There are many differing opinions of L.A.D. and our objectives, not all of which are complimentary or printable but let us assure you now, we remain committed to undemocracy of the highest level and all the benefits that brings.  Democracy does not work and we will continue to expose the lies and inefficiency of the Northern Ireland super council at Stormont.

That aside, L.A.D. were at a loss for words (only briefly) last night, as UKIP's only elected representative in Are Wee Country, Henry Reilly, fired this tweet off.

UKIP has recently announced that Henry Reilly will be their candidate in Northern Ireland for next year's European Parliament Election.  From his tweets, he would appear to be trying to woo a very small section of the electorate quite why anyone of sound mind would vote for this candidate is a mystery.  L.A.D. would question whether or not UKIP are aware of their candidate's behaviour?

They say no publicity is bad publicity and if that's the case, here we have a one-man PR dynamo.  We wonder what the electorate of Northern Ireland will make of Reilly and his bizarre, ill-conceived bollocks.

Conall McDebit

Conall McDevitt fell on his ceremonial sword this week after mounting pressure over payments to his wife's company and also a payment he received from his former employer.  Given the belligerence of other MLAs over similar indiscretions, L.A.D. can only assume there is something more to this story to warrant (by Great British Northern Ireland (lack of) standards) this sort of extreme action.  How about Conor Murphy's time at Regional Development?  Not exactly scandal free.  Peter Robinson's questionable property dealings anyone?  Lord Laird is of course, a beacon for high morals and then there's the daddy of scandal, Red Sky.

Rather than Nelson McCausland doing the honourable thing, he was allowed to make a lengthy oratory before the Social Development committee, during which Gregory Campbell thought the most important issue was whether or not the minister had come before the committee voluntarily or not.  No worries Gregory eh?  Perhaps Jim Allister's move onto the committee will make things a whole lot less cosy, while giving him something to concentrate on other than his normal Jurassic politics.

Much has been made of our esteemed MLAs expenses and employment habits but while those who bother to declare such things claim they are doing nothing wrong legally, how does it stand morally?  Perhaps if it was one or two here and there, it could go unnoticed, but the employment of family members is widespread and within the DUP, it's rife.

It isn't hard to find the information but it does take a bit of digging to get all the facts.  If that sort of thing should interest you, it can be found HERE.  However, L.A.D. has done a quick breakdown of the figures in case you're too lazy to read the stuff yourself.

As of the last update in July 2013, the figures are really encouraging for those seeking work, especially if you know an MLA.  A small number of the positions declared have since been terminated but what's a couple of jabs between you and us?

44 MLAs currently employ a relative, a colleagues relative or have procured services from a relative.  The worst offenders are Britishphile, Jonathan Bell who employs his wife and two of the Robinson clan, and Adrian McQuillan whose sister-in-law, aunt and George Robinson's nephew are all employed.

Jonathan Bell. A very dear friend of the Robinson Family

Irish Nationalist Shin Fayne IRA Roman Catholics (INSFIRARC) only figure once, Fra McCann employing the niece of Paul and Alex Maskey.  However, before the moral high ground is claimed, it should be noted that INSFIRARC MLAs only take the industrial wage, the rest going to the party.  It is entirely possible that family are employed by the party and as such, are indirectly paid for by INSFIRARC MLAs.

Given top L.A.D. fan and supporter of Flegger rights, Judge Jimbo Allister is a one man band, maybe it's unfair to say that 100% of his party employs a family member.

Here's a breakdown to make things a little easier to look at.

* Although UKIP isn't really a party, we've included it so we're not seen to be excluding the far right.

For reasons of simplicity, these figures don't include other interests such as rental properties, directorships, council roles and the like.  We also haven't included the tribe of nomadic faeries employed by the Green's Steven Agnew as faeries are not bound by normal EU employment law.

L.A.D are the defenders of undemocracy and we feel that not enough opportunities are being given to friends and family of MLAs.  Surely there is room for almost all MLAs to employ at least one member of family.  We don't care about what them INSFIRARC ones do of course.

