We were delighted today to be invited to include Kaya's "I'm In Control" at Make The March - a website dedicated to protest art which has been made specifically for tomorrow's big TUC "A Future That Works" march. There's some great artwork to look at - some of it hilarious, some of it dry, some of it very poignant, some of it just plain pissed-off. Please have a look at the site, and don't forget to use the "Like" and "Tweet" buttons below each artwork if you enjoy it. Spread the word! Click on the graphic to visit the site.

This coming Saturday, 20th October, Kaya Mar will be joining the huge TUC "A Future That Works" march in London. Assembling on Victoria Embankment from 11 am and setting off at noon to rally in Hyde Park, this anti-austerity, anti-cuts march will see tens - if not hundreds - of thousands of trade unionists, NHS staff, members of the public, disability rights groups and a huge coalition of activist groups ranging from Right to Work Campaign, False Economy, Coalition of Resistance, UK Uncut, Fuel Poverty Action, Disabled People Against Cuts and many more, protesting against the despised ConDem coalition's punitive "Austerity" cuts to public spending, the sacking of 700,000 public sector workers, workfare schemes, and the evisceration and un-mandated, outrageous privatisation of the NHS.

Keep your eyes open on Saturday for Kaya with his unique oil-on-canvas painting of a naked George Osborne (because as we all know the King Has No Clothes), dancing insanely amongst the mangled wreckage of the UK Economy, which Osborne has driven at high-speed into a lampost with his his inept Car-Crash Economics and his Bullingdon Bully's obsession with punishing the poor, the sick and the disabled,whilst still gripping the steering wheel, arrogantly unwilling to let anyone else take control of economic policy.

Those of you following the day's events on Twitter should use the hashtags #Oct20 and #afuturethatworks.

We're delighted to announce that Kaya's political painting "Cameron and Clegg" - seen here at last year's TUC "March for the Alternative"  demonstration - has joined the permanent collection of the Museum of London.

Opened in 1976 as part of the Barbican Estate, the Museum of London concerns itself primarily with the social history of London and its inhabitants throughout history.

Entry to the museum is free. For more details, visit their website HERE

On Monday, armed with only two large paintings and a thermos flask, Kaya Mar treated Conservative Party Conference delegates outside the International Conference Centre in Birmingham to his unique satirical renditions of David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson.

Painted - as always - naked, because (as we all know) "The King Has No Clothes", the two large paintings caused much delight and laughter from some delegates and many passing Plebs, but caused in others the kind of facial expressions you'd expect from someone if they'd just lost their job, discovered their car had been stolen from the staff car park and eventually got home by public transport to find it had burned to the ground and the insurance policy had lapsed...

The first painting, titled "I'm In Control" shows a naked George Osborne, surrounded by the wreckage of the UK Economy which he has crashed full-speed into a lampost. Osborne dances gleefuly in the wreckage of his Car-Crash Economics, tightly grasping the large steering wheel which has come off in his hands, and Osborne is oblivious to the disaster he has caused. All he cares about is the he is in control.

The second painting, titled "Nemesis: David Cameron's Unshakeable Pain in the Backside" portrays prime minister David Cameron, naked but for a "No. 10" Team GB athlete's singlet, dancing along a glorious post-Olympic road which is lined with trees and giant Olympic torches based on new and old Conservative Party logos. Cameron's attempts to bathe in a Post-Olympic glow are constantly ruined by his arch-rival, London Mayor Boris Johnson, who has manifested as one of Cameron's brotesque buttocks, and is unshakeable.

Later in the day as the well-fed Tories were filing back into the conference centre after their fois gras luncheons, Kaya was graced by the sudden brief appearance of Education Secretary Michael Gove (in a remarkably wrinkled and rather cheap-looking grey suit) who, after drinking in Kaya's imagery of his boss naked, walked off again as quickly as he arrived, wearing a perplexed facial expression that looked for all the world like somebody had just shoved something up his bottom!

See our photo slide-show below and decide for yourself...

As the political row over yesterday's shock announcement that the West Coast Line Franchise tendering process has been found to be riddled with incompetence, critics of the government's reckless pursuit of NHS privatisation without proper oversight or evaluation based on the NHS Risk Register which David Cameron has so far refused point blank to make public, and which is known to sound the alarm very loudly over the government's deeply flawed ideology and method, activists this morning started calling for a complete re-examination.

The West Coast Line ferago has been instantly called an Omnishambles by opposition politicians, and it is in light of this shocking proof of utter recklessness by Cameron's government and the very serious implications that has regarding the competence of the billions of pounds worth of NHS contracts which have been dished out left, right and centre to the serried ranks of Conservative Party donors that we think it appropriate to share with you Kaya Mar's painting "The NHS Crucified as the Vultures Gather", which Kaya will be taking to the Department of Health later today to make his own timely protest.

Photos will follow this evening.

