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ISSUE 19/AUTUMN 2013 £FREE (US $FREE) EVERY COUPLE OF MONTHS OR SO

THE OFFIICIAL ORGAN OF UNENDING MISERY

THE NIGHT THE LIGHTS

WENT OUT IN WASHINGTON The shutdown: apotheosis or flameout for the Tea Party?

ALSO, TOO: MILIBAND’S DAD —COUNTDOWN TO ELECTION 2015—SOUP

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100-word stories every Tuesday and Friday.

One day, before there ever

was a night, Magpie flew up

and stole the sun.

This caused some complaint.

NeilMurton.co.uk

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“Paralyzed by hatred and a piss ugly soul”

Vol 2 Issue 19

Autumn 2012

2sunsmagazine.com

4 12 18 This issue almost didn’t come out at all after the Bob the Fish headquarters suffered a

hard drive crash which still hasn’t been bloody fixed you guys it’s like you don’t want

my fucking money. So yeah that’s why it’s so short. We almost skipped it altogether

but we really had to cover the Shutdown as it’s definitely one of the major flashpoints

of the Obama presidency, and possibly the moment that the Republican Party’s

madness finally became inescapable.

Apart from that, we have the first of several regular party-by-party articles in the run

up to the next general election in 2015 — which is only about six issues of this

magazine away — and an unashamed wallow in schadenfreude over the Daily Mail’s

min-implosion over Miliband senior. Enjoy, and be back for the Cunt of the Year

2013 issue in December. Feel free to make your suggestions on the Facebook page.

Short and sour and written in a damn hurry, it’s 2SUNS 19.

COVER STORY JUMP THE SHARK p4

The Tea Party finally succeed in bringing down the Government, if only for a fortnight. Now everyone hates the Republicans a year ahead of the midterm elections.

WANNA MEET THAT DAD p12

Lesson one: don’t insult someone’s father.

COUNTDOWN TO INFINITE CRISIS p18

We start the countdown to an election more than 18 months away just because we can. They do it all the time in America.

Opening Salvo by John Wirstham-Harte (editor and shit yeah?)

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THE SYSTEM IS DOWN Two weeks in October with no Government at all. Bliss for the Tea Party, and other such Glibertarian types who have no idea how the real world works but expect it to revolve around them either way. At the end of it: the Republican Party’s reputation in tatters exactly one year before an election.

Words: Willard van Omnomnom Quine

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T he great plains are no strangers to snow. The blizzard that struck during the first week of October 2013 wasn’t

even the first of the year. Freak snowstorms have been recorded ever since the pioneer days. But this was just

taking the piss. South Dakota was struck by the worst blizzard it has ever suffered, and that’s saying a lot. At least

75,000 cattle were wiped out at a stroke. The lucky guys lost a quarter of their herd. Others lost fully half. Between

lost man-hours, structural damage, and something close to cattle genocide, the losses might well past $1 billion. Normally,

federal aid would be all up ons, but unfortunately, days before the blizzard struck, the government was forcibly switched

off. And why? Because a law was passed that restricts insurance companies from letting people die of treatable diseases.

Yay America!

T he long road to this inevitable state of affairs

began in 2010. Well, a case could be made

that they began in 2008, when that slightly

centre-left black guy was voted President

and the military-industrial complex responded by

convincing idiots to cosplay as tricorn-hatted pricks

and bellow in favour of their own oppression. But

the midterm elections of 2010 were the flashpoints,

as the coalition of useful idiots actually managed to

get elected to both houses in a great many places.

The most notable of these was Scott Brown,

snaffling up Ted Kennedy’s old seat by a

combination of luck and base pandering. But that

was a by-election, and basically having talking

points rather than an actual plan, he was long gone by the time of the Tea Party’s greatest achievement.