Thanks to Newton Emerson for this article in the Sunday Times yesterday.

By Newton Emerson

It is hardly as serious as the Arab Spring but the chaos of the past year in Northern Ireland has also been an internet phenomenon. The first flag protests last December were organised online, without involvement from political parties or paramilitaries, and brought thousands out onto the streets. Some of those early organisers have since faced charges for incitement. Others are now forging careers in what passes for loyalist politics.

While the police and the authorities dithered, the first reaction against the protests also coalesced online. A Twitter hashtag, #flegs, appeared almost at once, it's misspelling a mockery of the protestors' accents and education. Commuters, business owners and ordinary members of the public used Twitter to pour out their frustration at the road blocking mobs.

By early January, the social-media network was being used to organise a more positive fightback. The hashtags #backinbelfast and #takebackthecity were created by Belfast residents and adopted by Belfast city council in a campaign to support shops, restaurants and bars. The hashtags were emblazoned across official leaflets and television ads and were printed on the back of bar-staff uniforms.

Ultimately it was a courageous but shallow gesture. Attempts to organise counter-demonstrations via the hashtags received huge media coverage but attracted only miniscule crowds, revealing the internet's tendency to group people into echo chambers. In this case, Belfast's journalists did not realise that they had been over-connected to a small group of liberals like themselves.

The same cannot be said for the real online wonder of the year. Loyalists Against Democracy (LAD), a satirical Facebook page, took it's name from a loyalist banner at the first flag protest which read: "Democracy doesn't work".

Few internet users in Northern Ireland, whatever social media chamber they are boxed into, can have escaped LAD's output. Scarcely a week passes without something from the site going viral. One of LAD's spoof music videos was viewed 100,000 times within days, which is remarkable in a region of 1.8m people. Visual jokes are routinely shared thousands of times, to hundreds of people each time, on Facebook alone.

The mainstay of the site, giving all its jokes their jag, is surveillance and ridicule of loyalist online activity. Bigoted, inane and illiterate loyalist rantings are dredged up and dissected. The emerging loyalist victim mentality is forensically debunked, with stories on loyalist websites shown to be false or deliberately faked. LAD's parody of the loyalist writing style is now a running joke across the web, with "respect are culture" a particularly cutting example.

There is evidence that loyalists are stung as a result. Journalists have begun to notice loyalist leaders complaining bitterly about the laughter they and "their people" are enduring. The journalists themselves might reasonably ask if Northern Ireland's real public discourse is passing them by.

LAD is difficult to convey in print, as it would be on radio or television. It is real time, multimedia, interactive and uniquely adapted to this internet era. Producing it requires a core team of six, plus hundreds of more supplying jokes and Photoshopped pictures, or just surfing in search of egregious loyalist postings. None of these people are paid, and the site could never earn it's creators an income. Under a barrage of loyalist complaints, Facebook occasionally takes the page down, only for it to reappear under another "respect are culture" misspelling, such as Loyalists Against Demacracy, and return to it's original popularity. So even the mighty new-media corporation of Facebook has lost it's gatekeeper function.

How can other media cover this, let alone complement it? And that is only the technical barrier. LAD poses an editorial challenge to the mainstream media that goes beyond its post-watershed humour or the tricky implication that one side in Northern Ireland is worse than the other. LAD pillories loyalists for their stupidity, drunkenness, appearance and general underclass lifestyles in a way that is considered socially unacceptable. LAD makes this charicature all the more problematic by proving it to be true and of fundamental importance. It matters that those causing disorder over "culture" are totally uncultured, reflexively violent and seething with gormless hatred. However, to say so commits the terrible crime of snobbery which, ever since the Good Friday Agreement, seems to be the only crime you can commit in Northern Ireland.

There is a centre-left abhorrence in the media against anything that smacks of laughing at the poor, although it takes a special kind of middle-class idiot to equate flag protestors with everyone on less than the living wage. Before LAD, only broadcaster Stephen Nolan had put its targets before a general audience, but he has always been careful to accord them balance and respect. What if they plainly deserve neither?

