Comic-Con

Scotland is to rig the vote, sorry, lower the voting age, to allow young pups to distort participate in next year’s independence ballot. If that smacks of Scottish Nationalist desperation then how do you feel about the European Union spending taxpayers’ money to indoctrinate the very young indeed? Yes, the EU is sending multilingual propaganda colouring-in books to infants everywhere. Don’t come bleating to me when your ten-year old dobs you in to the authorities and you spend five years in a gulag learning to love Big Brother.

Well, two can play at that game. I hereby present my own version of the Euro Comic translated into just one language – the correct one – and invite you to disseminate it far and wide. We may yet wake up one day in a green and pleasant land, free to be British again, although I’m not holding my breath.

Page 1 and the story so far... Mr & Mrs MEP have to run the gamut of protesters bleating on about useless wind turbines. Do these people not understand that they have to register before 1830 on Monday evening to get their full day's allowance? It takes a good few hours sleep on the gravy train Eurostar to even get to Strasbourg, never mind all those demands on their time.

When they get there,there is much work to be done. For a start they have to book dinner at a swanky restaurant commensurate with their status, then have a relaxing evening before the challenging and ever-hectic Tuesday schedule begins... around midday. There are many palms to be greased and many favours to return.

Life is not all rosy; some of the expenses and allowances have to be tracked down. It's not like they hand them to you on a plate - it's more of a suitcase stashed with money. And suitcases can be hard to lug around Strasbourg all day, so once Mr & Mrs MEP have signed in they must take a free limousine ride back to their apartment where they have to count it all up and then account for every penny they are unable to hide. Those EU budgets don't audit themselves you know!

And then suddenly - almost as if they've done no work at all - it's Friday morning and time to go home. What a gruelling life Mr & Mrs MEP have, supervising the porters lugging their heavy suitcases through the open diplomatic channels and into a waiting Swiss bank account. But first they have an important mission to complete at the Parliament building.

I know what I want to be when I grow up! 

Spending our way out?

So, the spending review concluded that, in a nutshell, we need to review our spending. What else could it find?

Like an errant child extending a student loan to pay for frivolities, as any immature adult with new-found powers to borrow and spend naturally will, New Labour racked up the spending during its youth and now, struggling to find gainful employment, it gripes and moans as ‘the olds’ have to be parsimonious to avoid the bailiff. “No more boom and bust!” puffed their chancellor, while laying the ground for the biggest bust we ever did see.

You can jail all the bankers you like but it won’t bring the money back – it was recklessly lent to those who couldn’t repay it and fed fuel to an unsustainable boom. You can cut back on welfare, which expanded to ever more unaffordable and shameful levels under Labour, discouraging work and suppressing wages in an effort to buy voters by putting everybody on state life support. But you can’t just borrow your way out of debt. Nobody lends to a loser; see how this works yet, Labour?

The opposition’s rhetoric on borrowing to invest sounds attractive to the same infantile minds that always vote for them – those who struggle to cope with the simple realities of life and those who would eagerly exploit them. But it amounts to little more than a monetary perpetual motion machine, appearing to work just so long as somebody is injecting top-ups along the way. The goose can only lay the golden eggs if you feed it. Labour running the economy is a bit like relying on wind turbines to power a modern society – unproven, unreliable, ideologically driven, costly and ultimately doomed to failure and the scrap yard (probably a German one).

But they are right about one thing. It is human nature to hoard and those with the means to do so will naturally pass on their gains to their descendants, who will then get a start higher up the ladder and with less effort be able to increase their own wealth. Better education, established contacts, passed-on property, familial investment savvy, freedom from early debt; all of these are advantages conferred on the offspring of the successful and unavailable to those outside their circle.

While ‘the poor’ start with nothing and few are ever able to rise above that state, the rich undeniably get richer. Of course they do and they choose, in the main, to associate with those similarly blessed. But enviously and punitively removing their incentives to do so will only result in capital flight and then everybody gets poorer. Solve that conundrum without driving away talent or removing incentives for entrepreneurialism and you just may have a redistributive policy that works. Until that epiphany occurs The Eds simply cannot be trusted with the purse strings; it would be like letting your teenager run the household.

Labour's Economic Policy

The coalition might be struggling to put together the national omelette but at least they are honest about the difficulties and resolved enough to carry on. Labour would borrow, buy far more expensive, ready-made, powdered omelette mix and pretend to themselves that no eggs had been broken.

Going for a Tramp

I genuinely do not give a fig about the welfare of the sub-human pests who seek to invade our shores, despoil our towns and make large with our diminishing resources. I don’t care that they come from somewhere with less, where they lead hopeless lives in squalid conditions and resort to sub-human behaviour to survive. I am unmoved by the plight of children, who did not ask to be born, struggling to come to terms with a world that doesn’t want them. I want them gone and I really don’t care how that is achieved.

If all the world’s resources were spread equally amongst all the world’s human population then everybody would be significantly less well off than what is considered to be poor in the UK today. Give it a week, a month maybe and some would have more than others. Give it a year and we would have people living off landfill while others fortified the perimeters of their mansions. That is the way of our opportunistic, selfish species. It just is.

The kindest thing we could do for the vast majority of humans who live as little more than animals is leave them to it. Let their natural disasters control their populations and accept we can’t help everybody. Otherwise, as you see in the case of the Romanian gypsies cleared from Barnet today, like vermin they will colonise new ground and bring their breeding-for-survival lifestyles with them.

Looking at the pictures I don’t feel pity, I feel anger. Anger that they manage to get into the country at all. Anger that it takes seemingly forever to remove them. Anger that our supposed leaders plead impotence in the face of Brussels diktat. How much squalor, disease and crime is too much? Rather a lot, it would seem – we appear to have an insatiable appetite for imported misery.

