Vivisected Northern Ireland - Hugh Muir, be Intolerant of intolerance

I've written before about the vanity of small differences and the vivisection of Northern Ireland and the baleful effects of these egregious habits. In the face of such deleterious habits, I have called upon the need for civil intolerance. We can also learn from a parralel experience. In response to the flying of a jihadist-style flag in a London housing estate Hugh Muir wrote in the Guardian that we must resist those who would Balkanise public space. He wrote:

The cartoonist as the true journalist

John pilger thinks so:

"The most effective defender of the paper is not one of these. He has shaggy dark hair and a beard - or he did when I last saw him. For more than 20 years I have turned to his work as you would reach for coffee in the morning. He is outrageous, anarchic, brilliant, sometimes inexplicable and a bit mad (not really). For those who doubt the truth is subversive and often absurd, I point them towards two pages in the Guardian, where he resides. 

Only Steve Bell exposes consistently, fearlessly, the bullshit of "public life". Indeed, his characters are often drowning in or water-skiing on the stuff. "Right, that's it," says the last governor of the Bank of England, Sir Mervyn King, to Gordon Brown, then prime minister, and chancellor Alistair Darling, "heads down, tea break over!" They are up to their chins in a tank of turds. 

Steve Bell is a cartoonist and a true journalist with few rivals. He is Hogarth and Swift with a touch of Peter Sellers and a sprinkling of Orwell. He is more of an English original than one of his prime targets, Margaret Thatcher, the former petit-bourgeois totem. Often using the wickedly all-seeing penguin star of his strip, "If..." he rumbled both Thatcher and her protege, Blair, early in their criminal ascendancy."

In full here. The New Statesman also covered this with, 'John Pilger on Steve Bell and the cartoonist as true journalist.'

John Major - Loyalism's "phantom fear"

John Major said of the loyalist flag protesters here.

"I think it's a phantom fear... It's perfectly clear from the Downing Street Declaration and everything that for so long as Northern Ireland wishes to remain British, so long as the people of Northern Ireland wish to remain British, they will remain British. 

No-one is abandoning them, no-one is pushing them to one side. If you look at everyday life in Northern Ireland it is incomparably better than it was 20 to 25 years ago. Incomparably better for the people who are currently dissatisfied and for their children and for the future."

BBC report in full here. Mick Fealty had earlier said:

The flegs crisis is an unnecessary elevation of the trivial to a cause of crisis, which typifies the limited vision of the OFMdFM ‘partnership’.

Peter Robinson said:

"I fear the real danger for Unionism lies not in what our opponents would seek to do to us but in what we do to ourselves."