You might’ve noticed the outpouring of facebook-rage/tabloid-hysteria that broke out a couple of weeks ago when it was reported that, apparently, England shirts are to BANNED during the World Cup. The rumours started from this article in The Sun, which claimed that police were advising pubs to prohibit the wearing of football shirts for reasons of safety during the tournament.

This obscure piece of police guidance on licensing was then taken massively out of context and portrayed as presumably just the latest development in the British state’s long standing war against the persecuted minority that is white, English men. Cue, seemingly hundreds of thousands of misinformed eejits jumping on a virtual bandwagon against the ‘fukin stupid ban, its PC gone mad!!1!11 I WONT REMOVE MY ENGERLAND SHIRT UNLESS THEY STOP  BEIN ALLOWD TO WEAR TURBANS AND BURKAS’, and so on, before the whole thing had become an unstoppable juggernaut of the kind of nationalism, xenophobia and anti-immigrant hysteria that’s come to be exemplified by the English Defence League.

Faced with this, almost immediately the Metropolitan Police -- where the guidance originated -- issued a stringent denial that this was ever intended as a ban on England shirts, flags or other attire. Like, duh. But it didn’t stop there -- soon enough, nearly every police force in England, from Somerset & Avon to West Midlands was being forced to issue statements that they have no intentions to ban England shirts.

It’s become deeply worrying how prevalent this sort of casual racism has become. While the BNP, what was and still to a large extent is the united party of the far-right, appears to be falling apart, the same cannot be said of the ideas they represent in society. The EDL go from strength to strength, while UKIP veer ever further towards the radical right. 600,000 people are members of a facebook group entitled ‘Its funny how our flag offends you but our benefits dont!’. It’s a well-worn tabloid narrative that the ‘PC Brigade’ are determined to clamp down on ‘national pride’ -- to the extent that now The Sun only has to drop the merest hint that this is taking place before it sparks another outbreak of BAN OUTRAGE hysteria. And it’s endemic of the constant media-lies and scapegoating of Muslims that within hours, somehow ‘the Islamics’ were being blamed for this obscure piece of guidance, apparently written by one police officer, intended for licensed premises.

Now, however, it has emerged that there is more to the story than first meets the eye. A local newspaper in Worksop, Nottinghamshire, reports that someone has been going round, purporting to be a Police Community Support Office, and asking people to remove England shirts and take down flags. So who could this bogus police officer be? Surely our tabloid media would not stoop to that low in a shameless bid to generate some cheap headlines about ‘PC PCs’ being a bunch of killjoy England-haters? Well, it wouldn’t be the first time they’ve attempted such a stunt: a few years back it emerged that The Daily Mail was offering money to Polish people to  drive Polish cars to Britain and then proceed to break UK traffic laws, with a Mail photographer conveniently in tow. Hmm… tabloid media stirring up racial tensions and scapegoating minorities? Who would have thought it.

ABOVE: exclusive footage Leftfield uncovered of a recent Sun editorial meeting

As we’ve already reported today, The Sun have been relentlessly trying to persuade us to vote Tory. The reason for this is that the Murdoch empire that owns it has sunk millions into pushing the Tories, in the hopes of getting a government that will give them everything they want.

One of the things they want is to be able to keep using pornography to sell their papers. For decades, The Sun has put pictures of nearly naked teenagers on page 3 to help keep them as the number one “news”paper in the UK.

Unsurprisingly, many women are unhappy about the way that page 3 exploits women, encouraging Sun readers to objectify them and think of them solely as sex objects. There’s been frequent calls to try and stop The Sun pushing pornographic pictures of young women.

Since 2003, The Sun have accompanied the pictures with what they call ‘News In Briefs’. This basically consists of putting words in the mouth of the young women they’re exploiting, in order to push their political agenda. Supposedly, we’re led to believe, these women are not only hired to bare their chests, but also because they share the extreme right wing agenda of the Murdoch empire. Not only is this exploiting the models, it’s also manipulating the readers through a twisted version of sexuality, in order to try and get them to support their sinister agenda. You can check out some of the examples here, such as “Poppy thinks Tony Blair was absolutely right to send the troops into Iraq,” or “Tina thinks the G20 have taken the right decision to inject a trillion dollars into the financial system.”

It’s hard to tell what they intend you to think as you read these captions. Is it meant to mean, ‘These are intelligent young women who have made a free choice to be glamour models.’ Or are is it just a way to mock the objectified women even further, by making the patently ridiculous claim that they really said the things attributed to them?