There is still an offence of vagrancy, but we let our own population get out of control to the extent that it became largely unenforceable and unjust. There was once a workhouse system, seen as a last resort, but it was eventually deemed unusually cruel. We used to transport our undesirables. Now it seems, Europe is transporting its undesirables to us. Where does it stop?

Loveable Romany rascals!

Now, please excuse me, as I am off to do my bit, my patriotic duty. I’m going for a tramp in the woods. 

No Laughing Matter?

Like an annoying mosquito in a darkened room the first thing you notice is the annoying, persistent whine. You swat it away, but it comes back, an irritant with no other purpose than to pester. Eventually it goes away but not before it’s inflicted at least a modicum of self-satisfied corrective commentary. Twitter’s good like that.

My current annoying insect has been buzzing around, telling me off for daring to deploy sardonic humour against the pernicious evils of our world – socialism, the bloated welfare state, multiculturalism, islam (with a lower case ‘i’) “Why you so mean?” he say, “Why you no likey?” I made him Chinese... because it's funnier and easier to parody in a brutish, racist manner... because I am such a despicable person.

“Would you make fun of The Queen?” he asked, “Would you make fun of your Christian neighbours?” Of course, I replied (but not before I wondered how he knew my neighbours). I’m assuming he’s quite young – the national socialist experiment of the last few decades has mounted a concerted assault against one of the planks of our national character – but he could easily be one of the beardy-weirdy, lentil-knitting, bean-munching fart machines that started it all. “Go back to Russia!” we’d have said in the nineteen sixties, but he’s quite likely to be an entirely home-grown humourless malcontent; the product of the concerted battle against Albion.

The legendary British sense of humour has got us through all manner of strife and disaster and in the playgrounds of old (before they were sold off) you quickly learned that to be rattled was just asking for it. Sticks and stones, we learned and then learned that to say it out loud would attract more scorn. But the rules are all very easy. Nothing, but nothing, is off-limits, so long as you are first prepared to laugh at yourself. So, I’m a fat, balding, greying unreconstructed product of patriotism and toil – the sort of lumpen, working class stock that trots off to die in wars to protect people I will never know. I don’t expect the world to stay the same, but if we can’t deploy one of our most potent non-lethal weapons without recrimination then what was the point?

A typically despicable assault on islam.

Yet still funny - courtesy Daily Mail

 So yes, I reserve my right to take the piss, take the rise, make fun of, jeer at, heckle, name-call, mimic, goad, barrack and generally mock anything I bloody well like. And if it is too much for your delicate, politically correct, indoctrinated, mollycoddled sensibilities you can either grow a pair or fuck the fuck off. Or, you can sit there with your knees drawn up to your chest, rocking away and humming and wishing the whole nasty world would go away.

Beds in Sheds

Admiral of the Fleet Sir Caspar John was advanced to Knight Grand Cross of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath in 1960 and served as First Sea Lord from 1960 until his retirement in 1963.  Mention his name to any Royal Naval officer, however, and it will evoke the memory of soporific sessions in the theatre and lecture hall at Britannia Royal Naval College named in his memory. Caspar John Hall was normally referred to as CJH, or for tired trainees grabbing an opportunistic forty winks, the Zed Shed. (The lights go down and two-hundred sleepy heads begin to nod... it’s almost like a drill.)

Meanwhile, today in Slough a military-style airborne endeavour has been in operation for some time to root out its disproportionate share of literal zed sheds. On Nick Ferrari’s morning radio show this ongoing story produced plenty of angry responses. People sleeping in sheds is a long-term problem in Slough as in many places elsewhere in the UK with exploitation of hordes of often unregistered and uncounted denizens. This sort of barbarous arrangement is so far removed from traditional, civilised, British behaviour that it must surely be illegal to draw attention to it.

So, bollocks to that. The people of Slough have been aware of literally thousands of illegal and/or exploited immigrants, living in secret and in a squalor that probably reminds them of home. These people contribute nothing to British society yet place an enormous burden on services for which others pay. But years of reporting such alien transgressions by people with unacceptable and repulsive white skin has been met by a system that strenuously denies there is a problem. Back in the cold war days, Americans used to refer to reds under the bed. Now here in Britain we have the reds encouraging beds in sheds.

There is an entire industry devoted to denying the problems that multiculturalism has brought to these shores, formerly so robustly defended by Caspar John and his Jolly Tars. Were it possible, Hearts of Oak would be breaking asunder in their watery graves. Whatever happened to our identity and our collective security? How have we become so low that we dare not prosecute our own laws for anxious fear of offending people who have no such compunction in our direction?

"Come friendly bombs and rain on Slough"

But there is good news, the system is fighting back and while we can’t remove those who should not be here and those who would cause us harm, who openly deride our society and exploit our tolerance and would happily see us all dead, at least the full force of the law has been brought to bear on the evil white Australian, Trenton Oldfield, jailed and now being deported for disrupting the boat race. Abu Qatada must be laughing his cock off.

Ghosts in the Machine

In search of inspiration after finding the news full, yet again, of child abuse, rape, sexual assault, homosexual assault, kiddie porn, more rape and yet more child abuse, last night I retired to my hotel room and tuned in to Radio Four. On the news, more of the above... then suddenly it’s 8pm and time for The Moral Maze, a usually excellent, in-depth discussion and a weekly treat. Except the discussion was about, yes you guessed it, porn on the Internet. I wondered what their take would be. As expected it is the apocalypse which will destroy our world.

