PM apologies for Turing

A while ago a petition was started on the 10 Downing Street site asking for the British government to do something posthumously about the great Alan Turing. Turing wasn't just a genius - an astonishing mathematician, one of the fathers of computing (this in the 1940s, mark you), early thinker in Artificial Intelligence and a legendary codebreaker whose work in the incredibly secret world of BletchleyPark's Station X was an enormous part of the Allied effort in the Second World War. In fact it is no exaggeration to state without the work of Turing and his fellows there is a very real chance the good guys might not have won, or at the very least the war would have run far longer, claiming many more lives (and imagine if Nazi Germany had lasted another 2 or 3 years, imagine if they had time to fully develop their new fast jet fighters to attack Allied bombers, expand their V2 rockets which there was no defence against, continue atomic experiments... It doesn't bear thinking about).

There is a part in Neal Stephenson's fascinating Cryptomonicon, a novel which, like his later (although set in earlier period) Baroque Cycle mixes real historical figures with fictional to create a tale richly detailed with extensively researched history, where those working with Turing in the race to decode the German Enigma codes ponders what they do. At first he thought their team was fighting the shadow war while the real war raged in the skies and seas and land. Then he starts to realise what they are doing, shadowy and theoretical as much of it is, is the real war: fates of convoys, great warships, divisions of troops, even the fates of nations depend on what they are doing behind the scenes.

For his enormous contribution to saving his nation and invaluable intelligence in defeating the most odious, vile threat the free world has faced Turing was persecuted by his country. Alan Turing was homosexual, at a time when it was not just treated as unacceptable by society but actually a criminal offence. His security clearance was revoked, he was hounded, subjected to a ridiculous snake-oil 'cure' which was effectively a form of chemical castration. Alan took his own life not long afterwards, eating an apple he had laced with cyanide. An intellectual genius who had armoured the free world against violent Nazi oppression was oppressed by a bigoted society until he took his own life. Thankfully today we have moved on a bit in the way that gay, lesbian, bi or transgender folks are viewed and treated but there are still so many ignorant bastards who still rant their ignorant bigotry as if LGBT people were of a different species and this is the cost of that kind of uncomprehending, ignorant hatred, one of our best and brightest lost and although he used his brain rather than a bayonet or a Spitfire, someone I would consider a war hero who fought the good fight as hard as anyone.

It is good in this month that marks the 70th anniversary of the start of World War Two that Gordon Brown has formally apologised for the way Turing was treated, although a full pardon and offering proper government support for the museum at Bletchley Park would be better - the place where many men and women laboured in secret, without honours or publicity, to help win the war deserves to be better known. Its not as eye-catching as a Spitfire or the Normandy Landings, but the backroom boffins of Station X paved the road to victory as surely as the soldiers, airmen and sailors, as well as pioneering a whole new field of codebreaking, intelligence and birthing the modern computer, all kept secret for decades, so sensitive was this information (much of it was used during the subsequent Cold War for British Intelligence, it was that good) and both Turing and his colleagues should all be far more honoured than they have been. We have many public monuments to those who sacrificed all in defending us, and its right we should, but we should also honour the remarkable intellects who did no less a work in defending everything we believe in.

Brown is Watching. Apparently

Saw this stencilled onto the expensive wall of a Georgian building in Edinburgh's West End (tagging buildings is one thing, but really, street art wallahs could you not do it on listed, historic buildings, please?). I'd have thought Gordon was too busy watching his own Cabinet colleagues for sharpened daggers to watch us right now, but then he doesn't have to I suppose given the huge increase in surveillance and diminishing of civil liberties he and Blair have overseen during their corrupt regimes (for our protection, naturally).

New Cockney rhyming slang


Peter Hain = government's shame

Gordon Brown = what a clown

tricky Alsatian = dodgy donation

minister beware = no money to declare

National motto

Should the UK have a national motto? Since this idea of Gordon Brown's was first floated the Prime Eejit has distanced himself, saying that this wasn't actually his intent. Frankly I go with the Jim Hacker rule - when a politician denies something like this it normally means it is true. It seems a curiously old-fashioned idea which belongs to times past when governments and other institutions - education, religion, the monarchy, even the arts - tried their best to create a single idea of national unity. It was cobblers then, a pure fiction and one that would be badly misused too often (such as being used as a rallying point for the slaughter of the Great War, which is, ironically, when a lot of people really started to see it for the insidious nonsense that it is). To try and forge some sort of national identity in this day of multi-cultural societies, international travel and trans-border culture and communication seems simply stupid and as archaic as John Major's famously daft speech extolling a Britain of cricket on the village green and old ladies cycling to Evensong services at the parish church.