Still bathing in the warm, fuzzy afterglow of his headline-grabbing keynote speech at the Labour Party Conference in Brighton yesterday in which he declared that if Labour won the next election he would use the £4 billion windfall from selling chunks of broadcast airwave fequencies (freed up by switching off our analogue TV signals to allow the development of super-fast 4G networks) to build 100,000 new "affordable" homes, Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls, when pressed by mischeivous journalists, vigorously denied (again) that he had any desire to become party leader.

According to the Huffington Post, Balls is quoted as saying "If I’m honest for you, personally, it doesn’t matter, I actually don’t care, it’s not something which I think about, worry about, care about at all, whether I’m leader or prime minister, it’s not part of my mindset, its not part of my goals.

"If I say to you I rule it out, I don’t think you’d believe me. If I say to you it’s very unlikely, I think that’s totally honest, I don’t care. I don’t give a toss. I really don’t give a toss.”

Many people have immediately chosen to believe that Balls' statement means the complete opposite of what he was claiming, and was a classic piece of Malcom Tucker-esque double-speak, worthy of an episode of "In The Thick of It", and it is this palpably unbalanced relationship between the two men which is captured instinctively by Kaya Mar.

Kaya's satirical painting of Miliband and Balls portrays school football team captain Miliband, clutching his football to lead the team onto the pitch, but actually he is being led and directed by the bigger, more self-assured figure of Ed Balls, whose size and stature dwarfs Miliband.

Carrying on the theme of publicly undermining Ed Miliband before he loses them the next election, elsewhere this week it cannot have been a mere coincidence that Ed Miliband's extremely ambitious older brother David - who lost with very bad grace to his younger brother in the undignified scramble to replace the doomed Gordon Brown in September 2010 - still hates Ed for robbing him of his special 'Tony Blair' moment which he had long presumed would be his by divine right (much to everybody's relief...).

Popping up out of nowhere, in a move clearly intended to further destabilise his younger brother who is struggling to make any kind of a visible mark on his tenure as party leader, David Miliband told journalists about a recent Conservative Party-sponsored poll which declared that three-quarters of the public thought he would be a better leader than Ed is.

Mitt Romney "The Republican Backward-Looking Candidate"

   Kaya Mar's satirical portrait of US Presidential Election candidate MITT ROMNEY, portrays Romney naked and exposed, sitting astride an old, worn-out Republican Elephant. Unfortunately for Romney he is facing in completely the wrong direction, having taken so many U-Turns along the way in his egomaniacal pursuit of ultimate political power that not even he knows which way he should be facing. Ever the perma-tanned grandstanding patriot, Romney grasps what should have been the American Eagle by the throat in a show of steely determination, only to discover it has turned into a large boiled chicken...

   Romney's candidacy was heralded by the belicose, paranoid, racist Tea Party as being without a doubt the best Republican candidate to remove Barak Obama from the White House, and for a few short months the right-wing media - led by Rupert Murdoch's demented offspring, Fox News - created the impression that their wet-dream multi-millionaire elitist candidate was storming the pallisades.  

   Unfortunately Romney's foot keeps on slipping into his mouth... Quickly it was revealed that he, unlike every other candidate, was refusing to make public his tax receipts for several crucial years during which he has frequently claimed he was no longer involved in Bain Capital - a predatory hedge fund founded by Romney. His blank refusal to come clean led to widespread speculation that he was hiding something. Either the tax receipts would show that Romney had paid only a miniscule amount of taxes on his vast income over that period, or else he was illegally shovelling it into offshore tax-havens, went the most popular theories. Others suggested that Romney - a former bishop in the Mormon Church - wanted to hide the amount of "Tithes" he was paying to the church.

   Added to all this has been a series of what can only be described as thinly-veiled attacks on black Americans and Mexican immigrants, who Romney has implied publicly are little more than workshy scroungers living off welfare. In a speech secretly recorded by an activist Romney stated that 47% of Americans paid no Federal taxes. Playing fast and loose with the truth and official statistics, Romney was happy to hint that this 47% were not only blacks and illegal immigrants all living it up on welfare, but that this same figure of 47% coincided with the percentage of voters who were guaranteed to vote for the Democrats.

   What he was very careful not to divulge during his inflammatory speech was that the majority of this statistical 47% are actually retired senior citizens who form the bedrock of the Republican voting base, and who are all living on Social Security pensions and consuming billions of dollars in Medicaid. That figure also includes Mitt Romney himself, as he now seems to have used every slippery trick in the book (and maybe off the books...) to avoid paying his fair share of taxes. The Romney train-wreck continues to hurtle towards the buffers!

   So... as 6th November 2012 looms the Romney campaign is now limping from one self-inflicted disaster to another. A recent popular pastime amongst the Twitterati - using the #MittZingers hashtag - is to publicise the many quite appallingly elitist or ignorant or hypocritical public statements made by Romney. Click HERE to be amazed!