Not wars, not famine, not catastrophic weather events, nor genocide, disease, plagues or pestilence then? The human race, it seems, is determined to destroy itself and if can’t do it by the traditional, bloody massacre method then maybe we can just exploit each other and masturbate ourselves into extinction. Best get in a stockpile of Kleenex. What a depressing species we are, as it is revealed that a third of the resources of the greatest ever boon to human communication is dedicated to the pursuit of Percy Filth.

But just in time, a solution to save the day. According to a Google ‘futurist’ in about 30 years, humans will be able to upload their entire minds to computers and become digitally immortal and in time we may even be able to replace our frail bodies with machinery.

Unless we end up making machines that can make machines to make more machines in their image this might be the solution to world population levels. Let’s fix it and breed no more, living an eternal life as ghosts in the ether.

Trying to imagine the memory size and processing speed of a computer capable of storing an entire human brain, I realise that we have whole sink estate populations whose combined identities could be uploaded into a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. And we could probably get the average politician onto an Amstrad, which means we will be able to rail against the politics, not of soundbites, but of gigabytes.

Striving for equality will be a forgotten ideal as, just as in our current terrestrial life there will be clear winners and losers – and the poorest losers will just be disconnected. Problem solved. Those who can afford it will baggsy the best platforms available and spend billions to snap up super-fast chips with unlimited instantaneous access to the power of the World Wide Web, with treble back up and cloud immortality.

Lower down the scale the new, digitised middle classes will occupy cut-price storage provided by warehousing facilities, backing themselves up on the rent-a-cloud and forever striving to maintain this precarious existence and avoid eviction to a memory stick in a skip until such time as their arrears are settled.

And then, of course, there will be the black market. For a few bucks you could get yourself loaded onto the control chip from an old fridge or toaster. For mobility some crafty hacker with a sense of irony might manage to commandeer a Sinclair C5 and roam the deserted streets looking for a charge. But for the rest, until real bodies become available you’ll compete for the best available avatars; some will be able to afford to become the Aztec warriors of their fantasies while others will end up as badly drawn caricatures of themselves. Or stick men.

The Honourable Member for Thames Ditton

And of course, in this virtual world we won’t need food. We won’t need houses and warmth and clothing; we will find everything we need on the virtual grid. The world will be at our electronic neuron-tips and all the collected wisdom of the ages will be at our command. Humanity ascended to the omnipotence of gods! But, knowing the human race and its drives, we’ll probably just end up surfing porn and wanking ourselves into oblivion

Meteoro-lol-ogy

I don’t rely on weather forecasts and I rarely watch them. As a former meteorologist in the good old Andrew* I can read a synoptic chart at a glance, make my own mind up for the day ahead and take an umbrella if appropriate. Also, it really doesn’t matter a great deal unless I’m going out paragliding because whatever the wide-area forecast, the micro-meteorology of a particular hill site may be quite different from the general pattern. Otherwise I am quite sanguine about the fact that however disappointing the weather, I can’t do anything to change it, so I may as well just take what comes.

Friends (yes I do have a couple) often wonder that I can be so blasé but it’s simple, really. And anyway, why make rocket science out of a fairly straightforward process? Here’s how you put a daily forecast together:

Step 1: Look out of the window. Really, always look out of the window. Whatever it’s doing right now, that’s where your forecast starts.

Step2: Check out the latest surface analysis (that weather chart thingy) and see what’s on the way – a front will likely bring cloud and rain and change the airmass. So all you do is work out when it’s going to get here and describe the progression of change for your forecast period.

Step 3: Reduce the information down to Wind + Weather + Visibility and there you go. (Check out the Shipping Forecast – that’s all they give you – WWV – region by region.)

Step 4: Remember you’re only the messenger, not the Messiah – whatever the weather, you didn’t make it happen, you're not a naughty boy and it ain’t your fault!

I’ve always felt sorry for poor old Michael Fish after ‘that hurricane’. The poor fella was doing his best and by and large the forecast was pretty accurate. The difference between a Violent Storm (64-73 mph) and a Hurricane (74+ mph) is technically only one mile per hour but that single steadfast proclamation "Don't worry," has stayed with him for twenty-five years and might have destroyed a lesser man. Talk about defining a man by his mistakes...

But was that the point at which we no longer took at face value the forecasts from our formerly revered Met Office? In recent years ‘barbecue summers’ have turned to crap, an expected ‘mild winter’ became the coldest on record for fifty years and last year, the wettest since records began, started with a hosepipe ban. (Oh and we’re supposedly in the middle of a heat wave right now. Meh.)

All of which preamble gets me to the pointlessness of the Met Office’s climate change huddle this week. Lots of hand-wringing about something they can’t change. If they’re not careful they’re in danger of looking like a right bunch of Cnuts. Nobody has ever managed to accurately forecast the weather more than two weeks ahead, let alone months or years and the entire Climate Change Industry can’t even agree on what has actually happened in the past.

But the Met Office is missing a trick. From my Met Man days I know that nobody actually listens to the forecasts properly anyway, even if their lives may depend on it. Predict rain in the morning and by ten o’clock you’ll get complaints about the deluge they weren’t expecting until tea time. Forecast a wet Saturday afternoon and come Monday you’re practically guaranteed to have an angry Squadron Commander ranting that you personally ruined his garden party.

Nobody minded about the destructive tornado.

They were still laughing at Michael Fish's pullover!

So, if they’re not going to even remember what you forecast and you’ll get blamed for it being the wrong sort of hail, even if you called it exactly right, you may as well make your performances memorable for something else. I suggest TV Weatherfolk acquire other skills such as juggling, stand-up comedy, wearing ridiculous outfits or swimsuit modelling. So when they’re taking the piss because you dropped all the balls, or a nipple popped out, at least they’re not impugning your ability to guess the weather.

