Britain's not broken it just needs switching off and on again...

It's a well known fact for anyone who's ever worked with a computer that, a) the computer will fire warning messages at you quicker and with more regularity than Katie Price hurls "exclusives" at the lip-licking tabloids and, b) that it will do so only at the most inconvenient and crucial moments leaving you berating everything from your job to Bill Gates to the woman who sits opposite you chewing obnoxiously and recanting the details of her bizarre and ugly sex life with all the volume control of Brian Blessed. And when said CPU meltdown occurs you can also guarantee the lifeless IT helpline worker will offer only one solution, the dreaded "Off 'n' on" solution or 'ONO' as it used to be called in my office. As in 'ONO if that didn't work I'm really fucked.' But the most disheartening thing is that it really works, it's as if the machines need a rest or they're just laughing at the futility of mankind and our belief that "progress" means there are people who earn in excess of £15,000 to simply reboot machines all day. Okay so I may be underestimating the work of our friends in IT and I daresay we all have a few given the proliferation of computer-based services in this crazy world. However, whatever the truth one thing remains a constant nine times out of ten, things aren't really broken they just need a brief break; the 'ONO' solution really works.

I think we've now got to a stage where if Britain was a computer it'd be showing a granite box to our neighbours with the fury-inducing message, "An error has occurred and Britain needs to shut. Do you want to send an error report?" And maybe for once we should send a report, a detailed memo to the world on how not to develop and behave. After that we should shut Britain down for, say, six months and wait to start again fresh, having used our break to chill the fuck out and see where we've been going wrong for so long. We should ban all media outlets except the BBC website and insist even that only prints boring, factual news pieces. Any job title with more than three words should be rebranded to say simply what it is or better still disbanded. No more 'Head sales representative for marketing' thank you very much, that ship has sailed and been sunk.

The media would halt; the same papers that peddle the notion of broken families and communities that then gleefully print blow-by-blow accounts of divorces whether it's the Price and Katona break-ups in the red-tops or the oil magnates and people no one has ever heard of in the Mail and the Express. If we want people to be reasoned and civil during a divorce especially involving children, and we really should, we should ban the likes of Trisha and the Jeremy Kyle Show and send them to a distant island with their inbred guests to scream and shout and behave how they wish. Let's not put a microscope on the negative all the time, let's be genuinely thankful that this isn't Rwanda circa 1994 or Vietnam circa 1969 or even London in 1941. Life isn't really that bad for us, yes there are problems but most of them are simply impotent, wearied attitudes. As for removing pointless job titles that’s just for my personal fun, plus I just want to be told what someone does in an inane conversation, I don’t want follow-up questions just because some twat got a thesaurus for Christmas and feels compelled to call his poor minions by an absurd selection of meaningless words placed together with all the care and attention and organisation put into Leslie Ash’s face.

I know this all sounds a little communist and dictatorial but if people want change they have to do something about it. Forget Obama's "Change we can believe in" and let's look at Ukraine where people have genuinely moved for change in the last decade. Countries like Ukraine don't peer listlessly and bitterly at tabloids bemoaning the little things or the big things, they do something about it. Maybe I'm idealising a country I know little about but the reality is Britain isn't bad, we're the problem. We need to come to some key realisations, principally we're not the biggest or best country on earth and shit does, indeed, happen and when it does you have to deal with it sensibly and with action rather than fingers pointed in blame at everyone but ourselves. Take the recent attacks by two young brothers in Sheffield, a tragedy no doubt but it's naive to suppose that this is a) a one-off, and b) not part of wider a social problem which we should try to resolve as a collective rather than tut and moan about parental decay and social services in this country.

Life isn't easy and being part of a balanced, cohesive society's even harder but it's possible. Shit will always happen, unfortunately there will always be unpleasantness, it's hard to accept but inevitable that humans will always commit unfathomable acts against each other, Ross Kemp will always find work in TV and people will still buy James Morrison albums. But it's the reaction that really shows humanity and society's mettle, it's the ability to exist with a degree of happiness and success. Britain's not broken it just needs a bit of reflection, a bit of perspective. It just needs switching off and on again.

This week... Chris would like to send a massive shout out to our only follower, hope you're better soon mate. Chris also sat at home and read a not very good book by Carol Joyce Oates.

Brown's government is walking haphazardly across the road as we speak...

First, a disclaimer: This blog was first written several months ago for a national student newspaper that decided not to use my piece so it may seem less error-strewn (it's been edited) and the events of Prof. Nutt's sacking were not known at the time. Some say I'm psychic, a visionary, a prophet; all I know is that this mess has been coming for a long time now.

Imagine a sad scenario. You’re a young person who has just been blinded; following the accident you’ve won compensation with which you decide to train a guide dog. But not just any guide dog. This guide dog has to have experience, to have been trained by the best in the business and be able to show a level of ability that goes beyond any normal guide dog. So you hire the best people and your dream guide dog becomes a reality but there’s a problem. You. You don’t want to be pulled around by this dog, you think you know better than the dog and so you start pulling the dog around, ignoring its advice. You’ve lived in this world longer and you know what you want. You’re not going to be bullied by a dog, no matter how smart it is. Welcome ladies and gentlemen to the world of Gordon Brown’s Labour government.