Ironically, this centre-left squeamishness can best be seen in nationalism's response to what is, by default, a nationalist-leaning website. There is a perceptible nationalist unease about LAD, or at least a guilt about enjoying it, and this runs deeper than the fear of being seen as a snob.

Nationalism subscribes to a trite class analysis of loyalism epitomised by the late David Ervine, leader of the UVF-linked Progressive Unionist Party. His tale of working-class Protestants exploited by unionist grandees and British securocrats  got loyalists off the hook by flattering the nationalist narrative. Holding loyalists responsible for their own words and deeds blows this cosy convenience out of the water. Far from being fellow victims across the divide, loyalists stand exposed as vicious instigators of mayhem from the grassroots up, leading unionism and the authorities by the nose. 

LAD is pro-police, and PSNI officers of my acquaintance are greatly amused by it, which speaks volumes about how perceptions of authority in Northern Ireland are shifting. That shift is confounding unionist "leaders" as they play the old game of tagging spinelessly along behind the angriest elements in their community.

In previous years, the bulk of the unionist electorate would not have seen this game so clearly. It was obscured by media limitations and the great Troubles cult of respectability, which left unionists struggling to picture their leaders rolling around in the gutter.

This year, a new awareness of what loyalism is has seeped into public consciousness, just as unionist politicians line up behind it. To the extent that LAD can claim credit, it is the most intriguing use of satire in Northern Ireland's history.

Imagine how surprised and indeed honoured the tireless volunteers at L.A.D. headquarters were when we received an invitation for one of us to attend an audience with loyalism's premier author, philosopher, strategist and media darling, Jamie Bryson!  Admittedly, it was not a direct invite, but issued via the secretary of the Donaghadee Playschool who are, we're told, handling Bryson's PR.

 Undaunted, and filled with pride, L.A.D. held a draw to see who would be the one lucky enough to meet with the great Bryson himself.  After much bickering, a little fisticuffs and some thinly veiled threats, big Ramsden 'Brick' Johnston was selected as our roving reporter and this is his interview with the man hissel.

Somewhere with caravans

I arrive at the holiday village just north of Donaghadee and I'm shown to an unremarkable mobile home by a spotty young lad with a nervous look.  After giving a convoluted knock on the door of the caravan, the door is opened and I'm met by a boy with bony features, a mess of blonde hair and the look of divvilment in his eyes.  Thus begins my audience with Jamie Bryson, King Fleg himself.  Once inside, Bryson returns to sit cross-legged among a pile of brightly coloured plastic toys strewn in one corner.  A burly looking fella sits silently on a stool in the corner behind me.

RJ: So, Jamie, I have to say that I'm delighted for to get the chance to speak to you.

Bryson appears engrossed with some Duplo bricks at this point but the burly fella grunts something unintelligible from the corner and Bryson stops playing and looks at me.

JB: Eh?  Whadidyousay?

Bryson comfortable in his home from home

RJ: It's great to meet you wee lad.

JB: Oh aye, well, you know I'm very familiar with the work of L.A.D. and I like the way you make loyalism look like the future for the United Kingdom of Northern Ireland and Great Britain.  I've stole some of your jokes too.  Hope you don't mind?

RJ: Err, no Jamie.  Knock yersel out there.  If you don't mind me asking, what's with all the toys?  Thought you would be a bit, you know... beyond that sort of thing.

JB: Ah these (Bryson swings his arm across the spread of toys)?  No, not toys you know.  They're ideas.  All colour coded ideas.  The red ones represent fleg ideas.  The blue ones are Pradesan civil rights ideas. The yellow ones are for marching and flutes and the red ones are for flegs.  Not sure what the other colours are called but.

RJ: That's green, that's whi... oh forget it.  You said red twice there.

JB: Did I?  Right.  Then the second lot represent political ideas like voting and Stormount and voting and stuff.