(*Andrew = Royal Navy)

It's The Law

Nobody who has read 1984 can fail to be awed by Orwell’s prescience and to many readers of a centre right political persuasion his chillingly wrought world of grey, stalking horror is already with us in the form of Newspeak, Doublethink and Big Brother himself. Orwellian has become an accepted adjective and scarcely a day goes by without some columnist describing our society thus. Possibly the most sinister modern manifestation of Ingsoc is the willingness of the young to readily denounce others to the state on some trumped-up charge of bigotry, free speech being secondary these days to the eradication of any form of upset. (Unless, of course, you belong to certain promoted species of the congenitally thin-skinned.)

But while all eyes have been on the evolution of Airstrip One, another seer of equal perspicacity has passed quietly into history, although his observations are as true, if not truer than Orwell’s. While modern day managers will be well acquainted with The Dilbert Principle, those of an earlier vintage will remember with a happy sigh, the insights of one Cyril NorthcoteParkinson. I have regularly cited Parkinson’s Law since I first became aware of its existence. Imagine then, my delight that Radio Four last night devoted a delicious half hour to revisiting this seminal work. (Go on, iPlayer it; you won’t regret it.)

First published in 1955, Parkinson’s Law states, “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” How very true – we all recognise the laxity of production once a deadline is removed – I’m doing it now, being distracted by the cornucopia of the Internet while I’m supposed to be writing to my self-imposed daily deadline. But Cyril also saw so much more besides and in a world where your worth is measured by your busy-ness and bustle and bluster, rather than your actual productivity his arch words are more applicable than ever.

Parkinson said:

“In politics people give you what they think you deserve and deny you what they think you want.”

“The man who is denied the opportunity of taking decisions of importance begins to regard as important the decisions he is allowed to take.”

“The smaller the function, the greater the management.” And “Time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.“

He recognised the futility of allowing governments to govern, yet the equally frustrating futility of allowing the people to exercise democracy. He saw that people mistake activity for action and job titles for importance and that such mistakes are an inevitable part of the human condition. More academic tomes seek to give us ever deeper (and ever more costly) insights into our psyche yet despite the millions of man hours devoted to revealing humanity none have come even close to such succinct searing indictments as the bureaucratic imperative, “An official wants to multiply subordinates,  not rivals”

In a week in which The TaxPayers’ Alliance has published its latest Bumper Book of Government Waste identifying £120bn of worthless spending it might do us all good to revisit Cyril’s simple dissection of the truth of bureaucracy and the plethora of waste it inevitably produces. If every government department would man-up and recognise these truths we would have many fewer and leaner government departments. The deficit could be cut in no time.

Battsby's Bumper Book 

of Government

If I was running the show I’d have Cyril Parkinson at one hand and William of Ockham at the other, but sadly (or possibly thankfully) the world is not yet ready for our efficient ministrations. Much as I’d prefer not to piss on your chips, one thing is certain, although it’s a quote by neither man, “Whoever you vote for, the bloody government will always get in.”

A Great Honour?

So Baldrick, played by the rarely funny, often morosely left-wing Tony Robinson, whose only other notable TV outings were in Who Dares Wins in the mid-eighties and Time Team – Sunday teatime telly - gets knighted. Meanwhile Rowan Atkinson, whose face would be instantly recognised by millions across the planet, only gets a CBE. If Blackadder ever makes a comeback the erstwhile serpent-noir should appear in a tee-shirt bearing the words, “My servant went to Buckingham Palace and all I got was this lousy medallion”.

So why the knighthood for Robinson? Certainly not for services to comedy. Charity work? Yes, if you call banging the drum for Labour charity, although it could hardly be said to be charitable towards the country. Or the Queen for that matter; fucking Tony Blair sold off her beloved yacht, remember? You’d think there’d have been a royal moratorium on awards for lefty luvvies after that.

Every honours round is a joke. Twenty-five year old Adele gets something to mark her brief spot in the limelight while it takes others decades to be recognised, often just before they die. Many athletes were honoured after the Olympics but, dedicated though they were, they were still doing something they loved and in many cases will earn a great deal of money from. Maybe they were gonged-up in anticipation of their future work for charitable causes? It’s probably as good an excuse as any.

I absolutely ‘get’ the awarding of honours to those who have faced grave danger, scaled great heights, defended their country and rescued kittens. I am entirely happy also, for those who have worked for their country at home for many years to have their dedication recognised. I’m even okay with awarding honours to senior politicians and civil servants who, after all, are probably the closest modern equivalent to serving as knights of old. (Thinks: Court Jester, maybe that explains Baldrick… but then surely they’d pick somebody actually witty, like Phil Jupitus or Danny Baker… loads to choose from.)

There is always of course, a token smattering of unknowns, usually getting minor medals for simple things. You know, like spending sixty years volunteering at the local hospital, or running a shelter for various outcasts from society for half their life; sacrificing personal gain to help those less fortunate – easy, boring shit like that. It’s nowhere near as gruelling as say, running for Parliament, gaining a seat then stuffing your pockets with other people’s cash for a dozen years before donning ermine and getting £300 a day just for turning up, along with a bunch of absentee directorships. 

I'm ready for my close up now Mr Cameron!

Of course, not all politicos get knighted and some would turn down the honour, eh, Baron Prescott? To get a seat on the red leather you have to have at least held an important post in government. What would Baldrick do? If I was Ed Miliband I’d make a start on the juggling before it’s too late.

