I've told you a million times!

Exaggeration, embellishment and caricature add colour to our daily lives and liven up the dullest anecdote. “I just had the best sandwich like, ever!” is most certainly untrue but it harms nobody unless you count it as hammering one more little tack into the stair carpet of self-deception. Step by step, the use of carpet fitting as a metaphor for delusion has to be a stretch by anybody’s reckoning, but that’s what happens when you’re treading on the stairway to hyperbole heaven!

Kids do it all the time. They overstate, amplify and blow out of proportion every minute detail of their insignificant little lives while gorging on entertainment whose very essence is the inflation and intensification of the mundane to make its pixelated worlds appeal to senses dulled to mere reality. Nobody is going to buy a game that is ‘quite good, really’ or watch a movie that is merely ‘true to life’. Why settle for those when you can have an enlarged, overblown, heightened better-than-life, virtual reality?

And why bother with that sandwich at all unless it is truly going to be like, really, you know like the best sandwich like, ever? (While we’re on food, what’s the game with four-cheese pizza? Seriously, all pizza cheese tastes like it fell out of some upholstery; can it be that four types of spongy polymerised whey will somehow improve the experience and not just make it four times more mattressy? What is WRONG with you people?)

The news channels, presumably in order to compete with YouTube and its imitators engage in the sensationalisation of the ordinary. Thus fraudulent benefits claimants are misreported as master criminals, driveway disputes turn neighbours into inhuman creatures sent from the devil himself and every woman who has ever appeared in a soap opera becomes some sort of supermodel goddess the instant she gets pregnant. Is it too much to ask for the simple, unalloyed truth for once, instead of the romanticised, embroidered, larger-than-life world of the news and save words like ‘crisis’ and ‘horror’ for really horrible crises?

Thankfully, our political masters don’t engage in such shenanigans. They would never corrupt the bland machinery of government with fabricated and massaged statistics, or cooked-up accounting, would they? The incumbents or their opposition would surely never misquote, misrepresent or overestimate the effects of policy, or attribute to their counterparts motives that don’t really exist. Surely they would never dare? Nobody would fall for that, would they? Oh…

Thus profit is not just labelled as greed, but as ‘evil’. A reasonable desire to control the borders is called ‘disgusting racism’ by plants in the BBC Question Time audience and reporting of old, sick people dying of old age and sickness is popped in the pigeonhole marked ‘genocide’. Increasing welfare spending is decried as ‘slashing’ and 75p a week extra on the state pension is described as generous.

How in the world do they think they’re going to get away with it? Who in the world would believe the hype? Surely people can see through the bullshit and make up their own minds? Oh, hang on, that’s what quotas, dumbing down and diversity training are all about, isn’t it? So, by a process of pummelling and kneading and criminalising rational thought the population is brainwashing into compliant, docile, ‘somatose’ clones who clap and cheer and shout and jeer to order and accept outrageously overblown claims as accurate and reasonable.

Official! The biggest aspidistra in the world!

Exaggeration is absolutely the worst thing ever. I mean, exaggeration is like the biggest threat to our way of life we have ever faced. Exaggeration must be at least a million times worse than, say, Hiroshima! Now Excuse, I have this amazing sandwich to attend to…

Tweet Like a Lefty

There is a meme on Twitter under the hashtag #tweetlikealefty (or sometimes #leftylogic) in which people distil into less than 140 characters the essence, nay the very quintessence of left-wing lunacy of the two plus two equals five variety. For the left, belief is far more important than observable truth and anyway, if you tell yourself it is true it becomes the truth, doesn't it? The political equivalent of closing your eyes tight and wishing very hard.

To give you a flavour of how the delusions of the left are seen by people with a sense of humour – something denied the hard left, unless they are cracking Thatcher jokes - here are a few I stole from my screen this morning:

“If in doubt, ban it, delete it, censor it.”

“If you're winning the argument and backing your opinion up with hard facts, I can shout racist and then I win.”

“I support freedom of speech, but some opinions shouldn’t be tolerated in our society.”

“Tax TaxTax Tax Tax Tax Tax Tax Tax Tax Tax Tax Tax Tax Tax Tax Tax Tax Tax Tax Tax Tax Tax Tax Tax Tax Tax Tax Tax Tax Tax!”

“We will stand up for the working man, by forcibly taking his wages to fund those who can't be bothered.”

“Private schools should be abolished; as soon as my children have finished theirs.”

You get the idea. My contribution to the cause this morning was, “Your opinion is that of a closed mind. My intransigence despite the facts is debate.”

I have firmly held views, why shouldn't I? After all, I've been around for a while now. And in that time, in the face of evidence, I have been persuaded to alter some of them and discard others. I like to believe – as we all do - that my opinions are the result of experience, enquiry and examination and are therefore pragmatic and not sentimental. But I have seen over the years how leaders have been able to subvert human belief by that simple act of propaganda - repetition. Say a palpable untruth often enough and it becomes dull and inoffensive. Carry on saying it and you create a grudging acceptance that it may be a valid point of view and then it is but one small step to setting it in stone as an immutable truth.

A new buzzword for the bewildered white minority is the Arabic word “Taqiyya” which describes a systematic concealing of the truth of Islam, said to have originated to avoid persecution but nevertheless now meant in a pejorative sense. In the nineteen eighties I encountered lies every day in Libya, or rather, broken promises. “Mumkin bukra inshallah” was a casual lie concealing the real truth which was, “Maybe tomorrow if I remember and if I can be bothered.”

It is of course not confined to the Arab world.  Spain has its “mañana” and Cornwall has its “dreckly” but both come served with a knowing twinkle and sense of self-deprecation and certainly with no malice aforethought. Taqiyya is a tad more sinister and the Left has its very own form of taqiyya which is to adopt a stance and hold firmly to it regardless of the facts, or of anybody else’s freedom of speech, then in the face of unassailable logical defeat to simply ignore the argument and resort to name-calling.

  

You will learn to love Big Brother

If you don’t believe what they believe you are wrong. If you don't believe what they believe you are a kaffir. And yes, I use the anglicised version of that Arabic word precisely because some find it offensive. I guess that makes me a racist.

Not at the dinner table...

They say you should never discuss politics and religion at the dinner table. But when it all comes down to it, what else is there? Simple matters such as the price of eggs or whether you prefer pink or blue can be broken down into plain indisputable facts or simple preferences, about both of which it is difficult to sustain a good old shouting match. But veer onto things that do actually matter and you get a stern ticking off from the hostess. (Not the host, note; he’s champing at the bit just like you, but he doesn’t get to leave at the end.)

Maybe the real reason is that if we are allowed free rein we’ll pretty much stumble onto an awful truth. Politics and religion are one and the same. There, I've said it; but think about it. Power and wealth, big imposing buildings, self-important people organised into hierarchies and spouting doctrine against which we must not dissent on pain of death… it’s all there. Voltaire is credited with saying that if God did not exist it would be necessary for man to invent him, which is to say man invented ‘Him’.