I have voted Labour in every election since I was 18 and that’s more elections than I care to admit. But I, like seemingly everyone else, am finally losing patience. Since 1997 Labour has been putting in place quangos, policy boards, tsars and whoever else to give expert advice in all manner of fields such as drugs policy, education and enterprise (arise Surallun). A much maligned but potentially brilliant idea, its basis is to allow experts to have a direct input on important policy decisions. But that’s only if the government decides to take any of the advice on board. In the last two years any proposal that the government does not like has been tossed haphazardly into Number 10’s big “No” bin. Why? Because they don’t seem to fit with what the government thinks the electorate wants to hear. Take the political minefield of drugs. Just the mention of the word has politicians and their spin doctors breaking into a cold nervous sweat. Their ties suddenly feeling tight, they shift awkwardly about and dodge the question quicker than Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn in that movie about balls and all the while this country’s drug laws sit in a crumpled, rotting mess in the corner becoming outdated, lost and confused. Take the recent re-reclassification of cannabis back to a class B drug; a decision the government’s own advisory board specifically objected to. It’s like having that guide dog and crossing a road aimlessly yourself.

Drugs policy has always been a squeamish, tense issue not least in middle England where the moronic majority seem to think all drug users look weird and smell funny like the people stalking town high streets at night asking for change. The reality of drug use is unbelievably complex. Drug users veer from the rich and powerful (Barack Obama - cocaine and pot; Bill Clinton – who probably did inhale; Boris Johnson – cocaine and pot again) down to students via pretty much every profession. I spoke to a police officer recently who said any school or large company that claimed it didn’t have a problem with drug use was either lying, deluded or in deep, deep denial. Drugs are a fact of life; as students we will all at least know someone who uses drugs, whether it’s a bit of pot or pills or cocaine, and we can probably get hold of drugs if we so desire. The government’s insistence on pursuing and punishing cannabis users is nothing short of senseless. But don’t take my word for that, ask the government’s own advisory board, the WHO or the UN. They all accept the policing of the drug trade at the moment is not working and a new approach is urgently needed. Why chase users of the softest, least volatile drugs like ecstasy and cannabis when people’s lives are being ruined by heroin and crack cocaine and two of the most toxic substances, alcohol and tobacco, are freely available?

Clearly something needs to budge, but as for ultimate solutions I’m afraid I can’t provide those, I’m not an expert. That’s allegedly why the government has an advisory panel, and it’s probably time it stopped dancing preciously around the subject with their remaining eye on the polls and actually listened to the advice. After all it can’t get any worse for Brown, can it?

This week Chris... listened to The Invisble's self-titled debut album and agreed with it's sentiments. Also, Chris and Ed went clubbing in Derby and got so drunk a series of unflattering photos have now appeared on facespace from the dark, lurking blanks of that night. All good!

Gillette - The most racist an ad can get

I’ve got a problem with Gillette and for once it’s not to do with the addition of yet another blade to their latest range of razors. Oh the innovation! At what point are they going to stop and start selling cheese graters to the confused souls that actually believe this new razor will get them the job/woman/life of their dreams? Picture it now, dozens of demographics rubbing mercilessly at their faces until all that’s left is a collection of these dreams in a bloody slop bucket full of moronic brains.

Nor is my latest objection tied to the farcical names that accompany these “special editions”, you know the ones that twitch irritatingly in your hand like a wounded raccoon clawing away at your face. Oh it’s black and it’s called Stealth or Phantom or Tornado or Combine Harvester.

No what’s irritated me this time is their latest ad campaign. And it’s not the usual saccharine, chisel-jawed, face-rubbing close-ups that have got me angrier than Naomi Campbell waiting at Terminal 5. No it’s the new horrible, “acceptable” racism of their new self-congratulatory twat-fest. You know the one where all the different men of varying races stand in a terrible CGI bathroom while their identical partner comes jauntily in to rub their face and have a poo, okay maybe I added the poo part. The black man’s with the black woman, the asian man with the asian woman, and so on and so forth and it’s such a frenetic pace it could almost be a subliminal advert for the BNP, providing of course the non-white members were in a CGI bathroom somewhere the other side of the North Sea.

Now I must confess I’m horribly biased on this issue, my girlfriend’s British Indian and I’m white British, although the British part in my case can be read, as with nearly other white Brit, as European mongrel, a bit of everything in the European area. I digress.

The point is, for all but the most sheltered and rural, this just doesn’t fit with our experience of the world, our experience of modern Britain. And it’s racist, mind-bogglingly racist. Does Gillette have a right to say who I can date, spend my life and times with, indeed who we can all date, fuck and marry? In thirty years will the human race stop diversifying as we marry people who are not only the same race as us but have almost identical features? Definitely not. The reality is most towns and cities have diverse populations, well except Norwich but I seem to remember saying modern Britain. The days when thousands of people turn up to witness a black man marry a white woman as they did in Long Eaton sixty years ago have thankfully passed. In three and a half years my girlfriend have never suffered direct abuse for our relationship and we wouldn’t expect to, the truth is the majority of people see the world with more dimensions and diversity than this advert suggests.

Much advertising has always been woefully behind the times, often it depends on the demographic they’re aiming for, hence all those horrible sofas on Dfs adverts and Michael Winner’s appearance on those god-awful e-sure adverts, but the fact that two of Gillette’s most prominent advertising stars, Tiger Woods and Thierry Henry are and were married to white women only makes Gillette’s crime all the more hideous. Tiger Woods himself is mixed race, so why this daft racism? It’s not just Gillette though, everywhere I look across every cultural medium, with the exception of the heart-stoppingly attractive woman on the Next adverts and her white other-half, white faces go with white faces, asian faces with asian faces, etc. Ultimately our cultural mediums need to reflect our culture and need to represent perfectly acceptable relationships as perfectly ordinary and a fact of life. Only when advertising starts portraying gay relationships, mixed race relationships and the like, relationships that aren’t from a 1950s manual of what’s “normal” can we take it seriously as a medium once again, oh except the Churchill dog and the meerkat from that website I can’t remember, now those are characters I can truly relate to…