Desert Storm, UK

I sometimes give way to whimsy on a Friday but I just read this Commentator article and it echoes an accelerating invasive phenomenon that I have seen at close quarters and always been concerned about. A few years ago, for entirely practical reasons, I moved to this house in an area you might describe as just one step up from white trash. It was never particularly nice, but I've been away for five years and what I see now I have returned makes me angry; how could it not?

Six of them. Six of the noisy little fuckers playing loudly in the street and because of their cultural norms, playing loudly in the street until very late. A group of their male teenage and early-twenties role models driving noisy quad bikes with poor silencers around and around the streets for hours on end. I can’t help but feel – given the preponderance of former industrial waste land in the area - that they could have more fun elsewhere yet here they are, night after night. And where just five years ago you saw their sisters and mothers wearing western dress they now resemble tall, sinister, black bin bags.

While the local Hindus and Sikhs run legitimate businesses and are generally well respected and accepted, the Muslims display an obvious and intentional reliance on benefits and cash-in-hand working and breeding for benefits and an utter refusal to integrate with other faiths and sensibilities. Nationally they parade an agenda which they no longer feel the need to hide; nothing less than to dominate the entire world.

It’s not offensive to tell the simple, observable truth. Islam is not beautiful as many of its supporters claim, it is ugly and sordid and primitive and wrong. And it is utterly alien to western civilisation. There is not a single overtly Islamic country I can think of which is not held together by force and fear. I wonder that more anti-Islamic activity is not reported but then I’ve also seen how enthusiastically governments and their police have prosecuted ‘hate crimes’. A hate crime is anything which is seen as a threat to the left-liberal doormat policy of lying down and being trampled to death.

Surely there can be no more hateful a crime than to use a country’s generosity as a tool of invasion? To use a country’s tolerant nature against it. To wage war with wombs. We simply must not stand by and be conquered by birth rates. Yet we will because nobody dare lift a finger to prevent it. The only way that will happen is going to be atrocious. I can only thank anything but Allah that I will probably die before the real horror and bloodshed starts.

Mein Koranf

 So, bring on the Mohammed cartoons, fly the flags of ridicule, point and laugh at the stupidity and hatred of Islam and flatly refuse to accommodate its offensive ways. Make Islam a laughing stock and make its embrace a bar to advancement in British society. Yes, discriminate. Only when the young are ashamed of their parents and reject their destructive heritage will integration begin to happen; Islam is not welcome here. Oh and keep eating bacon for as long as they allow it.

Ow, Lego!

The world is in a mess. I can’t remember when there has been such a barrage of incoming reports of simultaneous civil unrest in so many disparate places at once. Just when one situation seems to be calming down somebody lobs a fire-bomb into another hornets’ nest and it all kicks off again. After a while one becomes hardened to strife and inured to such reports, so long as it’s not right on the doorstep. Then suddenly comes chilling news of such universal significance it simply can’t be ignored.

Lego has lost the plot and people are being hurt. It turns out that Lego figures are getting angry and some fear, hysterically, that it could be harming children’s development. (Go on, read the article) My big, fat, arse. What’s far more likely to hinder their development is continually being pushed off the swings by the other big daft child in the household – the one they call Dad - who is desperate to build their toy for them and deny the kids the rewards of their labour and invention

They didn't have Lego characters when I was growing up. There were maybe a couple of dozen different sizes and colours of brick and that was your lot. If you wanted characters you had to make your own, using your hands AND YOUR IMAGINATION. That was the whole frickin’ point. You invariably didn’t have enough bricks or you ran out of the colour you wanted, but that shortfall was part of the game. You learned to muddle through, make do and most important of all, be British about it. (Back in the day ‘being British’ really didn’t include blabbing to matron, strikes and strife, high court action, suicide bombing and the hacking to death in the street of people with whom you disagreed ; you sucked it up and got on with it.) Crappy, primary-coloured bricks and the disappointment they brought were an integral part of developing the stiff upper lip so lacking today.

Lego figures were only introduced in 1975 (I was preparing to leave for university – I’m so old my first form of transport was a hoop and a stick.) but I wasn't aware they existed until about five years ago when I learned that grown men were playing with them. “Huh?” was my reaction, but then, hey whatever, at least they’re doing man things – building stuff. But then I saw them, the figures and the boxes with fantastically detailed models, all designed by somebody else. These man-boys aren't using Lego, they’re just assembling pre-made stuff –it’s like IKEA and Lego combined and formed a task force. What is this, a Scandinavian invasion? A Scandinvasion? First the EU and now this? What is happening to the world?

And once you get pre-designed Lego which practically builds itself, you may as well have jigsaws that come ready assembled, and video games where the characters are already shot up for you – Oh I forgot, you already do; that’s what passes for blockbuster movie entertainment these days. What next, pre-read books? You may as well be delivered straight into a coffin – cradle to grave – and miss out all the boring stuff we call life if you’re not prepared to work on building your own character.

Lego is supposed to lie around the floor as a lurking, foot-stabbing, man-trap. It’s not supposed to be a sodding work of art for lily-livered, pampered, namby-pamby, milk sop, wet-behind-the-ears brats... whatever their age. As for the characters, Lego just isn't meant to have emotions – it’s a bunch of bright bricks that loosely stick together, with which you can have a few years of inventive fun before you turn to more grown-up things like getting qualifications and turning yourself into a contributing member of society.

My Lego model of Britain under Socialism

(You have to use your imagination!)

 Lego figures angry? No wonder they’re bloody angry – they have to do all the work.

Smashing Somethings

I see the students have been revolting again. It must be horrible having to endure the hypocrisy of wearing cheap, mass-produced clothes, utilising placard manufacturing equipment sold by profit-making companies, banging drums made by exploited brown children in far-off lands and using electricity, internal combustion engines, the transport infrastructure and modern telecommunications to gather and protest about the very forces that brought it all about, while showing and telling the world as it actually happens.