There seems to be a remnant herd impulse in the human animal; a need to follow something. Into the vacuum left by the recession of religion flows ideology and if that ideology isn’t ‘religious’ enough it has to up its game or else give way to another flavour of theocracy. Oh, hello Islam… I wondered when you’d be dropping by, but no thanks, we’re not talking about you, specifically tonight. Not round MY dinner table. (When I say ‘dinner table’ I mean, of course, Twitter.)

One hot topic round the table of late is the never-far-from-view, almost-taboo subject of capital punishment, or if you are against it, the more emotive ‘death penalty’. It’s emotive because, really, that’s the only hard objection to it. To those who believe in the absolute sanctity of human life the idea of taking ‘a life for a life’ is monstrous and those who advocate it are beyond redemption.  It is convenient to forget that this is exactly what we do in war and in a much more indiscriminate fashion than we would ever sanction for judicial purposes.

But we are more hypocritical than that. Our big brains give us a consciousness which we mistake for a soul and in so doing place ourselves on a higher plane than other herding animals, which we then deliberately breed and slaughter for food, inventing religious consent for our actions. Those animals we don’t eat we summarily eradicate if we believe they pose a threat to our safety, whether that threat is ever realised or not. All things bright and beautiful?

People die of their own stupidity and that of others every day. People die of ignorance and simple neglect in their millions around the globe. But very few people maliciously and individually set out to take other lives, either as the prime motive or as a consequence of other desired ends. Of those who are intent on causing misery, unacceptably vast resources are poured into catching, convicting and keeping them and attempting rehabilitation, which investment is often - more often than is acceptable - repaid by re-offending.

Yes you can set rigid burdens of proof and yes you can offer opportunities for reform, what civilised society wouldn't? But when the cost of caging an animal hell-bent on savage intent falls increasingly heavy you are really paying not for justice, but to salve your own conscience and adopt the mantle of the righteous. It isn’t about revenge, although vengeance is a perfectly acceptable and normal instinct. We lock people up after all and some suffer greatly as a result - it’s about whether it is right to take a life to save others.

Religion bangs on about the sanctity of human life - so do politicians when it suits them – but such sanctity exists not as a natural law, merely as a human construct. Indeed, when it suits or has suited them many religions and most political regimes have sanctioned execution, often on a grand scale, for the supposed ‘greater good’ and killing in self-defence may be a cause of regret but is rarely grounds for censure. Such killing, often under a hot-blooded and therefore irrational temperament is nevertheless excused, while a calculated decision by calm men to remove from society a great danger is met with horror and revulsion.

 Some of the objections to judicial execution are practical – the wrong man, the possibility of creating martyrs, the impossibility of appeal – but all of these can be guarded against. Very occasionally, a mistake may be made, but there is rarely smoke without fire and we should be pragmatic about that. Nothing is perfect. But most of the objections have a visceral, rather than an intellectual, basis. The instinctive, but irrational thought “What would that say about ME?” based on belief and not on truth.

And once again – as in all matters of faith - the believers are quick to anger, quick to blame and point the outraged finger of revulsion at those of us rational enough to be pragmatic about the meaning of life. Being savaged by a believer is much like being savaged by a socialist. They have no argument other than their faith and so revert to personal insult very early on, usually an attack on the state of development of one’s social and intellectual capabilities and their worth to humanity, oh the irony. Their final sally is normally to shake their head and profess to pity us.

We need to talk about pest control

In other words there is no real argument against the use of the death penalty other than that it offends some primitive and nebulous sense of worth, of godliness, which brings us back to Voltaire. Having a blind adherence to principles we conveniently ignore when it comes to other species, indeed to other nationalities when convenient, strikes me not as the behaviour of a higher intelligence but rather as one that is still hitched to our ancient, evolutionary origins in the herd. Isn’t it about time we were better than that?

Damned if we do, damned if we don't.

Syria? Almost the only thing I know with absolute certainty about Syria is that it will all go horribly wrong. Why wouldn't it? Rarely do foreign policy favours bring the reciprocation we hope for and whereas we might have all sorts of plans to get involved my guess is nobody has even an inkling of how long it will last, what the outcome will be and how in the world we will get out. One thing is guaranteed though; we will make yet more enemies and it’s odds-on that yet more British troops will end up dead.

And it will all be the fault of middle-aged white men. Again. I now heartily agree with all the clamour for quotas – let’s get women, representatives of all races and religions and at least tokens of every special interest group into government and let THEM fuck it all up, because fuck it up they will. The country is screwed because the politically correct pursuit of diversity at all costs means we no longer have any cultural norms and in the absence of norms anything goes. But we middle-aged white men will still get all the blame… for everything.

Multiculturalism, radical feminism, hate crime legislation, the relentless pursuit of nebulous equality by any means, welfare state dependency, child centred education, uncontrolled borders, monocultural ghettoes, hands-off policing, marginalisation of British identity and banning of conkers are all labelled as ‘progressive’, while every white middle-aged bloke questioning the wisdom of such polices is called reactionary… as if that was ‘a bad thing’.

I wouldn't mind so much if we were just ignored but, not only do we get the blame we also come in for ridicule against which we have no defence because it’s all our fault and we have to suck it up: The black guys point and laugh ‘cause we got no style. We can say stuff like that because, obviously, we are all racists as well. According to Lee Jasper and Diane Abbott only white people can be racist – but they surely don’t include women in that because women have the ickle babies and are therefore sacrosanct.

The feminists blame us for their having this onerous responsibility and form themselves into Angry Vagina militias (Thank you, Twitter’s @IvorGrumble)  and when Nick Ross so much as mentions the R- word he is vilified because as a white male he has absolutely no right to have an opinion on this or any other matter involving a woman’s body. I can almost imagine a future when all women adopt the burka not because of our terrible male oppression but as a reaction against it. We are monsters after all, aren't we?

But, see, here we are in reality quietly getting on with stuff. Not getting in anybody’s way, not doing anything to actually upset anybody – if anything, going out of our way to integrate into society and not cause offence by our mere existence. The bad stuff is not the fault of ALL of us; that is down to the actions of an unrepresentative radical minority who pass laws, control policy and drive the economy. We’d say sorry if it made any difference. But it won’t make any difference, will it?

 Yes, yes, the white middle-age, middle class blokes are whinging again; it's practical all you ever hear from this entitlement-obsessed, marginalised ethnic group. But all we really want is to be allowed to fit in and quietly get on with making stuff work. We aren't the bad guys here, but if we’re upsetting so many people in so many ways we must be doing something right. So fuck it,we may as well wade into Syria because if we don't that will be our fault as well.

Keep calm and watch out for wasps.

What are you doing here? Seriously, it's a bank holiday AND the weather is looking, if not good, at least half decent for once. Okay it's going to get cloudy later, if it isn't already. And temperatures are hardly record-breaking for the time of year. And it is going to be rather windy in places... but if you keep everything lashed down, keep a woolly pully to hand and drink heavily it might just turn out okay. You might want to have an umbrella handy.