Still, no reason we can't have a little fun with the idea, though, is it? America has 'In God We Trust', which is actually fairly recent (only brought in during the 50s) and still controversial since church and state are supposed to be strictly seperate. Not to mention the fact they have ended up with mentally defective retard monkeys like George Dubyah Bush and Ronald Reagan being in charge of the country gives you the inkling that such trust in god may be misplaced... France has 'liberty, egality, fraternity' (unless you're an immigrant from the former colonies in which case it is 'fuck off and live in squalor in a crap overspill development'). But what motto would suit a United Kingdom which has parts which would rather be the Untied Kingdom (apologies to my mate James Lovegrove for borrowing a title from one of his excellent novels, I'm sure he'll forgive me using it)? Here are a few of my ideas, feel free to make your own suggestions:

Britain - please queue here

(this emphasises on of our great national characteristics and at the same time serves to educate those damned foreigners like Italians who seem to have no concept of queueing much to the fury of Britons when they walk in front of us at a big line. Although we are too polite to tell them off for it, preferring to mumble in low tones to our queueing neighbours)

Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

(uplifting and inspiring in hard times and a reminder of one of our great cultural gifts to the world)

Nice weather for ducks

(we probably should have a motto that reflects our national obsession with weather. Others don't understand why we have this obsession, but it is simply because we have so much endlessly changing weather, sometimes having sunshine, rain, hail and snow within the same afternoon)

Full up

(one for the xenophobic Daily Mail readers to enjoy waving in front of the immigrant population)

Watch what you say or we'll invade you next

(what a lot of right wing numpties would love)

Britain - now available in HiDef

(perhaps we need one which celebrates our technological achievements)

Britain - Press red button for more information

(for our cabled up digital age)

Five a day!

(to help boost the UK's health)

I think I'll stick to our own Scottish national motto as seen above the gates to Edinburgh Castle: nemo me impune lacessit, roughly translated as no-one touches me with impunity or, as would be more the case these days, we're friendly folks but don't piss us or you're for a kickin'.

Lameolympics

I haven't been much of a fan of the idea of the London Olympics so far - frankly it is going to cost a fortune and a lot of hassle and I can't see it giving much to the rest of the country outside of London. Admittedly I'm not a big sports person to begin with, but since all the major new facilities (if they are built in time and work) will be in London they aren't going to be much use to trainee athletes around the rest of Britain, are they? And since they look certain to siphon off huge amounts of Lottery funding from arts group, local charity volunteers organisations and even local-level sports intitiatives to pay for this fiasco it looks like it may well hurt the encouragement of sports training in the UK, which is a huge own goal. Now they announce the lamest logo I have seen in years - it looks like something an amateur would have done around 1986 for smeg's sake. Given the millions the chancellor (soon to be Prime Monster) has indicated he will steal out of other much needed lottery funds to pay for all of this perhaps instead of this dire logo they should have an image of Gordon Brown's hand going into the collective wallet of the nation? I notice the BBC's poll of reader's views shows over 80% thinking it sucks like a hungry anteater.




I wonder how much money they wasted to come up with these pathetic designs? Never mind, perhaps Putin will have nuked us all before then. Assuming any of Russia's nuclear weapons he's threatening us with actually still work or even actually have a warhead inside since half of them aren't accounted for, probably because they sold them to rogue states and terrorists... Funny though, a dictatorial madman with a highly questionable human rights record, a history of aggression abroad, using fossil fuels to bully and intimidate others then threaten civilians with weapons of mass destruction - haven't we imposed sanctions and even gone to war for less than this in the recent past? Yet here we are with a few Western leaders just saying something weak such as "oh we'll have a talk with him at the G8..." and comments that his speech was "unhelpful." Unhelpful is refusing to co-operate with police to extradiate a suspect in a criminal case, telling millions you will point nuclear weapons at them is rather more than that; in fact its an act of terrorism.