Barack Obama "Praying For A Second Chance, Though the Food Pail is Empty"

   Battered, beleagured, vilified and insulted by the racist right-wing, the incumbent President Barack Obama is portrayed by Kaya Mar naked and vulnerable, on his knees praying to his party members and the American people for a second term of office. With its back to him and casting a baleful, forlorn expression, the Democrat Donkey looks disappointedly at the completely empty food-pail lying on the floor...

   Riding triumphantly into office in 2009 following the disastrous presidency of George Bush Jnr., millions of Americans looked to the first ever black president of the United States to heal the deep, painful wounds created by the Bush Presidency which had overseen the waging of two appalling, illegal wars of aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq which brought the American economy to its knees - an economy which was then all but finished off by the outrageous banking scandals in 2008. On his way out, Bush authorised the infamous "Quantitive Easing" which saw hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayers money simply handed over to the failing, incompetent banks to save them from total collapse, and which seems to have vanished into a black hole and appeared the other side into secret offshore accounts, out of reach of the American Taxman and the law.

   Obama's task was impossible from the outset. The outgoing Republicans had seized control of both the Senate and Congress, and from the very outset of his presidency the Republicans waged a political war of attrition against Obama, openly, purposefully blocking every single attempt he made to wrestle a fairer deal for the American public by way of a scheme for more affordable and fairer Medical Insurance, Medicaid for Senior Citizens and the poor, job-creation schemes with Federal funding for  National Infrastructure Capital Projects. Basically everything President Obama attempted to do in office to help the victims of the Bankers' malfesance has been crippled by the right-wing who, funded by corportions and billionaires, have waged a broad spectrum of constant attacks on Obama's integrity by way of questioning his American citizenship, accusing him of being a secret muslim, conflating Obama's name to imply by way of racist ignorance and islamophobia that he was a sleeper-terrorist sympathiser of both Al Queda's figurehead Osama bin Laden and Iraq's deposed dictator (and former American regional ally and military puppet) Sadam Hussein. Obama has been accused of being a communist, a rabid Socialist, a homosexual, and in many backward Southern States he is reviled by white-supremacists and the deeply ignorant militant evangelicals as simply the hated house-negro with ideas above his station who should be lynched or assassainated.

   Against the sickening, roaring white-noise of this ugly, mentally deranged 24-hour-a-day, 365-day-per-year assault on Obama waged by right-wing radio and TV stations whose mission is to stir up hatred and paranoia by way of lies and distortion, Obama has also disappointed millions of core democrat voters who had convinced themselves that somehow this intelligent, educated, likeable, highly-respected politician would end the foreign wars, bring the troops home, close the infamous Guantanamo Bay military prison, hold former Bush Government officials criminally accountable for torture, roll back the authoritarian police state laws introduced by Bush to spy on every American citizen, and to repair America's shattered reputation abroad.

   Sadly the last four years have been a very rude awakening for these hopeful, moderate Americans as Obama has increased unconstitutional spying on the entire population, has enormously increased the use of drone strikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan, has failed to make any headway over the Israel-Palestine situation, and has failed to save the American middle class from devastating job losses and plunging standards of living.

   From across the Atlantic is seems difficult - if not impossible - to perceive any good that has come out of Obama's presidency, yet there are many, many Americans who recognise that though he seems guilty of eternally trying to appease the Right instead of attacking them,  and he appears to be totally deaf to the many calls of alarm from those deeply concerned that the American Constitution is being ripped apart by the greed of corporations, big oil and defence contractors, he has actually made some significant inroads in job creation where it is most needed.

   Many say quite fairly that had another Republican been elected in 2009 the situation would have been much, much worse for poor Americans as the Republicans seem hell-bent on destroying 'Big' government in order that the richest amongst them should end up paying no taxes whatsoever, and let the poorest of the population fall into hopeless destitution, lest a single cent of a billionaire's money be spent on alleviating the misery of some of the 50 million Americans - including 17 million children - who regularly go hungry

Lord Justice Leveson delivers his Inquiry report:
To coincide with Lord Leveson finally publishing his report into the outrageous unethical, criminal behaviour of newspaper magnate Ruprt Murdoch's reporters and editors on the News of the World, The Sun and the Metropolitan Police (to name but a few) and the disgraceful collusion of government ministers, Kaya Mar is preparing his satirical comment on the entire sordid affair.

Speaking to Kaya he says this new political painting will have to be the largest one he's ever done, since it will feature so many figures who have been prominent over the long course of the Inquiry at the Royal Courts of Justice, including Lord Leveson, Robert Jay QC, David Cameron, Ruprt Murdoch, Jeremy Hunt, Rebekah Brooks, News International, ex-Police Commissioners, waning celebrities and a cast of what could turn into hundreds!

Leveson held the last Media examination in July 2012, and has promised to report on his findings in the Autumn, but as yet no public date has been announced. The second part of the Inquiry, looking into the scale and extent of unlawful or improper conduct within News International, other newspaper media organisations and, presumably the Metropolitan Police (who have not come out of this smelling of roses) will not get under way until the many police investigations are concluded.