Among the 2010 newbies were potato-headed Mike Lee, junior senator from Utah, and Ted Cruz, invaluable to the Tea

Party for being reasonably ethnic, even if he just looks like a forgotten third Belushi brother. A handful also made it

through the backlash to get elected in 2012; most notably, Mark Meadows, representative for North Carolina 11, and

owner of the most disturbing official portrait of 2013 — he looks like John Mahoney staring at a slab of meat on a hook.

These were the three central names in the process that led to the Government shutting down. Them, and Barack Obama.

The Republican Party was still butthurt about the Affordable Care Act — which they insist on calling “Obamacare” but

that’s retarded so we won’t — and, having spent most of 2012 (and the preceding four years) trying to prevent Obama’s re-

election, rededicated themselves in 2013 to killing it dead. Unfortunately for them, but fortunately for anyone who

respects basic human values, it was too late: having been ratified and codified and clarified and classified several times and

long ago, it was unstoppable. People were going to get to be treated for illnesses and injuries. It was going to happen.

Efforts began in earnest as soon as the President was inaugurated for the second time, with a cabal of dead-eyed, cold-

blooded fucks, headed by Reagan’s former Attorney General Ed Meese (he whose jowls are mighty), and funded by the

ubiquitous (and well-named) Koch brothers, coming together to brainstorm plans to get the ACA defunded. They’d been

trying and trying and got nowhere; time was running out, and they needed a plan. So they sat down and put their evil little

heads together and came up with one. It was quite simple, really. It summed itself up quite effectively in one sentence:

“Conservatives should not accept a Continuing Resolution [a bit of sticking-plaster legislation that lets the country keep

going if the President and Congress are arguing] unless it defunds Obamacare.” In other words, they were going to hold

the entire nation hostage for their shit and awful ideals.

A Continuing Resolution was already in effect at the start of the year; it expired in March, and at the time, no-one

noticed. The Republicans largely held their fire. Both Cruz and Lee knocked around the whole “hold a gun to the

Government’s head until they make it so poors can’t get chemotherapy again” notion in the upper house, but,

packed with Democrats as it is, it didn’t catch on. Meanwhile, in the lower house, amber-coloured weeping

douchebag John Boehner was concentrating on the nuts-and-bolts of sequestration, and the rest of the GOP

representatives toed the party line.

The DeFundies were frustrated, but bit their tongues. This could prove advantageous. There was another CR due to expire

in September, just in time for the new fiscal year and concomitant budget talks. Plenty of time over the summer to whip up

support for blackmailing the nation into letting poor people die. Best of all, if they kept the Government in limbo through

to mid-October, the country would be forced to default on its public debt! America’s credit rating would plummet! The

American economy would be fucked! The whole country would be a laughing stock! Patriotically speaking, they really

had no choice. They had the cash, via those absolute Kochs, and through Ed Meese, they had the heavyweight PAC the

A sign explaining surprisingly little, yesterday.

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Heritage Fund, and their militant wing, Heritage Action, who were more

than capable of making things happen. They rounded up their 6000

grassroots workers, referred to by the explicitly sinister name of “sentinels”,

and went to work.

They went on a ten-day tour of town halls between Arkansas and Delaware,

bellowing about how healthcare is tyranny. They set up a website,

don’tfundobamacare.com, complete with idiot-magnet petition. They ran

adverts starring Cruz and Lee in which they urged the viewers, with serious

and concerned expressions on their faces, to call their representatives and

demand that they vote to deny them their basic human rights. Momentum

grew. The Glorious Five-Month plan began to catch on.

Mike Lee and Mark Meadows came to the fore here, both of them writing

open letters that circulated around their respective Houses. Meadows’ one in

particular is considered one of the main flashpoints of the shutdown, because

practically every Congressional Republican either signed it or nodded

solemnly along to it, until Boehner really couldn’t ignore the plan anymore.