The demonstrators say they are staging a "Carnival Against Capitalism" across London before the two-day summit, hosted in Northern Ireland next week. But in truth it’s not at all clear what they are really protesting about. Some are just ideological hippy-dippies (now in their sixties) who crave a simpler world of equality and kindness for all. I can only imagine they long for a return to sub-150-strong communities in caves and Hobbit houses, living on seasonal native vegetables, wearing clothes made from jute and allowing natural attrition through starvation and hypothermia in winter to keep their populations steady.

Bless them; they’re harmless and they’ll be extinct soon enough anyway. But what of the others, the ones who are crying out for revolution against the system that has fed them from birth? The ones using the fruits of capitalism – invention, prosperity, unheard of mobility – to decry what they see as a worldwide plot to enslave them in work for eternity. Well, education first, then work for eternity, obviously. Well, when they say ‘eternity’ they mean until their retirement. A retirement prolonged by medicine which has extended lifespans to way beyond what was expected before capitalism increased wealth sufficiently to make any sort of independent retirement possible in the first place.

And then there’s nothing to do while you wait to die. Nothing to do but go on extended foreign holidays, live in relative comfort, engage in leisure pursuits previously only available to the very rich, watch twenty-four-hour television from around the entire world and eat and drink comestibles our grandparents could only ever have dreamed of. A true hell on earth, apparently; damn you, Capitalism! 

What’s their serious alternative to the global economy, those would smash the system? A complete return to localisation? So if your village doesn’t have a car-maker, you do without a car? Do you organise an Amish style, village-wide car-raising? Coffee? Sorry, out of season, out of stock and it costs two day’s work for a cup. Anything electronic becomes an impossibility unless you can source the materials to make it: petroleum products, trace metals, etc. And even if you could make a mobile phone the network would be restricted to just the local cell – you could phone everybody in your street. Hardly seems worth it – you may as well drive over… oops.

Ever since we set sail for The East in search of silk and spices and treasure, globalisation has been an unstoppable force and has brought greater and greater prosperity for all. Yes, for all. Trickle-down economics may not work as well as you would like it to, but everybody is better off than they were fifty years ago and fifty years ago everybody was better off than fifty years before that. It seems such an odd thing to get worked up about.

Of course things are not perfect, but I still don’t know what your problem is. Oh, you want fairness? Good luck with that. Given that fairness is always the watchword of socialist movements and socialism usually ends up as communism and poverty, you’re nailing your colours to the wrong mast. A bit of capitalism is essential if you want anything above bare subsistence. And when you accept that, where do you stop? How much capitalism is too much? Ooh, just a bit more and we can all have a telly. A bit more still and we can get the mobile phones working. And you know, I really miss the Internet… Everybody has their price and society’s price is monumental.

Dave finally finds the egalitarian society he craved

Come up with a workable plan and people might listen. But hey, you want a return to some sort of agrarian bliss, but with all the trappings of civilisation and you want it now? I suggest that you exploit the wealth that capitalism offers you, work your bollocks off, then fuck off out of it, buy yourself a smallholding and smile your days away.

The Fabulous Bilderberg Boys

Conspiracy, world domination, power, power and power. Whatever the truth about the first two conjectures it can’t be denied that the Bilderberg Group possess in spades the power to change the world. It’s not just what you know or who you know that gets things done, but who and what you own. And as most of the world is theirs or their associates to dispose of as they wish it is hardly surprising that they almost certainly cooperate with each other, or take cues from one another to influence affairs to their advantage.

It’s been suggested in the past that they have fixed oil prices, facilitated the arrogant centralising of power in Europe to the detriment of many of its formerly independent members and installed police states throughout the world. It has been accused of starting the war in what was once Yugoslavia, of being a liberal Zionist plot to overthrow societal norms and that its members are almost certainly behind the sudden urgency to push through single sex marriage. Oh yes, they say, we have seen their long lizard tongues and their green scaly skin, such discourse often punctuated with a knowing wink and a tap on the nose.

Whatever the truth and whatever you suppose about them this is just the global version of the adults retiring in private to discuss grown-up matters out of earshot of the kiddies.  Ah, but isn’t that the nub of the thing? The annoying privacy, the behind-closed-doors-ness of it all. Why won’t they reveal everything to the press? What have they to hide, cry the excluded who then, in the absence of any reply, go on to concoct all manner of sinister intent; the more lurid and outlandish, the better?

Those who aren’t invited are stamping their feet in envious frustration but wait a moment, if they wanted to organise the world in secret wouldn’t they do better to meet, you know, in actual secret? I am absolutely sure that if you want to influence, say, British energy policy the best way to go about it would be to employ, I dunno, a senior politician with fingers in the green technologies pie to lobby for you,  rather than to risk all the bad press associated with a mysterious annual meeting.

Oh yes, the dirty business they can do in the open simply because they already have the power and influence accredited to them. As for keeping things hush-hush, if I run British Petroleum, for instance and I want to consider a merger with Shell, why would I open discussions about that to the whole of the greedy Bilderberg bunch, who will only have their own bloody opinions about it? I’d just go to Shell and chat to them. In secret.

So why the meeting, which so enrages the theorists? What is it that can’t be done either in the open or in the closet without getting together so many busy people in one place at a highly publicised and heavily protected venue. Just what IS the guilty secret of Bilderberg? Well, I’ll tell you. The hoi polloi have Reading and V. The better connected can get tickets to Glastonbury. But only the fabulous Bilderberg boys can get into Ken Clarke’s exclusive annual music festival.