That, after all is The British Way. No fuss, no flowers; keep calm and make tea. Oh and if you want to be dangerously continental you could have one of those barbecue affairs, or a picnic. Or you could get out the family jalopy and drive to a nice lay-by off the dual carriageway and sit there in the car, in your anoraks, looking at the traffic while eating meat paste sandwiches and drinking stewed tea from a flask. Or you could take the kids to a theme park and rediscover the forgotten British art of queuing... and tutting.

Or, read a book, potter in the garden, chat to the neighbours over the garden fence, tut about the youth of today and say "mustn't grumble" as much as you like. Because the one thing that we need to be doing right now, more important than any amount of setting up task forces, 'opening dialogues', 'learning lessons' and not 'listening', is just getting along, living and letting live and setting the right examples. Being British, in other words.

Fire up the barbie - dial 999

What you will NOT have read about today in the news is that several billion children did not die of starvation, nor were they sexually abused or trafficked in any way. News that thousands of war memorials around the UK have not been desecrated has been slow to filter through to the mainstream media and you will  see no reports whatsoever about the literally millions of cars that remain unstolen on British roads.

So enjoy your bank holiday, take it easy and try not to get too angry about anything. Oh and watch out for wasps.

Missing in Inaction

There is something oddly wrong with British politics. There has been something horribly wrong for many years now, and for most of that time it was Europe, or Socialism, or Socialism in Europe, but it’s all gone eerily quiet all of a sudden. Since 2010 the Labour Party’s policies, all of them, have been missing in action but now, it seems, the shadow cabinet has also quietly slipped away.

Apart from a feeble and insincere ‘one nation’ statement on Twitter over the Woolwich murder nobody has heard a peep from Ed Milibland, the man who apparently still pretends to be their leader. Ed-the-Balls has been in hiding since his dearly longed-for triple-dip recession never materialised and even the strident feminist tones of Harriet Harperson have been missing from the airwaves.

A few days ago Andy Burnham made one feeble attempt on Radio Four to blame seventy years of compounded mismanagement of the NHS entirely on the coalition’s last three years, but he may as well have been reading from the same script he dreamt up in 2011 when he was moved to health having fucked up education and drawn flak from Mary Beard.

I miss them. It’s all well and good declaring open season on David Cameron and jeering from the sidelines as more proper Tories defect to UKIP from his New Red Conservative Party. It’s all well and good occasionally asking, “Who IS Nick Clegg and what is he for?” but without the principal comedy ensemble that is Her Majesty’s Opposition politics is just no fun any more – they couldn’t even be bothered to field a participant anybody had heard of for Question Time last night.

Neither have we heard any frankly hilarious calls for a general summer strike from the likes of Labour’s puppeteers, the gang of three: Len McCluskey, Mark Serwotka and Bob Crow. At the moment they and the Labour Party are missing a golden opportunity to have a right old go while the Conservatives are clawing their eyes out over same sex marriage. It's an open goal fer Chrissakes! What on earth is going on?

We need a public inquiry but there’s nobody to call for one.

Somewhere, there is a secluded happy valley, a sunny Shangri-La, where Shergar, Glen Miller, Lord Lucan, Amelia Earhart and the ship’s company of the Marie Celeste have been joined by the washed up survivors of a sunken political movement. Should we inform anybody? If you see them, don't call anybody.

Bring back the Nasty Tories

Over my lifetime my country has changed. In many ways the changes have been advancements; the average person in Britain has access, assumed almost as a right, to technology that would have been literally incredible when I was a child. And standards of living – for those who choose not to waste their resources on destructive and selfish hedonism – have risen to unimagined heights, decade on decade.

Notwithstanding our current economic malaise, our strong economy has allowed all this to happen, but our laziness and misguided philanthropy has also prompted decline. We have presided over a decline in basic education even as money has poured into that pit. And we have seen a decline in standards of personal responsibility, excused as liberalism and supported by a legal system so costly and dense and intertwined that it is used as often against us as for us. The more we spend on liberty, the less liberty we get.

In the guise of freedoms and rights our deliberate failure to judge and appropriately guide or punish has created a society that has never been more fragmented. For every misguided pressure group or belief that we not only tolerate but appear to actively encourage we lose a piece of our Britishness in return. We lose the sense of identity and the security in that identity that once gave us an enviable character. And part of that character was the confidence to be proudly British. And with that confidence a quiet tolerance of others was a given.

Now though, our tolerance is not assumed, it is legislated for. We are given pejorative titles such as racist, sexist, homophobe, xenophobe – not to appeal to our sense of fair play but to criminalise us for our rational instincts and reasonable objections. And this deliberate erosion of the liberties of the many in favour of the few has been a deliberate act of successive governments trading on their ‘caring’ credentials. The younger generation,brought up to see all this legal frippery as normal, know no other life and so cannot understand the frustrations of those who see what has been given away. But they will have to live with the consequences.

My Britain is almost lost. It will probably finally expire with my generation and the horrible imposed illiberalism of the various strands of socialist thinking will prevail. It will make this a far worse place to live, indeed it already has. Even today, as he talks tough on terror, David Cameron is still vociferously supporting the policies of surrender to ideology proven to have caused damage wherever it has been tried.

Death on the streets - something must change

He believes he is de-toxifying the Tories, but that won’t bring back the Woolwich soldier, will it? Savagery, in broad daylight, in England’s capital city? Socialism has no answer to the damage it has wrought other than to apply more socialism. If Cameron really wants a future for the Conservative Party (and by extension for the country) he has to stop talking tough and start acting tough. To get Britain back from the brink we need Conservatives to be out and proud. Bring back the Nasty Tory.

Keep It Simple, Stupid!

The great con trick pulled by experts the world over is to make their expertise appear beyond the wit of mortal man. Thus shamans the world over claim a direct connection with a world inaccessible to the herd, religious leaders proclaim themselves the keepers and protectors of the sacred word and alternative healers publish mumbo-jumbo masquerading as science and let the placebo effect do the rest.

All it takes is to fool enough of the people enough of the time and your place in history, society or the head of the paying-in queue at the bank is assured. The first objection you have to overcome is your own; there is none so zealous as the flag bearer for the cause and once you've brainwashed yourself the rest is relatively easy. Of course, KNOWINGLY misleading people is called fraud, but once you've convinced yourself of your mission it is simply called delusion. Fraud is a crime, but delusion is legal.

Luckily, in the real world our wackier delusions are often brought down to earth by a heavy dose of common sense. If I tried to borrow money from a bank for a business idea I hadn’t properly analysed I’d get short shrift. If I tried to convince listeners that I’d received the word of god at three o’clock on a Saturday morning following a night of excess I’d rightly be met with scepticism. And if I concocted a miracle cure in my shed and tried to flog it in recycled jam jars at the car boot sale I somehow doubt I’d be retiring any time soon.

But package any of those ideas up in the right way and you have the latest stock market darling, a whole new faith and GlaxoSmithKline. Research (by experts) shows that if you say it often enough, commission studies to arrive at a pre-ordained conclusion and get the price right, people will buy any old shit. Which brings us to politics.