Not everyone in the GOP was convinced, however Richard Burr, senior

Senator for North Carolina of all places, called it “the dumbest idea I ever

heard.” Significantly, as he pointed out, he was around in 1995, the last time

the Government shut down, whereas most of the Tea Party cocks leading the

charge this time around were freshmen. The DeFundies responded with a

radio-act that all but called him — and several other long-term Republican

senators who’d quitely pointed out that what they were doing was fucking

stupid — traitors and corrupt Beltway insiders (the Beltway having apparently

stretched to accommodate both Carolinas, Tennessee and Missi-bleeding-

ssippi), unlike their Tea Party candidates, who were regular guys who didn’t

know what the fuck they were doing, and this is an advantage somehow.

S eptember duly came along, and a fresh CR needed to be drawn up.

The DeFundies kept the momentum on. Ted Cruz, who was very

much their public face (he’d been the main speaker on the You

Deserve To Die If You Can’t Pay For Your Treatment Tour ‘13),

famously drew attention to himself and his stupid plan (in descending order

of importance) with a deliberately time-wasting and completely fucking

psychotic 21 hour speech on the floor of the Senate, during which he quoted

from Green Eggs and Ham to explain why he didn’t want the ACA. Which

presumably, given the source material, is that he’s an obstinate bastard who

doesn’t know what’s good for him.

Anyway, when the chance to shape the fresh CR came along, the DeFundies

managed to add a last-minute amendment, in Ted Cruz’s name, to defund

the ACA, and the Republican-dominated lower House passed it. The largely

Democratic Senate, however, sent it back to them sans the amendment —

referred to as the “clean version” — only to receive it two days later with a

slightly reworded version of the amendment. Here Obama himself got

involved, and threatening the Republicans with his Presidential Veto if they

didn’t cut it the fuck out. The Senate duly returned the CR to its clean

version and sent it back to Congress a second time. This time, Boehner

refused to even look at it, let alone bring it to vote. When it was pointed out

that legally speaking they didn’t need his permission, the House quickly

passed a resolution saying they did.

This is an important part that really shouldn’t be overlooked. The same day

they received the clean version, House Republicans made sure that only

Boehner could bring it to a vote — effectively sealing the country’s fate,

because Boehner wasn’t going to bring it to vote unless it had the bits

Mike Lee, Ted Cruz and Mark Meadows, respectively. Yesterday. (Official Congressional/Senate portraits)

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ensuring that poor people don’t get a marginally better deal after all. As much as Republicans like to cry about how mean

ol’ Obama wasn’t being fair and that’s why the Government shut down, this is the smoking nuclear weapon that

demonstrates beyond a doubt that the shutdown was premeditated.

O n October the first, the lights went out and the US Federal Government began its first shutdown since 1995

(technically 1996, because the Clinton-Gingrich standoff lasted almost a month altogether — and in case you’re

wondering, it wasn’t over any ideological point so much as because Gingrich is a literal child). House

Republicans immediately went to work on several “mini-bills”, legislating temporary funding for whatever bits

and pieces were popular with the voters — FEMA, say, or the FDA, or the Parks Service — all of which looks good on

paper but actually served two purposes, both ultimately negative: first, it was good PR: it made the Republicans look like

they were trying to do something about it, even though they loved the whole notion of the Government shutting down.

The other purpose it served was to act as the political equivalent of spam: loads of half-arsed temporary panacea mini-bills

for every single conceivable Government function, constantly being sent upstairs to the Senate, where they’re all busy

working on a single unifying bill to draw up an actual single budget. And of course, when the Senate Democrats smack

them away and tell them to let them get on with their work, they look like obstructive arseholes.

Meanwhile, the Republican spin outside of DC mostly focused on the fact that the national parks and monuments were

shut down and people — including veterans — were being turned away, as the suddenly severely limited budget was

forced to concentrate on essential things like law and order, rather than monuments. This was obviously both meaningless

in practical terms and emotive as an image. ARE TROOPS ARE BEING TURNED AWAY FROM THEIR

MONUMENTS WHAT THEY FOUGHT FOR AND SHIT!