The election special of ‘The News in Briefs’ concerned the noises that some MPs have made about taking action against page 3. Normally I would just link to it, but I’m not sending hits to right wing porn, so here’s the text:

“SIXTEEN Page 3 Girls in all their glory represent the very image of freedom in this country.

But if Labour or the Lib Dems win the election, this could be the last time they are allowed to pose together.

MPs Harriet Harman and Lynne Featherstone will move swiftly to change the law and ban Page 3 forever.

John Locke: Not happy about his theory being appropriated to justify pornography

Our national treasures – who even enjoy the Royal seal of approval from our future King Prince Charles – will be no more.

And at a stroke the very liberties that put the Great into Great Britain will be torn asunder.

The radical ideas of the 17th-century philosopher John Locke helped shape our freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights and, later, America’s Constitution.

Lib Dem frontbencher Featherstone was cheered by women’s rights activists when she declared she would “love to take on Page 3″.

But our Poppy said: “The basis of Lockean thought is his theory of the Contract of Government, under which all political power is a trust for the benefit of the people.

“His thinking underpins our ideas of national identity and society. Please don’t let those who seek to ban our beauty win. Vote to save Page 3!”

There’s so much wrong with this article I don’t know where to start. That’s why we’ve lined up Leftfield’s own page 3 stunnas to give our own left wing take on this particular nonsense.

Bob from Airdrie says: “I resent the way they say that banning page 3 would put women on the dole queue, because it implies being a ‘glamour model’ is actually a proper job.

The fact of the matter is it’s not a proper job, it doesn’t come with a wage. Models are not employed, they’re rented from an agency, and paid a tiny portion of the fee that that agency takes. A small minority get to make a bit more money by becoming celebrities, but the vast majority either have to get an actual job, or become even more exploited by going fully into the horrendous pornography industry.

It’s a big lie that glamour models are liberated women who have made a choice, and who make loads of money. They’re exploited and paid a pittance. Page 3 models are not employees, they’re products, as far as the Murdoch empire is concerned.”

Doug from Kirkcaldy says: “This whole so-called controversy is ridiculous, because it’s clearly a transparent ploy to shore up the vote of progressive women for Labour and the Lib Dems.

If Harriet Harman actually took page 3 seriously, she’s had 13 years in government to do something about it. She’s been deputy leader of the Labour Party since 2007, and it’s proven to be all talk.

The fact of the matter is that Labour care far more about the support of the right wing press than they do about doing anything serious to try and stop the sexual exploitation of women.”

And Bill from Auchtermuchty says: “The philosophy supposedly spouted by the models in this article is nonsense.

First of all, the Bill of Rights and the American constitution are in the USA. Britain has neither, so the idea that John Locke’s philosophy has been enshrined in law here is totally wrong.

As a socialist, I do recognise that John Locke made an important contribution to the history of philosophy. His theory of the social contract argues that a government cannot be legitimate without the consent of the people.

The problem however, which was recognised by Marx and other socialists, is that the individualist conception of human rights pretends that everyone can be equal in a society that is still really unequal, because some own property and get rich from the labour of the vast majority.

In the case of page 3, the objectification of women reflects a society where women are forced to compete for the attention of the men who dominate sexist society. Our patriarchal society means that men have power and access to resources that women don’t. Women are only considered valuable to this sexist hierarchy if they’re deemed sexually attractive, and page 3 encourages men to keep thinking this way.

How, in this context, can we really claim that everyone has an equal say in society? How can we pretend that sexism is over women are liberated when this kind of misogynist propaganda is looked at daily by millions all over the UK?”

Princess Murdoch

The Sun’s front page today (above) is a the final showcase they have to try and desperately push for a Tory government.

Leftfield has said consistently that the best thing we can hope for out of this election is a hung parliament. Nobody knows for sure how tonight is going to turn out. A strong Tory government (which is still possible) or a Labour majority (which looks really unlikely at this point) both would result in a strong government for the capitalist class.

A strong government elected today means that before too long we can expect a massive attack from the people in power, starting tomorrow. Just look at Greece: the people there elected a “Socialist” government in disgust at the economic crisis. Now that same government is pushing through an unprecedented assault that threatens the survival of the Greek working class.

The good news is that the opinion polls are all pointing towards a hung parliament, and a period of uncertainty and indecision as to who’s in charge. The only big party right now that looks like it could deliver a government with enough seats to push through cuts, new anti union laws and sackings is the Tories, and the Murdoch papers are trying to give them one last push.

