News has just reached me that film maker Ray Gosling has been arrested on suspicion of murder. It may seem an odd thing to say of a murder suspect, but I do hope that he is okay. He has seemed fragile in the past, in his wonderful films about his ongoing money problems. But he has always championed the ordinary, the downtrodden and the wronged.

Anyway, here is a very British slice of the kind of work that makes his maudlin, cantakerous self so intriguing and worth watching.

With the campaign for the General Election already heating up it is no surprise to see Britain and Britishness come to the fore as the main and fringe parties prepare for what looks like a May election, which would also coincide with some council and Mayoral elections.

Foremost among the glib slogans from the right is ‘broken Britain’, a catch all put down of the UK and its inhabitants first used by Shock Jocks and newspaper columnists. As was the way with the former, the facts trotted out by those on the right of politics are often misread, misrepresented or just plain wrong. What those on the right usually fail to grasp is that the generational malaise they represent is often a result of the Conservative policies of the 1980s. One only has to glance back at the likes of Nick Davies’ Dark Heart to see how lack of work, loss of industry, the sale of council housing and rampant privatisation turned our estates into lands of despair. Meanwhile, Labour seem happy to tinker at the edges of the immigration debate by (perhaps having read We’re British, Innit) adding lessons in queuing to the Life in the UK Citizenship Test process.

Over at the British National Party, the leadership have no been forced to lead the party into a vote to allow ‘non-white’ members. This, naturally, has given the party the chance to find a tame Sikh member, who has a serious grudge against Muslims. Though the party that started out as the brainchild of goosestepping, fascist uniform wearing John Tyndall has obviously not changed its spots. In a reflection of the National Socialist Party’s approach to the media, the party’s security staff violently ejected a Times reporter from a meeting this weekend. His crime? Writing for a newspaper that contained some things that the BNP leadership did not agree with. So much for free speech.