Unfortunately for the GOP, no-one was taking the bait. They’d successfully managed to propagandize America to the

point where, by September, a very slight majority of Americans were opposed to the ACA (although it’s impossible to say

how many of those people were opposed to it for being a barely satisfactory compromise, rather than because of a genuine

conviction that medical treatment in the richest nation in the history of the world was a luxury item), largely by lying

about what it consisted of until the viewers were too confused to know whether they liked it or not. But once the

shutdown was underway and people were genuinely being inconvenienced, no amount of Sean Hannity bleating about

how no-one outside the Beltway would even notice was going to placate them. In the final analysis, the American public

largely came down on the side of blaming the Republicans, because it was their fault, over the Democrats and the

President. Even Fox News viewers voted to partly or fully blame the GOP. About the only people who didn’t were the

Tea Partiers, who, when polled, overwhelmingly said their congressmen should stick to their guns, possibly literally.

Some even framed it as a new American

Revolution, because reasonably

affordable healthcare for a slightly wider

income bracket is tyranny on a level with

colonialism. That’s where you are,

America.

More than two weeks went by, with

Obama meeting with the Congressional

Republican leaders almost on a daily

basis, and going nowhere slowly. Finally,

human tortoise Mitch McConnell, the GOP leader in the Senate, stepped in, apparently genuinely shocked at the fact that

the Congressional leaders of his party had apparently gone completely fucking insane. Working with Senate Republicans

(and Majority Leader Harry Reid, who’s been there so long he’s starting to resemble the ghost, doomed to haunt the

Capitol building forever) he finally hammered out a compromise bill whose only concession to defunding the ACA was a

slightly stricter set of income verification guidelines. The GOP had lost. With only hours before the US defaulted on its

debt, and only the most swivel-eyed Tea Party prick actively wanting that to happen, Boehner admitted defeat and quitely

encouraged his party to support the bill. (Doing so out loud is actually against GOP rules). Despite Cruz, Lee, Meadows

and a handful of other, mostly freshman, Republicans voting against, the bill made it safely through both the Democratic-

controlled Senate and the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, raising the debt ceiling just in time. America

was still a laughing-stock, but at least its credit rating was only demoted from A to A-. More importantly, the Republican

Party stood revealed as a bunch of infighting pricks, with the few remaining sensible conservatives being increasingly

shouted down — and primaried out — by the lunatic spokesmen for corporate interests who think they’re working-class

warriors. It really was quite delicious to watch, but unfortunately the midterms aren’t for another year, by which time

everyone will have forgotten that they did this. Let’s hope they keep fucking up so the pressure doesn’t go off.

Tyranny, yesterday.

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IT’S JUST A LOGO

COONS WASHINGTON

HEY, AT LEAST WE DON’T HAVE CHIEF WAHOO. THAT GUY IS JUST TAKING THE PISS.

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Not born

here?

Text FUCKOFF to 78070 to be shouted at for three straight hours by a divorced man from Kent who has no idea where Poland even is on a map

We’ll even pay for your plane tickets, just get the fuck out, you horrible shits

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Text FUCKOFF to 78070 to be shouted at for three straight hours by a divorced man from Kent who has no idea where Poland even is on a map

We’ll even pay for your plane tickets, just get the fuck out, you horrible shits

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IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER Two versions of the life of Ralph Miliband: ours and the Daily Mail’s. Is just being left-wing suddenly inherently wicked and evil? You decide (that the answer is no). Words: Willard van Omnomnom Quine

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I s it unreasonable to bring up “Hurrah for the Blackshirts”? It comes up every time the

Daily Mail does something despicable (ie every other attosecond of every day), but is it

really fair to do so? I mean, okay, the Daily Mail published an article fulsomely praising

Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists, written by the paper’s founding editor,

Viscount Rothermere. But that was almost 80 years ago. Completely different context, right? Okay,

so the Daily Mail’s never actually been sold and the Rothermeres still run it, with the latest Viscount

(the fourth) being a tax-dodging bell-end and

personal friend of David Cameron. But come on,

can we really hold something that was written in

1934 against them in 2013?

