Today, Jeremy Clarkson – when asked his opinion on the strikes, said: “I would have them all shot”.

He added:

I would take them outside and execute them in front of their families.

I mean how dare they go on strike when they have these gilt-edged pensions that are going to be guaranteed, while the rest of us have to work for a living.

Does that look like comedy?

I have two issues here.

First, the BBC has major voices on the right that regularly opine about national politics (Andrew Neil, Jeremy Clarkson, Nick Robinson) – and those are just the major ones – while there are hardly any similar left-wing figures. The only ones you occasionally get (Armando Ianucci, David Mitchell and Charlie Brooker) – are explicitly non-partisan, mostly anti-establishment in general and pointedly comedians. The first two also voted Libdem (as I did) at the last election, not Labour.

Mehdi Hasan has written about the myth of the left-wing BBC too, and this continuously grates on me. The BBC’s willingness to take Clarkson’s seriously is not balanced at all by an equivalent left personality.

Secondly, this isn’t really a joke – because he repeats with quite a serious face the lie that they have ‘gold plated pensions’. There was nothing funny in it.

It is a naked attempt to push the debate even further to the right, in the way that Republicans in the US keep repeating the lie that Obama is a Marxist-socialist. We take it as a joke because we know it rubbish but it’s a dog-whistle to a whole bunch of people out there who hang on to their ever word. It matters because extreme stuff like this becomes part of the national discourse on the right…whereas if anyone left-wing says anything vaguely controversial they’d be sacked from the BBC.

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PS – Let’s not have Tories complaining about ‘PC gawn mad’ and ‘have a sense of humour’ when they get so uppity and annoyed at even small jokes themselves.

The racist woman from #MyTramExperience has officially become a meme now that she has a website dedicated to her.

But a whole bunch of people on YouTube have also re-mixed her original rant. Here are some of the best ones.

Auto-tune remix

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Re-mixed with the infamous ‘Muslamic Ray Guns’ track

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Racist lady vs Mr T!

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What did she say??

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The obligatory Downfall parody

Another video of a woman having a loud racist rant (at some Arab men I think) on a train from London to Manchester was uploaded to YouTube yesterday.

via @gift_of_the_fab

The Sun has jumped on this video today too, reporting:

She jabs her finger at the victim and unleashes a string of obscenities, while other passengers beg her to stop.

The new footage emerged as a woman appeared in court after allegedly hurling racist taunts on a tram in Croydon, South London.

In the latest attack, on a London to Manchester train, the drunk, dark-haired white woman repeatedly yells: “You’re in my country now, talk my language. Don’t ******* talk your ****, talk my language. You ****, ****.” Her face contorted in rage, she mimics a Middle Eastern accent, adding: “Don’t look at me like I’m a ****.”

Is there a virus going around?

If you happen to be in the London area this week, Platform, Art Not Oil and Liberate Tate are launching a new publication, ‘Not if but when – Culture Beyond Oil’ on the evening of Tuesday 29 November.

The publication features art work that people have made in response to oil companies and their impacts, as well as a series of articles examining the issues in greater detail.

Like the title of the publication states, it’s not a question of if, but when oil-sponsorship becomes socially unacceptable, in the same way that tobacco sponsorship did a few decades back.

In the last two years, art-interventionists Liberate Tate have been doing a great job of creatively bringing this tension to the surface through a series of high impact, direct action performances in gallery spaces that have propelled the issue into the mainstream.

If you accept the need to draw some sort of line about what is and what isn’t ethically acceptable, then we need to renegotiate exactly where thNose lines are in light of our awareness of the role that oil companies are playing in dragging us to the edge of climate catastrophe.

There’s a growing sense in the cultural sector of this being the case. Apart from letters signed by hundreds of people in the arts Liberate Tate and Platform are sending round a petition calling on Nick Serota to end the relationship with BP.

There’s been a great response to it so far, but we’re still hoping to get a few thousand more signatures on to it before we present it to the Tate board. Click here to sign it, and please share it with other people who you think might be interested.

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Follow ‘End oil sponsorship of the arts’ on facebook, and @platformlondon and @liberatetate on twitter, to stay up to date with this campaign.

Chances are you’ve been looking forward to George Osborne’s 2011 Autumn Statement even less than he has, so this year we thought we’d make it a little more interesting.

The New Economics Foundation have pulled together a list of words and phrases that might just crop up in his annual defence of government economic policy.

Get ready to score them off from 12.30pm this afternoon! Also see the #osbornebingo hashtag on Twitter.