Even though the other big two parties are no better, it is a testament to the class consciousness of normal people that a year ago the Tories had a huge poll lead, but a the day drew near they realised they didn’t want an Eton educated wanker in government. Despite the full weight of the right wing propaganda machine behind him, David Cameron hasn’t been able to get clearly ahead. Which is good.

That doesn’t mean that we should be fighting to keep a Labour government either. They’ve promised cuts “deeper than Thatcher”, as everyone reading this blog must know by now. The Lib Dems also want to cut, and have also committed to bring in new laws that would stop workers being able to strike against those cuts. More importantly, the Lib Dems want into power, and will prop up whichever party looks like they can put Liberals in ministerial limos.

The key thing to understand is that the UK, like most of Europe in the world, is in huge debt, because the state used our money to cover the losses made by ultra rich bankers betting on the stock market. This means that the government can’t afford the cost of running the country. Their solution to this crisis is to make you and me pay. None of the three parties that could be part of the next government can possibly conceive of an alternative.

Hung parliament: Best of bad options

But there is one. Make the ultra rich, whose wealth jumped again last year, pay their fair share in tax, and end tax evasion. Cancel the incredibly expensive plans to renew Britain’s weapons of mass destruction, and bring British troops home from Afghanistan. But most importantly, tell the banks we want our money back. The banks that were bailed out with our money have more than enough cash. If we take them into public ownership, and use those vast reserves of money to do actually useful stuff, like transforming the UK energy economy to try and prevent climate change for example, it’ll create jobs and do a hell of a lot more good than going towards bonuses for millionaire executives.

If you live in one of these places, you can vote today for someone who stands up for this alternative. but today is only the beginning. Over the next few months we need to build up a ferocious resistance movement to the world of shit that the next government is going to try and plunge us into. We can stop the cuts, and we can put an alternative on the agenda. The weaker the next government is the better for us, but whatever happens tonight it’s going to take a hell of a lot of people power. So today, we recommend that where you can you vote for a socialist candidate standing against the cuts. And from today, get involved in building up a fightback to whoever forms the next government.

If you think it can’t be done, just check out some of the stuff we’ve been covering in Greece over the last few days.

David Cameron’s reaction on learning he won’t get a majority government:

Primark’s secret plot to make little girls more appealing to paedophiles has been revealed, thanks to fearless journalism by The Sun.

They reported that “Primark bosses invite parents to send out girls of seven dressed as sex objects to be leered at by paedophiles,” after it was revealed that Primark have a range of swimwear for children which includes a slightly padded bikini top. Horror of horrors!

Labour, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems are all tripping over themselves to condemn Primark, and the Sun has extended its crusade to a whole host of other shops, announcing that it’s “Paedo heaven on our High Street“.

Let’s have a look at the bikini in question. It’s hardly a Wonderbra, is it?

There are two reasons girls start wearing bras or crop tops long before we might actually need them for support:

- to be mature and grown up, and avoid being made fun of by girls

- to hide the shape of our developing breasts, and avoid being made fun of by boys

Remember school swimming lessons, and having to stand in front of everyone you knew in a skintight costume that left nothing to the imagination whilst the PE teacher droned on for what seemed like an eternity… but none of the other kids paid attention because they were too busy making fun of you for either being a flatchested baby or a bigtitted slutty bitch? And to top it off, all of the popular girls are wearing bikinis and you’re stuck in a totally lame onepiece. Being a kid is really fucking hard.

As well as being ridiculous and not helping anyone, The Sun’s PAEDO BIKINI panic has an extremely sinister undertone. If paedophiles are only preying on children because of their “sexy” clothes, then who should take the blame when children are abused? The shops that sold the sexy clothes? The parents for buying them? The kids for wearing them? Anyone but the actual abuser and the sexually fucked up society obsessed with little girls’ and their virginity and purity, whilst promoting an pornographic ideal of hairless and childlike womanhood.

Laurie Penny at the Guardian’s Comment is Free has had the only remotely sensible take on this so far, saying:

Rather than encouraging healthy sexual exploration or promoting education, campaigns to protect girls from “sexualisation” assume that sexuality itself is a corrupting influence on young women.

The notion of “sexualisation” deserves serious critical unpacking. The term envisions girl children as blank erotic slates upon which sexuality can only ever be violently imposed. This narrow vision of sexuality leaves no room for young girls to explore authentic desire at their own pace, insisting instead that girls need to be protected from erotic influence, while boys, presumably, are free to fiddle with themselves to their hearts’ content.