Well, maybe it’s not really fair, but it’s not any

less fair than shrieking about Ralph Miliband

being a Britain hating fifth-columnist Commie

spying little shit. In fact, it’s probably more fair,

since the Daily Mail genuinely did produce an

article called “Hurrah for the Blackshirts”,

whereas the senior Miliband’s crime was being

left-wing. Properly left-wing, mind. Like, he

owned more than one book by Karl Marx. And

he read them. And then wrote about them. That’s

right: he was a left-wing intellectual. And the

Daily Mail really really really wants you to see

that as tantamount to treason. Here’s the real life

of Ralph Miliband. See if you can spot the bits

where he destroys our way of life.

R alph Miliband was born in Brussels

to Polish-Jewish parents in 1924.

Which makes h im Sa tan

automatically for being an

immigrant. Shockingly, the Mail failed to make

anything of the fact that his birth name was actually Adolphe. He changed it sharpish for obvious

reasons. When he got to Britain in 1940, he was understandably dismayed to be faced with a culture

of rabid nationalism and imperial cockiness, not to mention casual anti-Semitism. War had just

broken out, of course, and seemingly everyone Miliband met in London was drooling at the prospect

of slapping Hitler in the face with their great big imperial shlong, not to mention showing the French

who’s best once and for all. This was when he wrote the diary entry essentially calling us all

dickholes of which the Mail made so much, as if a diary entry saying “you almost wish these pricks

lose the fucking war, just so they’ll shut the fuck up about how great they are” is anti anyone other

than those specific pricks.

He joined Labour in 1951, aligning himself with the Bevanite wing of the party (although he wasn’t

Bevan’s biggest fan, he preferred him to the centrist Gaitskell). Going from student to lecturer at the

Fabian-founded London School of Economics, he rose to became one of the big movers in the

British New Left movement of the sixties, which sought to move past Marx’s obsession with the

class struggle, which was becoming increasingly outdated and place his ideas, and Socialism itself,

within the context of the modern world. Miliband got noticed for criticising Harold Wilson for

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supporting the War in Vietnam — which the Americans were using as an increasingly desperate

rationalisation.

The Seventies weren’t kind to Miliband. The LSE fell into turmoil amidst the protests over its forced

separation from its Fabian Society roots, and Ralph was one of the casualties, moving to the

University of Leeds as a Professor of Politics. He promptly had a heart attack. He stayed for five

years, but, frustrated at the job being mostly paperwork and very little working-class revolution, he

left Leeds in favour of long-distance Professoring in Canada and America, and writing books which

continued to adapt basic Socialism to a changing world. His heart deteriorated steadily through the

eighties and nineties, leading to a bypass operation in 1991, until his death in 1994. He was buried in

Highgate Cemetery, not too far

from Karl Marx’s resting place,

which he’d visited in 1941 to

“swear an oath to the workers’

cause”. His sons followed him

into the Labour Party and both

became cabinet ministers: one

Foreign Secretary and the other

Energy Secretary and eventually

Party Leader. The end.

E xcept it’s not, of

course, because

twenty years after his

death, the Daily

Mail dredged up his life as if anything even vaguely sordid had ever happened in it, in an

attempt to make us afraid of his youngest son.

The Mail and their fellow swivel-eyed tossrag papers have been pushing Ed Miliband as the second

coming of Mr. Attlee ever since he was elected, and while this sounds like the best thing Britain could

possibly have at the moment, it’s not what Miliband is at all. With the best will in the world, he’s a

centre-leftist. He’s the most left-wing Labour leader since Neil Kinnock, but that’s not saying the

hugest amount in the world. But the Mail is locked into its “Red Ed” narrative now, and although it’s

not as if the truth matters as much as keeping the Tories in charge, some supporting evidence might be

helpful. Particularly since Miliband has repeatedly disclaimed all connection with the unions, which

is what got them so scared in the first place.