Fabulous Ken & the Bilderberg Boys

And that, as they say, is Jazz! Now, do the hands.

Going like clockwork... oranges

Oh it’s too good to miss and I haven’t blogged about the boy Owen for a while but he’s always good for a mention. In his latest polemic for the Independent (Oh, the irony!) he puffs smoke up the arse of the "missing force in British politics", his much-vaunted People’s Assembly.

“The unemployed; disabled benefit claimants; immigrants; public sector workers: all have come under far more sustained attack than those who plunged this country – and much of the world – into disaster. We've burned your house down, say the Tories: so it’s only fair we burn down your less deserving neighbour’s house, too. ”

So there he goes again, the architects of misery and ill fortune are not the disastrous dabbling with unworkable state socialism, the thirteen years of borrowing and spending and the hideous expansion of benefits to trap pretty much everybody into some level of state dependence. It’s not the simultaneous raising of aspirations and lowering of employability, leaving British school-leavers at a disadvantage against unskilled workers from the darkest corners of the globe. Nope, it’s the good old British class system to blame, as always.

While Owen was still in nappies ordinary people across the land were scratching their heads and wondering how Tony Blair’s miracle was being worked. How was it that workless people were affording cars and holidays and even buying houses? Could people not see that constantly re-mortgaging their homes was an unsustainable income model? And where was the money coming from to bribe tax payers with ‘credits’ to stay in work, or to bestow imaginary ailments to keep them off the jobless figures?

For balance, the boy wonder also had scathing words for the opposition: “As for the Labour leadership’s confident, coherent alternative to Tory austerity – well, I’ll let you finish laughing before you read on.” But it’s hardly a savaging because in his view ‘austerity’ is still entirely to blame, somehow, for Labour's former profligacy.

But the reality is that – just as in that disastrous decision to put yourself into negative equity – the road to recovery is long and slow. The coalition’s attempt to rein in spending while maintaining pretty much the entire welfare bill is almost certainly the only realistic option and a slow steady return to sanity is surely far better than some quack cure worse than the original disease.

Young Master Jones longs for some imagined rising up of the downtrodden masses and on his tour he’s doing his best to be seen as the resurrection of the firebrand rabble rouser, whipping up the mob into a frenzy to march on Downing Street and demand… well, what exactly, Owen?

“Letting councils build houses and controlling rents, rather than subsidising landlords; a living wage, instead of state-subsidised low wages; an industrial strategy to create hundreds of thousands of renewable jobs, instead of the misery of unemployment; an all-out war against tax avoidance worth £25bn a year; public control of the banks we bailed out: here are demands that have long been ignored. They won’t be ignored any more.”

I’ll let you into a secret you young Marxist scallywag. It’s all bollocks; empty words. The force you want to start your new people’s revolution is not the massive army of tough, wiry, manual workers you might have commanded in the 1920s, but a rag-tag huddle of welfare-softened, skunk-addled, benefit bunnies and their ideologically muddled cheerleaders. Those who can work and want to work are too busy doing what they’ve always done – working. If you were ever to get your house building programme you know damn well it’s the East Europeans who will get the jobs and your cherished left wing government would then have borrow even more to keep your constituents idle and breeding.  

Owen Jones prepares for his next big speech.

Owen concludes “The fragmented strands of progressive Britain are coming together; the anti-austerity movement is making its belated appearance. Finally, the left is entering the ring.” Yes dear, yes they are. I can only hope they've got their throwing-in towel at the ready.

Dire Straits...

So, the parliamentary recess is over, the holidays have been had and everybody is back at work recharged, reinvigorated and full of vim. It’s surprising just how much good a few days of rest can do for the soul. Particularly refreshing is the bright new Labour stand up comedy routine. I do hope they are taking it to Edinburgh. I may be wrong, but it appears that their answer to three long years without any policy at all is now to present themselves not as the party of opposition, but as the party of shrugging and saying “What can you do?”

That’s just pathetic rubbish. They could at least go out in a blaze and deliver a manifesto full of fire and brimstone and promise the earth to the lowest bidder. If you are going to crash and burn on the political stage you might as well make your pyrotechnic political suicide memorable. If things carry on like this, in ten year’s time people will only say, “Labour? Oh yes, weren’t they something to do with the Greens? Or am I thinking about Lord Sutch’s lot? Were they ever taken seriously?”

Future historians will be amazed that the party which harnessed the manpower of, well, manpower and immeasurably improved the lot of the worker spent the last forty years of its existence colluding in bringing about its own sorry downfall. The party of the workers should be boldly Eurosceptic, pro growth and very much against the something-for-nothing culture it cultivated so enthusiastically. Labour should be almost racist in its rejection of multiculturalism because that policy has been instrumental in creating the underclass who are now donning brown shirts and stirring up rebellion. It is a bitter irony that the socialist party has spawned a National Socialist uprising.

Nobody will ever know who burned down that Muswell Hill ‘mosque’. You know, the one long overdue to be demolished, re-funded and rebuilt; ripe for a fraudulent insurance or compensation scam. Nobody will ever discover who decided to spray paint EDL on the smoking ruins. But I bet there are plenty of natural Labour voters quietly nodding and muttering “well done”. If you are going to turn your back so completely on your natural constituents you may as well go out with a bang.

So, I hereby present some manifesto pledges  to make Labour’s last gasp election campaign at least as memorable as they are unelectable. Free hay (means-tested of course) for all unicorns. Golden eggs to be accorded royal status and paraded on silk cushions on national holidays. Rocking horse shit collectors to be classified as a distinct race and the use of their name in conversation to become a hate crime. All trees to be a protected national asset, just in case one of them turns out to be magic and money-bearing. Equality to be extended to cover all living things, the issue of spider passports being a major priority.  All ethnic food to be classified as British, thus the phrase “going for a Chinese” can never again be uttered without prosecution.  Oh and jam with everything... tomorrow.