RJ: That's what I thought.  So you see yourself as a leader of loyalists.  What do you think qualifies you as such over like, say...  Winkie Irvine or Willie Frazer?

JB: Ehhhh, not sure who that first lad is but Willie Frazer is a great pal of mine and he's easy led.  I can pretty much get him to do all the stupid stuff while I concentrate on the important work of leading the Pradisan people to Stormount.  You see, I've writ a book or two and I know what I'm talking about when it comes to my direct line to God and being in touch with civil rights.  Plus I'm the only one with politics experience, having standed for election in 2011 and I even got 167 votes and that eh.  See I was born in 1990 leek and I missed all the shit, can I say shit, so I want to get a flavour of what the shit was all about even though that all them posh folk with jabs and that don't want any more shit.

RJ: I can see why you're such an inspiration to loyal Pradisans of the union, such as myself and the other volunteers of L.A.D.  Have you ever thought about running a chip shap?

JB: Is that like having a career like a politician?

RJ: Aye, pretty much the same thing to be honest.  What about this hunger strike thing?  Anything you'd like to set straight with fellow L.A.D.?  I mean there's a lot of differing stories about this.

JB: Stop right there.  Let me tell you this.  I was on a hunger strike and no doubt about it!  My normal diet consists of coco pops for breakfast, a Kinder Bueno for play time along with a bag of Tayto, spaghetti hoops and toast for lunch washed down with some chacklet milk, mebbys a couple of packets of wine gums in the afternoon then maw makes me whatever I fancy for my tea.  Usually fish fingers, chips and beans because that's my favourite like.  If I'm good and finish it all, I get a bowl of ice cream with sprinkles.  I like to end the day with a couple of jammie dodgers and a glass of nice cold milk before bed.

Now, I have a very high metabolism like a mouse see, which means I have to eat lots or I freeze to death, even in summer and that.  That means missing more than two meals for me is a hunger strike.  5 hours is a hunger strike.  It was a close thing for me.  The screws knew I didn't like curry so they deliberately made sure that was the only thing available because they're bastards and were trying to make me look stupid.

RJ: Glad you could clear that up for us all.  That makes us all the more proud of your achievements then.  What do you plan next, given your bail conditions?

JB: I was thinking of running a mobile disco or something leek.  One of the guys in prison says there's load of money to be made and you don't even need a big record collection.  Had tae look up what records are and that because they don't make them anymore do they.

Either that or something where I can stay out of the public eye.  I'm a bit fed up of all the publicity I've been getting lately.

RJ: So no firm plans then Jamie.  How about your prolific use of social media, do you think people take you seriously?

JB: To be honest Ramsden, I couldn't give a shit, they're all just #keyboardwarriors.  At the end of the day, they can say whatever they want but they're still just #keyboardwarriors and we'll see who is talking the sense come election time.  I predict landslide victories across the province of Northern Ireland and Great Britain and ye's will see I was right all along and that the Pradisan loyalist unionist people really are God's people and we will create a state of Ulster for Ulster people and Pradisans and loyalists and that.

RJ: I see ye've been blabbering on about horses a lot on the aul twitter and thon.  Are you planning on marrying one yerself and just testing the water or something?  I don't get it. The L.A.D. don't get it.  We need an explanation Jamie.
JB: Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.  This horse is all mine.

Jamie advocates cross-species love. I think

RJ: Clear something up for me here Jamie.  What exactly is it that we're meant to want?

JB: What?  Who wants?  I want some sweeties.

RJ: Not sure I fo...

JB: SWEETIES!  I want sweeties!  Gimme gimme gimme sweeties!

(at this point Bryson becomes agitated and incoherent so I decide it's best to leave)

Well fellow L.A.D., there you have it.  I'm not sure what we can take from that interview.  

Is anything any clearer?  We fear not.  There is only one solution.

Camp Twaddell must go on!  NO SURRENDER

 

(For legal reasons we should point out this is an imaginary interview, much like Bryson's sense of importance or relevance)