His father being one of the leading Marxist thinkers of his generation is perfect for their purposes,

even if Ed is sadly less committed to actual proper Socialism than he was. What’s telling is that the

Mail didn’t even pretend Ralph’s life was the least bit scandalous. They didn’t dig any deeper than

OMG HE LIKED MARX. They didn’t need to, as far as they were concerned. Not to sound

obsessional or anything, but Thatcher really did change everything: her phenomenal success altered

the fabric of Britain, just as Mr. Attlee’s administration had pushed it to the left. Except, where the

Attlee revolution had transformed Britain in practical terms, but not made much of an ideological

difference, Thatcher successfully moved the political centre to the right, and it wasn’t until Labour

embraced that with an aggressively centrist leader that they became electable again. That legacy still

exists, and if only in the minds of Daily Mail writers, it’s reached the point where just having left-

wing opinions is literal treason. If we had more than 50 readers, we’d probably be in jail right now.

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Anatomy

of a

TuRd

So how did that article go again? Let’s cast our minds way, way back, to a mythical time called September 2013... Shouting at the rain: Sampford Courtenay

Frankly this is quite endearing. You don’t get people

this passionate anymore, except Tea Partiers.

Geoffrey Levy usually does random puff pieces like

“What now for the Anglesey housewife?” (ie Kate

Middleton) and “Does Balotelli symbolise everything

that’s wrong with British football?” Suddenly he’s

called upon to piss on the grave of a celebrated Jewish

intellectual. Surely his surname is a coincidence.

“Socialist”. You can almost see the finger-quotes.

Like it’s some crazy, incoherent philosophy he

made up.

Geoff learned a new word! He’s so excited about it!

No context is provided whatsoever about the content

of this book, or what David might specifically be

talking about. Like we need to make our own minds

up. The Mail will tell us what we think!

This is encouraging, especially as it’s obviously impossible

for a politician to say something he thinks the voter wants to

hear, as opposed to something he believes to his very soul.

None of this was said by Ed Miliband, but it’s all

but being attributed to him already.

A 17-year old wrote miserable, over-dramatic diary entries,

world reels in shock. Also, we should have sent the ungrateful

immigrant fuck back to the Warsaw Ghetto. This, incidentally,

is the whole bit where he hated Britain. A diary entry at the age of

17 is the entire evidence for Ralph Miliband’s frothing

despisation of the country that sheltered him (ie didn’t

exterminate him like the one he’d left was going to). Jesus

Christ, even if it had expressed anything like hatred for Britain,

are we really judging people from what they wrote in their

diaries at 17? Because if we are, everyone’s an arsehole. Especially

Paul Dacre.

BE TERRIFIED OF HAROLD LASKI

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In the same way as your paper has ignored every

single failure that’s sprung out of the wholesale

privatisation of absolutely everything in Britain? Or

a different way?

Ed Miliband couldn’t be sinister if he wore a black

cape and called himself Torquemada. Especially

when reforming land laws.

We might be reading too much into this, but are the

Mail trying to imply that Ralph was a deadbeat dad

and a pervert?

Which is obviously complete extremist nonsense.

Actually just affecting share prices.

Notice how they’re not even trying to demonstrate

how he was wrong.

Yeah. A teenage Jewish immigrant comes to Britain,

finds nothing but discrimination, anti-Semitism and

Empire-wanking, and writes diary entries about how

it’s a bit shit. What a whining bitch.

He was exactly right. Smart guy.

Thus proving that he was a thoughtful, progressive

Socialist, as opposed to all those dicks who turned a

blind eye to Soviet and Chinese atrocities on general

principles. Nice job condemning him.