Far from protecting young girls, the “anti-sexualisation” agenda actually serves a culture that shames girls if they have sexual feelings of their own while fetishising them as objects of erotic capital. The pornographic and advertising industries routinely infantilise adult women in an erotic context: in 2008, catwalk model Lily Cole infamously posed nude for French Playboy cuddling a teddy bear and licking a lollipop. Corporate visions of pubescent sexuality are marketed to children and adults alike as ritualised acts of erotic drag, and from an early age, young girls have a profound understanding that such sexual performance must be undertaken if we are not to be socially punished…

This ugly world of performative erotic control is made more confusing by a vociferous moral lobby in which adults talk to other adults about what young girls should be permitted to wear, say and do. The online mumocracy’s call for retailers to “show parents that their company believes that children should be allowed to be children” is irrelevant to the real experiences of girls growing up in a world where our sexual impulses are stolen and sold back to us.

Padded bras for preteens are not the problem. The problem is a culture of prosthetic, commodified female sexual performance, a culture which morally posturing politicians appear to deem perfectly acceptable as long as it is not ‘premature’. By assuming that sexuality can only ever be imposed upon girl children, campaigns to ‘let girls be girls’  ignore the fact that late capitalism refuses to let women be women – at any age.

But leaving all of that aside… surely paedophiles want children to look as childlike as possible, and would therefore be resolutely opposed to padded bras for kids? LOGIC FAIL.

The first game I ever played was Sonic The Hedgehog. I played it when I was around about 5 or 6, and thank god the unrelenting, brutal and sadistic violence in that game did not scar me for life. I did everything to that hedgehog you can imagine. I jumped him into lava, into spikes, balls with spikes on them, cylinders with spikes on the sides, robots with cutting tools, lasers and one time I even threw him to his death from a plane.

I must have killed more foxes than the entire Tory Party in the past hundred years.

Of course, this wasn’t my only experience with videogame violence -- when I was 10 I played Desert Strike, where I had to commandeer a helicopter gunship to attack a series of targets inside an unnamed IRAQ IRAQ IRAQ middle eastern country. I carried out dozens upon dozens of bombing raids, ostensibly on military targets like anti-aircraft radar, presidential palaces, scuds and tanks. But more than once I would fuck up and gun down civilians I accidentally assumed were enemy infantry -- or blow up civilian houses whilst searching for more fuel. What happened? Well I would return to the frigate, my mission would be over -- but I would be allowed to restart ALL OVER AGAIN. An endless cycle of violence and misery.

This only got worse when I got the sequel Jungle Strike, and consciously decided to lay waste to Washington DC -- destroying  Justice Department buildings, The Washington Memorial, The Jefferson Memorial and laying waste to the suburbs, in a gross dereliction of my mission objectives. Sure I would be asked to return to The White House to retry my mission, but this threat was frankly somewhat toothless considering it would be the first building I would destroy when starting my mission.

This videogame violence is almost cartoonish compared to what you are now able to do on modern computers -- buy sex from prostitutes and kill them, machine gun down civilians in a busy airport, or use a wii remote to enact a beheading. Veteran gardener Alan Titchmarsh is on the case though -- watch him below attacking violent videogames -- who have grossly surpassed such gritty, sadistic, and bloody 50’s dramas like The Lone Ranger.

If you look closely in the audience, you’ll be able to see pitchforks and torches at the ready.

Listening to Alan spell out the games names shows he is clearly very familiar with the industry. Sitting next to him is Mrs Helen Lovejoy and noted social commentator and cunt Kelvin McKenzie. More on him later. First things first, violent videogames may only make up 5% of the market as the pro-gaming guy says, but they make up 95% + of all decent videogames. You really can’t get as much joy out of pushing plastic buttons on a guitar in tune with shiny boxes as taking over control of a predator drone and using it to kill 20 invading Russian soldiers in a shopping malls carpark.

This isn’t because human beings or videogames players are psychotic, it’s just that violence is exciting. Violence involves pressure on individuals which heighten tension in all drama -- books, films and games. Things are more thrilling if there is a chance someone could die, especially if it involves their head being ripped off by the Predator. If you don’t agree try watching the 4 hour black and white silent version of Die Hard done by Werner Herzog. The drop in quality is noticeable. Yet one of our prize rent-a-panelist chumps says she is against “all forms of violence for entertainment”. Did you hear that? “all forms of violence for entertainment”. If these nutters had their way we would not have,

* 24

* Battlestar Galactica

* Die Hard

* Aliens

* The Bourne Ultimatum

* Predator

* Where Eagles Dare

* Indiana Jones

* Terminator 2

* James Bond

* THE ENTIRE STAR WARS AND LORD OF THE RINGS SERIES.

