracy in Britain is in a perilous condition.
 
Ed Miliband is basing his entire strategy on gaining just 36 per cent of the total vote, which will put him into Downing Street on the basis of rigged constituency boundaries. For all his talk about ‘fairness’, Clegg reneged on his agreement to revise the boundaries, so that each constituency would contain roughly the same number of voters. He has decided to stick with Labour’s rotten boroughs because he thinks there’s a chance the Lib Dems might just be able to slide into another Coalition, this time with Labour, after the next election. Whatever happens, Clegg will get his reward in Brussels, probably as Britain’s next EU Commissioner.
 
Does Call Me Dave care whether the Conservatives win the next election? Your guess is as good as mine. He’ll have had his five years of fame, he’ll get his peerage and still be young enough to earn some serious money, like his role model Tony Blair.
 
If UKIP had sprung up in Egypt, or Poland before the fall of the Iron Curtain, it would have been hailed as a spontaneous popular, democratic movement. So what if it is a protest party? How else are we supposed to protest, if not at the ballot box?
 
The kind of people who are attracted to UKIP are mostly decent folk who don’t go in for throwing petrol bombs or smashing in the front of McDonald’s. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have a voice. Or that the main parties should take them for granted.
 
For what it’s worth, I won’t get the chance to vote UKIP on Thursday because there are no council elections in London. In any event, my local Conservative councillors seem to be doing a reasonable job and at least we still get our dustbins emptied every week. They shouldn’t be punished for the sins of national politicians in Westminster.
 
But I shall be voting UKIP again in next year’s European elections, simply because I don’t trust Cameron ever to hold a proper ‘in-out’ referendum. Farage may come across as a bit of a circus act, but he speaks for millions of people who feel utterly disenfranchised by the political system. I wouldn’t blame anyone who votes for UKIP this week, if that’s what it takes to get the attention of the cosy little cartel at Westminster.
 
You can tell Farage has got the mainstream politicians worried. If they weren’t concerned, they wouldn’t be wheeling out big guns like Ken Clarke to trash UKIP. As I said, I respect Ken’s honesty even though I despair of his cussed devotion to the EU. I’d cheerfully buy him a pint and a small panatella. But when push came to shove, if they were both standing in my constituency in a general election, I’d vote for Farage.
 

 
The GOS says: Ah, the warm glow of satisfaction! It's beginning to look just a little as though two days ago I wrote something intelligent. I think I might retire. Always a good idea to quit while you're ahead.
 

 
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