That’s because Perestroika was obviously a good idea,

in the same way that totalitarianism is a bad one. And

one that’s not inherent to socialism. Once again, the

Mail mistakes intelligence for hypocrisy.

The disgusting hypocrite, giving his kids the best

education possible and using perfectly legal procedures

to ensure his inheritance was handled properly!

Right again. Daddy Miliband was one smart cookie.

Will you stop calling him that? Sadly, we fear this is

catching on. Also, more disgusting hypocrisy: Ed

Miliband lives in quite a nice house.

Oh, we hope so. We really do.

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THE DIGNITY OF LABOUR

Words: Sampford Courtenay

It’s eighteen months away, but hey: they’re planning for it, we might as well too. Besides, this will be an election like no other in the modern era: a straight fight between a coalition of ideological opposites and...Ed Miliband? How is that guy doing anyway?

FULL PARTY NAME: The Labour Party.

Ed Miliband MP, Doncaster North. For more information

about his fairly awesome dad, consult the last two pages. Former energy secretary under Gordon Brown. Elected leader after Labour’s 2010 election defeat, largely due to union support, leading to nickname ‘‘Red Ed’’, even though he’s actually as wet a centre-leftist as anyone else in the post-Blair party. Has spent much of his leadership trying to overcome his image problem: he’s basically Labour’s answer to

John Majors: a comedy nerd who looks more like a future Santander employee of the month than a future Prime Minister. But then again, that never hurt the real John Majors. Notably the son of respected proper Socialist Ralph Miliband (cf the last four pages), which proved completely uncontroversial despite the best efforts of the right.

LEADER:

Sticking with the rose motif they’ve had since 1987, this 2007 revision is a bit cold, with its unusual typeface and compressed rose. That font really is offputting, you guys. With its stubby

serif tops. It doesn’t look friendly. They really should go back to the lovingly-rendered illustration of a rose they used to have. It was Peter Mandleson’s idea, incidentally. Kinnock didn’t like it, but it was better than the words ‘‘LABOUR PARTY’’ formed into a fluttering flag, which was what Michael Foot used. Like they didn’t look far-left enough with him in charge.

CURRENT LOGO:

COLOURS: Red, baby! And, oddly, yellow.

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Far-left if you ask the Daily Mail. Centre-left at best with the odd pleasingly old-fashioned touch in the real world. Obviously too early for a

proper manifesto or anything, but Miliband’s made the odd promise about what would happen if he becomes Prime Minister. Latest of these is the freezing of all energy bills, harking back to Miliband’s old job in the cabinet. This made the right-wing sections of the media crap their collective strides, and is therefore a great policy, whether or not he can actually implement the damn thing. And it has the backing of none other than Sir John Majors, who not unreasonably mused on what kind of government would allow a situation where its people have to choose between heat and food.

Labour’s newest schtick is ‘‘One Nation’’, which is described by them as ‘‘our vision...of a country where everyone has a stake, where prosperity is fairly shared and where we preserve the institutions that bring us together.‘’ Sounds a bit like the Big Society to us. Remember that? Anyway, it’s just to annoy the Tories by biting their styles.

POLITICAL POSITION:

Well, obviously they were in charge for thirteen years between 1997 and 2010, after eighteen years of Tory rule finally collapsed upon them in a

