Charlie Brooker on Nick Clegg

Governments around the world must be studying the coalition [government in Britain] and working out how to get their own Clegg. He's the coalition's very own Pudsey Bear: a cuddly-but-tragic mascot representing the acceptable face of abuse. But unlike Pudsey, he actually speaks. Immediately following each unpleasant new announcement, Cleggsy Bear shuffles on stage to defend it, working his sad eyes and boyish face as he morosely explains why the decision was inevitable – and not just inevitable, but fair; in fact possibly the fairest, most reasonable decision to have been taken in our lifetimes, no matter how loudly people scream to the contrary.

It's hard not to detect an air of crushed self-delusion about all this. At times Clegg sounds like a once-respected stage actor who's taken the Hollywood dollar and now finds himself sitting at a press junket, patiently telling a reporter that while, yes, on the face of it, his role as the Fartmonster in Guff Ditch III: Fartmonster's Revenge may look like a cultural step down from his previous work with the Royal Shakespeare Company, if you look beyond all the scenes of topless women being dissolved by clouds of acrid methane, the Guff Ditch trilogy actually contains more intellectual sustenance than King Lear, and that all the critics who've seen the film and are loudly claiming otherwise are misguided, partisan naysayers hell- bent on cynically misleading the public – which is ethically wrong...
From this article noting the tactical nouse of the Tories having the Lib Dems fronting their cuts. As Ed Miliband noted, Clegg has all but successfully destroyed a 150 year tradition of liberalism in just five months... On the subject of resisting the cuts,
there are a couple of decent videos on you tube - a song here while for chat show host Paul O'Grady's rant see here. Plus the new issue of Socialist Review leads on austerity and resistance, while Socialist Worker has all the latest on the crucial firefighters, London underground and BBC strikes in London...