That’s only a very small example of what would happen to society if we ceased entertainment based on (kiddy on imaginary) violence. We would be stuck in an endless nightmare of shit daytime telly, which is probably why this rent-a-gob supports ending all violence in entertainment as it would mean Loose Women would endlessly loop on TV, alongside Jeremy Kyle and Call My Bluff and she would be on telly non stop.

Kelvin proudly displays his membership of the British Wankers Charitable Trust.

She also goes on to claim that videogames “promote hatred, violence and sexism”. If she had simply looked to her right however, she could have seen noted piece of human shit Kelvin Mackenzie, who has spent an entire journalistic career promoting all 3 far more effectively than the Metal Gear series. Videogames may have all these 3, but it’s no different from most mainstream Hollywood movies. GTA may allow you to buy sex from prostitutes and kill them, but theres a whole film industry dedicated to “torture porn” which often involves women being mutilated to death.

Yes! I killed a ship going out the exclusion zone, I've won a multiplayer map!

When Kelvin attacks videogames on the potential offence they may cause he should remember that no current or previous version of Street Fighter accused Liverpool fans of pissing on their own dead and robbing them. And that when you destroy something in a game and get a high score for it, people haven’t actually died for your moment of glory -- unlike the Belgrano.

Attacks on the game industry aren’t limited to daytime telly shows though -- violent videogames are denied tax breaks other games get, and other games have been attacked by MP’s -- such as Modern Warfare 2. Most of Modern Warfare plays as a conventional shoot em up, with the player gunning down terrorists, soldiers etc. But in one mission that provoked tabloid hysteria you play as a US Special Forces soldier undercover with terrorists attacking an airport.

Part of this mission means you have to keep your cover, which means not stopping the terrorists from slaughtering hundreds of civilians in an airport. Contrary to the press, you don’t have to shoot folk to keep your cover -- but you aren’t punished for helping the terrorists massacre folk.

It’s pretty realistic to watch, with lots of chaos and screaming going around you while it happens. But the reason the level is there is to show the extremes the character has to go through to keep his cover. You get the same kind of scenarios all the time in 24 -- where terrorists are allowed to carry out attacks ostensibly for the greater good.

The reality is that every now and then the press and politicians need to find some moral outrage to sell papers with, and create false panic - using tried and tested techniques. It’s not unlike the hysteria over “video nasties” in the 70’s, that were frequently banned because they supposedly corrupted people who watched them. This hysteria sometimes overlapped on to mainstream, big budget films -- like Childs Play, because the killers of Jamie Bulger were alleged to have watched the films.

It’s the same kind of madness Michael Moore did Bowling for Columbine about -- the idea that listening to some kind of music, watching a film, or playing a game believed to be obscene can force the user into violent acts in the real world. It’s not that dissimilar from the mephedrone hysteria -- that taking mephedrone automatically leads to death, while ignoring many of the victims were also taking methadone etc. So the fact Jon Venables and Robert Thompson had no moral compass when they were brought up, and abused by violent parents would have had no impact on their horrific crime, it was watching a horror movie that warped them.  Or that it’s Marilyn Manson’s fault a school got shot up in a country with more guns than people.

It is probably only a matter of time before some violent attack is reported in the press, with the criminal having Manhunt, GTA or Modern Warfare in his videogame collection, and a demand to crack down on violent games is made.

That said, I don’t think you can be totally uncaring about a games content -- not all games should be whitewashed. There are games you can buy off the internet which simulate the rape of women. The fact that you can actually beat a prostitute to death in GTA probably does fuck up a whole load of young men’s attitudes to women who work in the sex industry. And that there are now videogames being planned based on the current war in Afghanistan does desensitise people to a war that’s causing misery for thousands of Afghans and hundreds of families in the UK. It’s no coincidence the US Army has released an official videogame as a recruitment tool, they are clearly trying to sell the idea to young guys that joining the army is just like a really realistic shoot em up.

But the facts are, all these attitudes are just as much in movies, music, politics and the press as they are in videogames. The reason games are attacked is because they are played by an overwhelmingly young section of the population, who don’t vote or own houses etc. This makes them the perfect whipping boy for MP’s who want to get votes and or publicity, and also newspapers who want to increase their circulation by generating some false moral outrage.

It makes me so sick, I just wish I could pull this kind of shit on them ALL DAY,