single night of devastation. It’s easily forgotten just how incredible that election was — not just how it felt to see the Tories humiliated and broken, but the sheer scale of the victory. Of 659 seats in Parliament, Labour won 418 of them. It was quite astonishing, and the party managed to coast on that for their first term, knowing that they couldn’t possibly lose next time around. Having said that, that first term was easily the best of the three, because the pathologically credulous Blair wasn’t saddled with Bush and therefore didn’t get Britain involved in any stupid pointless wars. Apart from Kosovo. But seriously, they did do their best and most progressive work in their first term, including introducing the minimum wage, programs like SureStart and the New Deal, Working Tax Credit, all that bollocks. Good stuff, and proper Labour stuff too. They didn’t renationalise the railways, or anything else for that matter, but they did okay. Unfortunately, they then went and got us involved in Iraq in exactly the same way Harold Wilson didn’t get us involved in Vietnam, and pretty much threw their reputation into a great big burning bin. In truth, they won the next two elections by default anyway. Blair was replaced by Brown after much prevarication, and that’s where everything fell apart, because Brown turned out to be allergic to luck on top of just not being as good at the job as everyone expected. Still, though, Labour didn’t become so unpopular it lost the last election outright: it was the lesser party in a hung parliament which led to the current coalition of the shit we live under now, which has rolled back as much of the good stuff from the 1997-2001 term as it possibly could.

PREVIOUS FORM:

Early favourites, but it’s tight. At the end of 2012, Tory papers like the Telegraph were already writing the election off as lost, as Labour consistently had a lead in

the double figures. Since then it’s tended to be mostly singles; it went down to as little as 3% at one stage in October. The good news is that the lead in the polls has belonged to Labour pretty consistently since October 2010, barring a couple of blips in 2012. It’s probably theirs to lose at this point, but it’s dangerously close, especially considering how close the last one was and how that ended for them. They need to work to prevent another hung parliament. Especially given the rise of UKIP. A UKIP-Tory coalition remains horrifyingly plausible, so FOR GOD’S SAKE GET YOUR ARSES IN GEAR, LABOUR.

CHANCES:

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Publisher: M.H.

Editor: John Wirstham-Harte

Contributors: Sampford Courtenay, Thierry Henry Thoreau, Willard van Omnomnom Quine, Gareth Manford

All photos used without permission. All “original” material is copyright 2010 the Bob the Fish Co-Operative.

Designer: Mel Christgold

Art director: Jops

Adverts by Bedden Debord and C. Sandy Cyst

FOR BOB THE FISH MAGAZINES

Head of Production: Congorilla

Managing Editor: John Yes

Chairman: M.H.

All copyrights acknowledged. This magazine is released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence. Full details here. Obey.

Unless otherwise indicated, all materials are used without permission. No profit is made from the distribution of this magazine. No attempt has been made to supersede existing copyright. This magazine is not affiliated with any company or service mentioned herein. I mean, obviously. We only mention it to cover our arse. Neither are we affiliated with any organizations or pressure groups mentioned in passing in these pages. Hope you appreciated the Washington Coons advert, because we hated that Google Image Search. Under Reagan, the US Federal Government shut down on eight separate occasions, for a combined total of a fortnight — just less than Obama.

NEXT ISSUE: 2013: A YEAR

YOU HAVE BEEN READING

ISSUE FIFTEEN, AUTUMN 2013

Fuck4

OwnGoalOwnGoalOwnGoal

GOALKEEPER GOALKEEPER

CONCEDES GOALCONCEDES GOAL

Read all about the humiliation of someone eight hundred Read all about the humiliation of someone eight hundred

times more talented than yourself in the latest issue of the times more talented than yourself in the latest issue of the

magazine for football fans smart enough to throw cold piss magazine for football fans smart enough to throw cold piss

all over anything good and decent in this stinking worldall over anything good and decent in this stinking world

IMMEDIATELY RETIRES IMMEDIATELY RETIRES

FROM ALL FOOTBALLFROM ALL FOOTBALL

FUCK FOOTBALL TO HELLFUCK FOOTBALL TO HELL

21

WE JUST DON’T GIVE A

Fuck4

JESUS, IT’S JUST A RACIST CARICATURE, NOT THE TRAIL OF TEARS , I MEAN GOD

OwnGoalOwnGoalOwnGoal

22

2SUNS Issue 19, October 2013.

Next time in

CUNT OF THE YEAR 2013