Politics has nothing whatsoever to do with producing useful outcomes for ordinary people. It isn’t about the best way to run the country and it certainly has nothing to do with whatever the electorate says it wants. The alchemy of snakes like Mandelson is to gently tell you that what you believe isn’t the right thing to believe and that he’ll be gentle with you as he makes you nicer. The prestidigitation of a Cameron is to talk tough medicine for all, while privately bending over for big business and special friends.

No wonder people are disengaged with politics. If you buy a can of fly spray that doesn't kill flies you get your money back. If you buy a vacuum cleaner that sucks – or doesn't  as it were – you exchange it for another one. And if you order a blue car you don’t expect to get a red one delivered. Yet in politics, if it doesn't work or it’s feeble or you don’t get what you voted for, the Sale of Goods Act just doesn't apply.

Here in real life if you don’t like cheese you don’t buy cheese, if you can’t afford to heat your house you don’t pay to heat your neighbour’s house and you don’t continue to pay for membership of a club you never go to, that your dad signed you up for forty years ago. It’s that simple, yet the power of the political shaman lies in making it complicated.

Here’s a classic example. Everybody is banging on about tax. The tax code in the UK is so complicated nobody – literally NOBODY – can fully understand or explain it. So, the common sense answer is to simplify it. Do the sums, work out how much we need to collect, decide who is going to pay how much of it and there you go, done. In a household we call it a budget. The politicians’ response? Make it more complicated still… Oh and bung some more Europe into the package.

Walking - as designed by politicians

The reason people are drawn to Nigel Farage is because he doesn't seem to offer false hopes and he doesn’t appear to offer all the answers. Whether the reality ever lives up to the hope is up to the future to reveal but maybe political naivety is exactly what we need right now. He doesn’t play the political game because unlike the others maybe he’s seen through the smoke and mirrors and realised something many of us suspect. We’re told there are no easy answers? Of course there are! Politics – it’s only hard because they make it hard. 

Vanishing with a Poof!

Charges that David Cameron is out of touch with his party and by extension the party’s supporters are getting pretty hard to ignore. Half his parliamentary party opposed him on Europe and now they’ve gone on to further scar him over the gay marriage business. Ooh, he should scratch their eyes out!

To demonstrate just how relevant he is to the Conservative Party at large he is battling Swivel-eyed Loonygate by insisting he’s not sneering at the party faithful, yet simultaneously doing a deal with the devil Labour to pass a bill which has direct relevance to a tiny minority and urgency to almost nobody. To the 98% of the population, who are not gay – and that’s based on ONS findings – whilst equality in the law is undoubtedly important it comes a long way down a very long list of priorities. Is our Nero fiddling while the country burns?

Whatever Peter Tatchell and Stonewall and the militant element of the LGBT community want you to believe it is hardly the case that homosexuals are being horribly persecuted for their orientation and the survey reporting that three-quarters are in favour of single sex marriage is not so much a hearty “Yes!”, rather a “Yeah, whatever” response to what is seen as more irrelevant politicking on the Westminster stage.

There is concern that this out-of-the-blue enthusiasm for the adoption of gay marriage legislation in several EU countries simultaneously is being driven not by the needs of the those directly affected but by some sinister drive towards yet more Euro- conformity. There is a clear logic to the belief that the drive for this legislation is external to Britain but the facts are elusive. I’m not entirely convinced by the Berlinguer Report theory, but to some, this is the source.

Meanwhile, in Oklahoma City a genuine emergency is playing out as ninety-one people died and many were injured and/or trapped in the aftermath of a devastating tornado. As the focus of the world turns to the USA it is a timely reminder that nature has the ability to impose real emergency and real harm genuinely out of the blue.

No natural disaster for David Cameron

 What is happening to the Conservatives is no natural disaster, it is a calamity entirely of human making. The Book of Hosea, in the Hebrew Bible says, "they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind". David Cameron is probably praying for a natural disaster to distract attention from the whirlwind set to engulf him. A big, gay whirlwind coming to suck him off up and spit him out. 

Freaky Clean

So, the long knives are out, it’s a cross party thing, and nobody is immune. For both Conservatives and Labour the creaking of coffin lids is deafening as the Howes and Mandelsons break off their repose in the soil brought from their native land in order to sink their fangs into their own party leaders for purposes most foul. These two are serial offenders; this is normal. It’s the signal that the 2015 election race is on and a reminder that your position in politics is never safe.

Some say this is the price people pay for public office, that every utterance, every false promise and every bit of body language should be pored over by analysts trying to find a chink in your armour. Failing to find weakness in your policy they’ll go for weakness in our character and failing that, it’s your past deeds that have to stand scrutiny. The Tories will be associated for ever with that Bullingdon Boys photo and Ed Balls will never wear a Hitler moustache in jest again.

So how on earth does anybody ever get into politics given that everybody makes mistakes, humans harbour grudges and a voracious press and social media live for nothing if not to spread rumour, gossip and downright lies to please the crowd? UKIP have – quite rightly - come under a deal of scrutiny from opposition activists, gleefully raking up the muck on candidates and looking for any opportunity to expose the slightest past indiscretion as evidence of racism, homophobia and youthful fruitcakery.

But look at the maths, as they say. The Independence Party is attracting people who feel disenfranchised by the status quo in politics. No other party has gained anywhere near the numbers of new recruits and far from selecting candidates from long-serving party members, they are welcoming with open arms anybody willing to give it a go. You don’t get much more grass roots than that. And when you pull up roots you always get some dirt.

Don’t dare put yourself up for selection if any of the following apply: Have you ever been in a police station other than to report a crime? Did you ever owe anybody money? Have you been drunk more than once in your life? Did you ever pass on a rumour without fully investigating its veracity? Have you ever called for rapists/muggers/murderers to be shot? In short, have you, do you or might you ever make a mistake and have you, do you, or might you have an opinion on anything?

It used to be that a secret gay past could signal the end of a political career. Now it’s almost a pre-requisite and infinitely preferable to the undisputable observation that heterosexual relationships are statistically more prevalent. Don’t ever use the word ‘normal’ in reference to sexuality, race relations, religion, childcare, parenting, education, behaviour or any other area where opinions other than a bland acceptance of immutable, universal equality are verboten.

Naturally, the current incumbents of seats on the green benches are squeaky clean. They are raised in political hothouse environments and groomed for office by mentors with agendas of their own and influence to help them on their way. Their profiles are scrubbed and sanitised and any principle which may cause rancour is given a thorough biopsy and if necessary, surgically removed to create a bland, uniform, same-as-the-other-one, identikit, cookie-cutter Member suitable for the Westminster shelf of mediocrity.

Well, fuck that. If I was running a surgent political party, intending to challenge the bland Europhile status quo I’d be posing the following test: Are you thinking of standing for office? Are you squeaky clean? Then you're not suitable. I’d want candidates with beliefs and principles and with fires in their bellies. What’s that? You once expressed an off-colour opinion out loud? Welcome aboard!

