more fool us
Having never been a fan of his comedy, language, dress-sense or life-style, it should come as no great surprise that Russell Brand’s ‘revolutionary’ approach to politics & economics leaves me decidedly unmoved. To my mind his preening, self-aggrandising, off-the-cuff pronouncements embody a lot of what is going wrong with society and his recent spat with the BBC’s Evan Davis highlighted how completely devoid of depth and thought his views are. Don’t like capitalism? Well, demolish big organisations. Not happy with bills? No worries, I’ll abolish personal debt. Under pressure from Evan’s questions? Ah, you don’t trust the corporation he works for. Stressed? Yogic meditation will be compulsory. And then he informs us he can’t “get his head around economics”. You don’t say Russell, you don’t say.
It also appears he finds it equally hard to get his head around taxation. “Pay your tax, you slags!” he cried on The Jonathan Woss show to loud applause. Which makes his choice of publisher, Random House an alarming one. The company, a joint venture between Bertelsmann and The Pearson Group, whose intentionally complex tax avoidance schemes through the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg are currently being investigated by HMRC.
Whilst I’m on the subject of recently published celebrities, and at the risk of sounding like ‘aggrieved from St Albans’, what exactly does jailbird Stephen Fry think that his THIRD autobiography has to add to the first two? He had an unhappy childhood, he became rich, he was famous, he took lots of cocaine, he was never happy. Thanks Stephen. You half expect a couple of those circular blue plaques popping up around London proclaiming ‘Stephen Fry failed to take cocaine in this building 1998-2009’. At least Johnny Rotten waited 21 years’ until publishing his second autobiography and using the vehicle to apologise to everyone he insulted in the first!
