A few of my recent gigs...

Most of the gigs I've been to recently have been a bit of a drunken blur so don't get a full write-up. Last one was Antisect (The Fleece, Bristol 14/01/2012), where support Virus were my favourite part - I'd seen them before playing with Violent Arrest and Zounds (their logo would make a lot more sense if it was Violent Arrest's) and they were pretty fun. The day before that it was Peter and the Test Tube Babies (The Fleece, Bristol 13/01/2012), who were a lot of fun but your usual beer belly punk fare. Towards the end of last year I saw Varukers, Subhumans and Agent Orange who were all excellent, particularly Agent Orange. Nicest bunch of guys I've yet to meet in rock n roll!

Driven to Suicide

With the ongoing "austerity" cuts from the tory government causing increasing unnecessary woe, and evidence that tory governments drive people to kill themselves, the suicide rate is set to rise in the UK as it has in Greece, with more and more people unable to cope with increasing financial pressures on their lives. One of the most overt attacks on those weakest in society recently has to be the Disability Living Allowance "reforms" pushed through the lords on Tuesday. They had a vocal spokesperson in Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson but unfortunately the whips in the House of Lords seem to have got their act together following defeats of benefit reform last week and drummed up support to pass the motion by 229 votes to 213. With a fraud rate of around 0.5%, the DLA benefits are a soft target for cuts and will hurt those least likely to be able to speak up against it.

This is the same week as it was leaked that serially incompetent education minister Michael Gove thought it'd be a good idea to piss public money away on a fucking yacht for the Queen's jubilee. Tory PR then kicked in and decided that if a new boat for the multimillionaire hereditary monarch to swan around in could be financed privately somehow it would be more publicly acceptable. While the idea of a  £40million floating guillotine could be at least stomached, the prospect of providing the royal parasite with a boat is quite unpalatable for me. The sheer audacity of those playing at running the country is astounding. Times like these the plastic face of their class war slips and you see the rotting flesh beneath.