Because what would you prefer – a representative who holds your views in contempt, preferring instead to further a bland agenda of appeasement in return for a long career and a secure retirement? Or somebody secure enough and principled enough to learn on the job and get on with it to make your views heard in Parliament? We might just prefer MPs with a past.

Manifest Nonsense

It’s a rum old game of deception, is politics. Spoof, poker and real-life liar dice all rolled into one but with human stakes. The consequences of getting it wrong are enormous, but it’s simpler than you think and no qualifications are needed. Actually, no qualifications would be preferable; in the days when most MPs came from the world of work you at least had some idea of what they stood for, right or wrong.

Now, however, in the age of the professional hot-house grown, mass-produced political clone they all look and sound the same and you have to work much harder to work out whose side they are on. Not, it would seem, the side of the masses who supposedly vote for them but who are kept in the dark by obfuscation, hedge-betting and the wielding of power as if it were just a big game. Line up the population, shoot as many lies at them as you can before being found out, then just press re-start, no harm done.

Just as it is in a holistic healing centre’s interest to keep you on the books and sell you yet another bottle of costly snake oil to complement all the crap you’ve already swallowed, every politician wants you to believe only his side have the magic solution to everybody’s problems. But everybody is of little concern when the battle is no longer fought on the welfare of the many but on the rights of the few.

Why else was the vanishingly small issue of single sex marriage hyped up into a matter of national urgency? It affects so few people in proportionate terms yet raises the blood pressure of some groups in alarming ways. Me? I couldn’t care less so much it hurts, except insofar as being agog at all the fuss. But of course that was the point; stir up a mood and challenge the other fella’s view. SSM had nothing to do with liberty for gays and everything to do with establishing credentials and probing for weakness – an opportunity to use a modern hate crime – homophobia – against the opposition.

Another hate crime – racism – the weapon du jour of the committed Marxist troublemaker, was deployed against one of the least offensive persons in politics, Nigel Farage, in Edinburgh yesterday. In an outstanding display of irony, a baying mob of anti-English, National Socialist, student agitators hurled abuse at him, suggested he fuck himself and tried to tar him with dirt of their own fevered imagination. Mobilised not by principle or by policy, they were nothing more than a hired hate mob. I expect Alex Salmond is delighted at their sterling effort to present the rational argument for a separate Scotland – the English would welcome it after that.

What I smell is simple desperation. The profligacy of pursuing ideological dreams without worrying about paying for them has brought us to the situation where the UK credit cards are all approaching their limits yet some flavours of politician are still pretending all will be well. It’s like carrying on the commute after losing your job and hoping the family and neighbours won’t notice as you spend your days in the library. It doesn’t actually achieve anything and it’s not good enough, is it?

In two years we have to decide which band of fools we want to lead us out of the darkness of the European recession – because most of the rest of the world is quietly getting on with it while we rend our garments in the street. The trouble is, I no longer know what they stand for and I think that’s important when it comes to a vote, don’t you? With just two years to go is it too much to ask that colours are nailed to masts and manifestos are mocked up? Because there are voters out there with no idea where to place their ‘X’.

What THEY think WE don't know...

Running a political party really can’t be too much unlike running a business. You need products that people want, at a price they are prepared to pay and then you need give them the clear reason and opportunity to buy. Oh and you need to keep your costs down too, if you want to profit by your labours, so people want to know what return they will get on their vote. Margaret Hodge can bang on all she likes about corporate responsibility but if I was a political party I’d be looking for a business model a lot more like Google and a lot less like Woolworths.

EU Hokey Cokey

Politics can be confusing. I should know, I've been called a Nazi for some of my fairly mainstream views, yet I have no sympathy for parties like the BNP; as a matter of fact I abhor socialism, which is their underlying ideology. On the other hand I can see that unrestrained freedom has its downsides because I also believe we have a duty to help those unable to help themselves. According to the leftists this means I can’t be a Tory, yet at heart I'm pretty sure I must be.

If I support UKIP that makes me a fruit, apparently, or in the closet, or some such thing. Oh, for certain, wanting to regain control of the UK’s own fortunes absolutely must make me a racist, yet UKIP is the only party that expressly refuses membership to racists, which policy is then said to be biased against those who wake up and change their political allegiance. See? Confusing.

We wake up today to news that some experts are disputing the case made by some other experts for spending vast sums of money we don’t have on HS2, for benefits nobody can quantify and absolutely nobody except potential bidders ever asked for. And yet another bunch of experts are undecided about the state of BP and whether it has yet paid sufficient penance for daring to make so much profit before the Deepwater Horizon incident. In every arena it seems that those who are paid huge sums of money to know about things later turn out to have known fuck-all.

The thing I’m most confused about (I'm not really - the only way is out, but bear with me) and about which nobody really knows is the EU; are we having a referendum or what? And if we do, what is the likely outcome going to be? And will it make any difference, either way, to anything?

Everybody now knows, surely, that Heath took us into the Common Market on the lie that it was a trade agreement and not a massive plan to create a country called Europe. Some even insist that, worse than just a massive lie, the whole arrangement was and remains contrary to the UK constitution and is therefore illegal. But it was the Tories, the most patriotic party, that oversaw the move while Labour, the most natural of EU bedfellows, that wanted us out. Now, the opposite seems to be happening but I’m not so sure.

So, do the Tories want us to be IN or OUT of Europe now? What does the ‘revolt’ by half the Tory backbenchers last night mean, when they voted for an amendment to the Queen’s speech ‘regretting’ that she hadn't mentioned, at least in passing, the humungous white elephant blocking the door to the chamber? And does it make any difference what our supposed elected officials want if the EU says otherwise?

And what, exactly, does Cameron’s proposed Referendum Bill actually mean? I read Dan Hannan’s (as usual, brilliant) telegraph blog about it, but I've forgotten the detail. Does it mean there WILL be a referendum, or there won’t be one, or there’ll only be one if DC gets back in and doesn't ‘forget’ to hold it? Has he finally shot that elusive fox, or has he just given everybody more cause to suspect treachery?

At stake is the prospect of UK independence, or being forever shackled to an institution that can (and does) overturn democracy and rob private bank accounts or impose massive spending increases such as this demand for an extra three-quarters of a billion pounds per year at a time when everybody’s belts are tight. Surely there must be a massive case to demonstrate that the benefits outweigh the costs? Yet there isn’t; there are only hollow words and two decades of unaudited accounts. Running a continent? This lot couldn’t run a corner shop.

But the confusion over Europe doesn't start and end with the Tories. Does anybody know what the increasingly desperate Labour party stand for now? And where are the LibDems with their EU hokey-cokey: in-out, in-out, shake it all about? They say that membership of the EU is low on people’s priorities, way behind jobs, immigration and the economy at large, but that doesn't mean people are actively pro EU. If anything, as the EU affects all of those important issues (and many adversely) it can be shown to be easily the top priority. In my life, which has been anything but parochial, I have met few people in favour, but a clear majority broadly against.

A dangerous game?

So, as the great propaganda machines of state creak into life expect two years of repeatedly and confusingly seeing answers to the following impossible questions.

Is the EU: 

1. great/bad/brilliant/bad/superb/bad? Or is it, 
2. crap/good/shit/good/disastrous/good? 

Which way round is it? What was the question again? Does 'yes' keep us in, or does 'no' get us out? Do we cut the green wire, or the red? Nobody knows, so let’s get the hell out of there before somebody blows the bloody doors off.

Nothing to see here

So, once again the phenomenon of Muslim ‘street grooming’gangs is in the news, this time in Oxford.

Victims repeatedly reported rape or other sexual abuse but not until their abusers were convicted at the Old Bailey did police and social services apologise for failing to respond to their repeated cries for help. More than 50 girls were groomed, tortured, raped and sold to other men for sex around the country. I expect the girls are over the moon at the apologies, don’t you? As I write, they are still mealy-mouthing their cringing words on Radio 4.

The usual public handwringing and empty talk of ‘failure to listen’ and ‘missing opportunities’ and ‘learning lessons’ are offered in place of the action that should have been taken long ago. Abused by their tormentors, neglected by their carers, then let down by their supposed defenders, this is an all-too familiar story. Cue the authorities bending over backwards to pull the usual sleight of hand by refusing to emphasise the cultural origins of the gangs, instead spreading the blame to all men everywhere – anything to avoid being labelled racist. Not good enough, society, not good enough at all.

As I’ve observed before I can handle being called racist by the wilfully ignorant grievance industry; that accusation is fired off so regularly it’s become a devalued term of abuse and even a joke insult now, but change one letter of that descriptor and you can ruin a life. As if to distract from the Islamic flavour, the Met Police were anxious we should know that white men do it too – these white men just happen to be from Eastern Europe.

But there’s a much wider point and one that is obvious to everybody who lives outside the cloistered world of Westminster, university campuses and gated estates. Rampant drug use, rape, assault, sex trafficking, knife crime, torture, begging, theft, vandalism, wilful casual violence - as the population gets larger and more diverse, so does the malignant criminality diversify and increase in frequency. There’s a minor civil war going on out there.

The well-known and applauded British sense of fair play and tolerance was always based on the principle of live and let live. Well, many incoming communities don’t play by those rules. The sex gangs obviously see a fresh crop of naïve, groomable ‘stock’ in which to trade. The beggars, thieves and cheats see rich pickings in our crowded cities. And yet another example of an entire community who doesn't wish to play by our rules is the group euphemistically called ‘travellers’.

We’ve always had Gypsies in the land, but they used to be few in number and although never trusted they did make a habit of, you know, travelling and thus spreading their impact and visibility thinly. Rupert the Bear even had a colourful gypsy family as an exotic and rare group of occasional friends. That much Gypsy we could cope with. But news came in last night that residents’ concerns over the granting of a new permanent ‘travellers’ site in York have been ridden roughshod over and the site is to go ahead.

Don’t say you weren’t warned. Modern day Gypsies have become another form of protected species, yet they don’t return the favour; they don’t live and let live. Even on permanent maintained sites they spread squalor and criminality and impose fear and misery on the communities they blight.

What all these examples have in common is quite simply, in comparison to long-held British standards and ethics, an overwhelming ‘otherness’. They don’t belong, they don’t and won’t fit in and yet those who need never endure their often quite devastating impact insist there is no problem. The Communist determination to disrupt and destroy (yes destroy) our society is almost complete. The kids are indoctrinated to accept any form of subjugation to the will of government and they don’t even see it. In a generation the last of the true British people will die out. I don’t see that as an improvement to the world, but it seems our ‘rulers’ do.

Our leaders - always on the fiddle

Yes, we have always had immigration. Yes we are enriched (don’t you hate that word) by integration and yes, to mix is undoubtedly a good thing, but that’s not what this is. This is an invasion. It is not racist, or xenophobic or any other form of bigotry to set out what is or isn't acceptable behaviour. It is not wrong to seek to restore Britishness to Britain. And it is not wrong to utterly reject the formation and growth of destructive sub-cultures within our shores. Only if we can wrest back control from the appeasement-monkeys in Westminster will we ever have a chance to bring Britain back from the brink.

Skint

I had a long chat to my mother yesterday. In 1972 she went back to work having got the last of four kids (I'm the eldest) safely into what was then called Junior School (We had real schools back then with only the earliest glimmer of the notion of holding everybody back on account of some misguided egalitarian nonsense) She took a job as a representative for the Empire Stores home shopping catalogue company and largely touted their wares to exactly the kind of working class family we were.

She was shocked to discover, lurking in the teeming council estates full of the genuine working class, a new kind of denizen; families who managed to survive entirely without regular work. No, not the lovable Barbaras and Toms of the self-sufficient Good Life model, but the prototypes for the ‘unwaged’ underclass now under the protective custody of the Labour Party and its apologists.

Narrowly avoiding the all-too regular occurrence of the limited-to-140-characters Twitter-spat last night, my interlocutors were demanding I furnish them with examples of the harm done by socialism. Actually they were mostly critical of my apparently wanting to lay the blame at the feet of Karl Marx, which I absolutely wasn’t doing. I was however, suggesting that the origins of the widespread take-up of socialism lay with Marx, Engels and other young Hegelians and the whole class-struggle, means-of-production malarkey.

As it turned out, I didn’t need to point at the many examples of murderous socialist regimes corralled under the various versions and nomenclatures of Communist or Socialist, collectivism, such as those of Soviet Russia, Nazism, North Korea, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia and so on. All I had to do was suggest they watch Channel Four’s new documentary Skint, filmed on a Scunthorpe estate; the real life version of Shameless.

On a small scale there is absolutely no doubt that some form of social collectivism must exist in order to prevent us tearing each other limb from limb. We used to call that ‘the family’ – remember them? You know, where children were brought up in nurturing environments and taught the rules and given aspirations to better themselves while the government’s role was to provide educational and legislative structures to make that possible. But as the scale of government intervention grows, control is lost.

Socialism maybe doesn’t intend to impoverish people but it always does, as opportunistic and resourceful humans adapt to their environment and choose, if regular work is not available or pays too little, the kind of lifestyle seen on Skint. Black marketeering, petty theft, casual acceptance of dangerous drug use and gross, anti-social behaviour all become normalised and accepted modes of living. The answer to the doomed life cycles thus created by the good intentions of big government surely can’t just be more big government. I have a sense, at least, that the coalition knows this, just as Labour desperately tries to ignore it.

The true face of productive Britain

What’s the solution? Short of a brief and deep humane cull, I have no quick answers, but neither do those who seek to rule us. But at least Skint answered one question that has long puzzled Britain’s social philosophers. Much of the programme centred around the unschooled, uncontrolled, fifteen-year-old jailbird-in-waiting, Connor, as he made his mother’s life a misery. If you’re looking for a contender, then I propose Connor as the real c**t in Scunthorpe.

Conspiracy!

There may not yet be need for the national distribution of tinfoil hats and ‘Keep Calm’ public service announcements, but there is something badly wrong at the heart of British politics. Nobody in Parliament quite knows what to do any more and nobody outside quite knows how to vote; just what do the parties stand for? Conan Doyle had Sherlock Holmes say “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

Franciscan friar William of Ockham gave his name to the theory known nowadays as Occam’s razor whereby, among competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected.  Or in modern parlance the least complicated explanation is most likely to be the truth. But to hell with all that theoretical bunkum - everybody loves a good conspiracy theory, don’t they? And both sides have them:

Polemicist gob-for-hire, Owen Jones likes to talk about some odd sort of right wing conspiracy whereby the (Boo!) Nasty Tories seek to permanently subjugate the former working classes, denying them a living wage and forever keeping them down. They hiss and point and stare down their beaky, toff noses while quaffing Champagne and passing legislation to allow their cronies to buy bits of the NHS even while millions die in unstaffed wards. Oh and they closed down t’pits in which the young Owen once dreamed of earning an honest crust. Now he’s reduced to spouting his neo-Marxist waffle at any newspaper willing to pay his fee.

Well, I’ve looked into all this right-wing conspiracy how’s-yer-father and as far as I can see, those with a right-of-centre bent are far too busy making a living to give a toss about keeping the workers down. The only thing they’re bothered about is paying as little tax as the system will allow. One thing that seems actually demonstrable is that in administrations practicing a light touch, almost laissez-faire approach to their economies the role of the state shrinks, as do its costs, as prosperity rises for almost everybody. Because these devious capitalists actually cause jobs! Of course some people can’t be helped, whatever system is in place.

On the other side of things we have the left and oh my, what a lot of devious meddling has been going on since 1848 when Uncle Karl offered up the family recipe  for, er… the destruction of the family, among other things. We get Lenin and Stalin and Mao and all sorts of purges and five-year plans and plots to murder intellectuals before they think about you too cleverly. We get Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and we get Jean Monnet, the architect of the EU, with his plan for a full-on federal European state by stealth, which is going so well that even when countries try to leave they can be told to vote again or are forced to follow economic bail out plans that leave their people starving.

We get Cultural Marxism and Common Purpose and Demos and the Fabians and the Frankfurt School and so on. Every campus is riddled with right-on children wearing Che Guevara tee shirts and dreaming up witty and ungrammatical slogans for placards. We get all sorts of variants on the theme such as Utopian Socialism and Anarcho-Syndicalism and Mutualism and even, oxymoronically enough, Libertarian Socialism. My god, Marx could make a few bob on licensing if he was still about. It’s no wonder his followers can’t run a country - they can’t even agree what flavour of pinko they are. How about, for the chattering classes, Mocha-Marxa-Cappu-Commuccino?

And so to those conspiracy theories: Capitalist conspiracies - for they do exist – always revolve around a few people forming cartels to make big profits, usually by offering something too good to be true and relying on human greed to do the rest, taking advantage of a few thousand gullible mugs. Socialist conspiracies on the other hand involve ambitious, evolved, disconnected Über -brains plotting over many years the means of bringing about the subjugation of hundreds of millions of people to a form of interminable Sisyphean serfdom on the basis that only the schemers know what is best for everybody else. But which is true?

Sherlock's method quickly dismisses the socialist conspiracy as impossible, so where does Occam’s razor guide us? Will people fall for the stealthy, clever-clever socialist plan for the breakdown of society by attacking its traditions and criminalising words and deeds and thought itself, eventually driving everything down to its lowest level in pursuit of an undefined equality in which everybody is too poor to rob? (Labour currently call that ‘One Nation’.) Or is it more likely that some greedy rich bastards try to get richer by exploiting the just-as-greedy poor? Either way it seems we're doomed.

 You know what? Owen must have it right, after all. No matter which way you look at it, Communism is just too bloody complicated and implausible to ever work - all those rules! Now excuse me while I fashion myself a hat...

(PS: You want real conspiracy? Try this: Christopher Booker)

A matter of common sense

When I bought my first house I had to put down a deposit of 50% and the mortgage interest was a whopping 15% per annum, but hey it was bricks and mortar and as anybody would tell you back then there was no finer investment. Owning your own property was one of the ultimate aspirations of the working man, but had been out of the reach of the majority. That was about to change; before long, everybody was at it and the formerly strict rules for borrowing were quickly relaxed.

Aspiration morphed into entitlement and lenders fell over each other to pull ever more risky rabbits from the hat. The earlier lending limits of two-and-a-half times main salary and a sizeable deposit soon became three times joint salary, married or not and later increased to four or even five times and 100%-plus as market values soared. And somewhere in that lot was born the endowment mortgage. Money for nothing. We should have seen the signs.

Every month you only pay off that month’s interest and rely on the endowment portion – no need for you to understand whatever the hell that is - to mature at more than enough to pay off the remaining capital. Hah! Look at those boring idiots being prudent and using repayment mortgages. Hell, we’re off on holiday again, buying a new car, improving our lives and it costs us nothing because it’s property, right? We can keep borrowing against our rising capital value and not only will our endowment pay off the capital debt, there’ll even be a surplus. Bonus!

Except today, people are still trying to get compensation for miss-sold endowment mortgages when the small print was there all along; they have only themselves to blame. Those who prudently stuck with the boring old buy-what-you-can-afford philosophy are slowly paying off that burden. The difference? At the end of the term you own your house outright, while the endowment owners have to borrow still more to make up the shortfall on their expectations.

Sounds familiar? Being in the European Union is like having an endowment mortgage and the slippery snake oil salesman for the project promised us something for nothing.  One of them even said , it can ONLY get better. But nobody ever tells you where this magic ‘better’ is going to come from. It’s like an Ed Miliband ‘policy’, all hollow words and talk of wondrous things in some far off future to conceal the lie that a united Europe is impossible without the costly paper tyranny the unelected in Brussels impose on us all.

British exit from the EU – Brexit – will be like making the switch to a repayment mortgage. It may cost a little more in the short term but in the end we will actually be the proud possessors of a sovereign country. It was never just a common market. Leaving it is just common sense.

The Reason for Treason?

I wasn’t going to write a blog today  - I often don’t at the weekend - but then I found this piece in the Telegraph: Ed Miliband nails his colours to the Euro-mast and says a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union is wrong.

He says Labour will always stand up for the national interest.

So it was in the national interest to bankrupt the country by subsidising already-failed heavy industries, preventing investment in new industries and new jobs? It was in the national interest that for a decade or more under Labour’s influence there was a strike somewhere in the country on any working day you’d care to mention? And it was in the national interest to borrow more than any government in history with no plan to ever pay back the debt, at the same time as deliberately opening our borders, bringing in cheap labour to displace a generation of British workers for a lifetime and create state dependency on hitherto unknown levels?

And his answer to the trouble and strife and socially engineered mischief engendered under Labour’s collusion with the EU is… more Labour and more EU?

“A diverse, multi-ethnic Britain is one of things that makes our country great”, he says. This not long after he admitted Labour got immigration wrong. Just as the miners’ strike devastated Labour's core communities, their version of multiculturalism – monocultural ghettoes – has once again brought blight on their own most steadfast voters. Just how much contempt does labour have for its loyal but confused constituents?

If it were just Labour there would be little to fear. Surely the penny must drop at some point that the left’s pickpocketing ways cannot continue when all the pockets are sewn up? But it’s not just Labour is it? David Cameron may be squirming a little just now, but sure as eggs is eggs he will find a way to renege on his hollow promise to offer a choice. And the whispered referendum pledge by Nick Clegg  just five years ago has also fallen by the wayside.

For forty years I have seen referendums offered and the offers whisked away, replaced by failed negotiations which have always ended up with us further up to our nuts in Europe’s guts. For forty years I have never seen a reasoned justification for ignoring the clear will of that portion of the population who have a strong and informed opinion. What I have seen is Jean Monnet’s plan for a Federal Europe advanced by stealth, year on year.

I can't believe anybody voted for this.

We CAN exit the EU. And we CAN do it with little strife and we CAN take control of our own affairs and it WILL bring us greater prosperity and a sense of nation once again. But first we have to take control of our political classes who, it is quite clear, currently have all their strings pulled by Europe.  To be in the pay of a foreign power, working to undermine the true national interest has a name. And until Tony Blair changed the law, it was a hanging offence. 

A fine line between love and hate

Barrister Barbara Hewson came under some vicious attacks yesterday for her comments that consideration should be given to lowering the age of sexual consent. In a world where every real or imagined transgression toward any individual on any grounds – race, age, sex, religion – is immediately elevated to the same bogeyman status as that of an indiscriminate cannibal serial chainsaw killer, her words prompted the sort of threats that are themselves now actionable in law.

For the crime of exercising her free speech Miss Hewson was pilloried and dragged through the e-streets in the online version of tarring and feathering that 'Trial by Twitter' has become. Because that’s all she did; she spoke some words, based on her knowledge and experience of the issues, to which she is much closer than most.

Her monstrous utterances? In an online article in Spiked magazine, she wrote, “Touching a 17-year-old’s breast, kissing a 13-year-old, or putting one’s hand up a 16-year-old’s skirt, are not remotely comparable to the horrors of the Ealing Vicarage assaults and gang rape, or the Fordingbridge gang rape and murders, both dating from 1986. Anyone suggesting otherwise has lost touch with reality.” She’s a witch! Burn her! But wait. Is the mob about to go and torch a paediatrician all over again?

So, while the idiot Daily Mirror is calling for the voices of experience to be ignored and for the young to decide on an entire nation’s future and Alex Salmond cynically wants the vote to be given to sixteen-year-olds, it appears that lowering the age of responsibility is fine when there’s a political prize to be played for, but it’s hysterical and dangerous nonsense when it’s the opinion of somebody with whom you disagree.

Oh, of course! It’s the socialist incarceration-of-speech agenda all over again. The simple fact is that Lolitas and Humbert Humberts exist and have always existed. Hebephilia is by no means unusual and there are examples throughout history. Indeed as one unhinged caller to Iain Lee’s radio show [audioboo] suggested – bravely, but unhinged, I thought – it might even lie at the roots of some religions. What is different these days is the absolute sense of entitlement to an unfettered life of joy backed up by the claiming culture that exists to brutally extract compensation for the smallest slight, regardless of the disproportionate misery it might cause to those thus pursued.

Me? First and foremost, I am a white, middle-aged bloke, so that automatically means any thoughts I might have either way on this or any associated issue are irrelevant. The socially engineered changes of the last few decades have effectively ruled against the validity of any opinion I might have. So I don’t have one. Don’t assume I have one, don’t assume you know what it is and please address your hate mail towards a target who is more likely to care what you think.

As Douglas Murray recently wrote in the Spectator: “…no difference between men and women can be commented upon without being accused of being ‘sexist’. No difference between transsexuals and non-transsexuals can be referred to without committing ‘transphobia’. No difference between different cultures can be commented upon without being deemed ‘racist’. And no difference between gay people and straight people can be mentioned without being accused of ‘homophobia’. “

And as with sex-crime, so with Europe. For many years debate has been shut down because any dissenting voice has been labelled that of a racist, a fruitcake or a clown. Anybody speaking common sense has been howled down, not for their words – for they are never listened to - but because they have not submitted to the politically acceptable agenda. So it was refreshing last night on BBC’s Question Time to see an audience eager for some responses other than ad hominem insults toward Eurosceptics.

Now that THAT debate is finally out in the open, can somebody direct me to a French, Dutch, German Albanian, hermaphrodite, under-age, nappy-wearing, tall dwarf BDSM brothel? After all, it IS the weekend! 

The Queen’s Debrief

Dear Diary.

Had to open that dreadful place today. All those bloody Eton boys are supposed to be my loyal subjects but, looking around me, I wouldn’t trust a single one of them as a cloakroom attendant so I kept my crown securely on my head the whole time and clung onto my purse with a vice-like grip. I’ve had plenty of practice ever since I caught bloody Charles trying it on – he had his day at Caernarfon and he can sodding-well wait his turn.

I’m an old lady and I shouldn’t have to put up with this charade. Opening Parliament? Don’t be ridiculous, we have a man with a bunch of keys for that. And anyway, it’s not our Parliament any more – the EU will do away with it as soon as they think they can do it without a fuss and sell it off for flats. Maybe I should give Charles a go with the crown after all? It might be his only chance.

Anyway, it was the usual dreary guff: taxes, or was it taxis? I get them confused because I have people for that sort of thing. I read in the papers every now and then about how I pay tax then get paid from tax and then they tax me on it and to be honest it does one’s head in. I was just reading from a script really but I do remember a few bits. It seems like they are planning on putting up the pension, which is a nice. It can be hard to get by, especially heating that place of mine.

But how can they do it? I’m no economist but even I can see that trying to increase pensions at the same time as taking many people out of taxation can only end in tears. Especially as they are talking about spending yet more millions on promoting the European Union. Am I having a flashback? Didn’t they do all that in 1975 when they spent all that money on all that doom-mongering propaganda? That was a depressing time. I do hope that nice Mr Farage can jolly us all up – Philip likes the cut of his jib.

Now, the bit about cutting red tape amused me no end. Amateurs, all of them; if you want to know about cutting red tapes, I’m your girl. I’ve cut more red tape in my life than you will ever know, young Cameron. I’ve cut miles of the stuff and all around the world, too. Philip nodded off during that bit – he’s still a bit miffed that he never gets to use the scissors.

But I had to nudge him awake when we got to the immigration bits; he’s always been very keen on that sort of thing and he’s a bit concerned that this new lot want to curb it. Phil thinks it’s marvellous they’re letting all these people in. After years of flying all over the bloody planet, he says, it will be nice if all he has to do is take a stroll down The Mall to be surrounded by hordes of unintelligible brown people.

  

Hang on to your wallet Phil! 

Anyway, that’s all over for another year. I’m getting a bit tired of it all if I’m honest with myself. Sixty sodding times I've done it. What was it Daddy used to say? Oh yes. F-f-f-fuck this for a game of s-s-s-soldiers!