Labour's new party uniform

If you are going to be a laughing stock you may as well give it your best shot.

Wired for what?

Modern life. Oh what brave new world that has such people in it. Free from the shackles of an agrarian subsistence, new age mankind roams free, bestriding the globe in giant leaps of faith and technology and gathering into our reach the farthest corners of an increasingly small Earth. From a mountain top in Brazil I can control a business empire in Billericay, from deepest Peru I can remotely patrol my premises in Purley for intruders and from the darkest corner of Romania I can authorise the conversion of money from Rand to Rupee.

Limitless power! Boundless bravado! It is all I can do to contain my urge to laugh “Mwuhahaha!” more often than I already do. For at my fingertips the power of the World Wide Web is mine to command. I can skype with Chris Dornan in Wisconsin, I can email Joe Lomax in Washington DC and I can publish a daily blog that is read by millions ... thousands ... dozens of people I have never met. I could raise and command an army to do my bidding and march on Whitehall to overthrow the government without ever stirring from my perch.

Of course, if I am connected then all my transmitted thoughts can also be intercepted and parsed and scrutinised for hidden meaning. My missives can be spied upon and my every intention discerned and deterred forthwith. I could be placed under a state of constant surveillance and be electronically tagged without my consent. My funds could be hacked, my location pinpointed and my incarceration as an enemy of the state organised and authorised by remote and shadowy forces. My electronic freedom also enslaves me. Or it would, but for my secret weapon...

At this very moment I am typing this from an unguessable location. Free from connecting copper conductors I am tapping into the ether via a WiFi dongle of a sophistication that could not have even been imagined a mere decade ago. My intellectual essence is finding its way into the ethereal online world by the miracle of digital packet and radio frequency technologies, enhancing all it touches with its wisdom and veracity. My words are legion and the authorities will never discover me. Never! (Mwuhahaha!)

Why am I so confident of non-discovery? Because in order to get a connection I am fifteen feet above the ground, sitting on a low bough of a mighty English oak tree in a secluded corner of open parkland adjacent to a trading estate. I have my netbook on my knee while my other leg is extended horizontally out in front of me. And I am typing one-handed as my left arm is holding aloft the miraculous dongle, connected via a USB cable to a port on my device. Why, you rightly ask? I’ll tell you why  - It’s the only way I can get a sodding connection.

The promised land.

Snoopers’ Charter? The powers that be would spy on my emails? Hah! Best of luck to them. I’d have to be reliably connected to the Internet in the first place for that to happen! 

I don't want to worry you but...

So, Labour are to come out of their huddle and say how they would run the economy if anybody votes for them in 2015. In effect their plans amount to a return to the sneaky Blairite tactics of New Labour and can roughly be described thus: “Socialism doesn’t really work and we will be unelectable if we keep to all that the Labour Party holds dear, so our only chance is to become Conservative-lite (again) and promise to continue  all their economic policies, but smile a lot, say ‘caring’ and ‘fair’ whenever possible and pretend –against all the evidence - that we are very much nicer human beings.”

They are hoping like hell that we see a bit of growth – not too much because that would make Osborne look good – just enough to get the ball rolling so that if they get back in they can ride the wave for a year or so, then start spending like lunatics once more. It’s a desperately familiar pattern and it fools enough of the people every time. If they rely on a better-the-devil-you-know sentiment to limit their losses to UKIP, combined with a concerted push to collect as many of their famously shady postal votes as possible, who knows what might happen?

The worst thing is that they may very well succeed because Labour is a remarkably hardy parasite and like a tick it can survive outside the host, biding its time until the blood-sucking can begin again. And of course, once latched on the Labour tick is able to grow its population at an alarming rate until no tax-payer is safe. The various afflictions spread by ticks include Lyme Disease, tularemia, ehrlichiosis, meningoencephalitis, bovine anaplasmosis, poverty, stupidity and welfare dependency and there is no known vaccination which can guard against these ailments once infection is established.

The next Chancellor of the Exchequer

The best thing is a pre-emptive DDT strike before it’s too late. Citizens are advised to stock up on Deet and mosquito nets well before the next election and avoid entering areas known to be infected with Labour unless wearing suitable prophylactic clothing. A full-body kevlar onesie soaked in paraformaldehyde is recommended along with dark glasses and noise cancelling headphones. Remember; hear no evil, see no evil, vote no evil. Be careful out there. 

That's easy for you to say!

Last night I discovered the sad news that the fabulous and not at all fictitious German word Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertrag-ungsgesetz  has ceased to exist. In so far as a word can be said to die, bereft of life it has shuffled off this mortal coil and joined the choir invisible. It is an ex word.

The German language is justifiably famous for its compound nouns, reflecting the German propensity to call a spade a manualsoilremovalwerkzeug. (I know, I know, it’s ‘spaten’ really, you spoilsport!) I remember from my dim and distant youth (who I keep in a poorly-lit box, far away) some cracking made-up, Anglicised German words and phrases like Das flippen-floppen (windscreen wipers) and Plinkenplankenplunkenboxgepounder (pianist).

We have plenty of German words in use every day in English such as the fabulous word without which the inner character of every true-born Englishman could never adequately be described -  Schadenfreude. And where would we be without such responses as gesundheit or the sage and timely Vorsprung Durch Technik to draw on whenever an Audi is seen broken down – kaput - on the motorway?

In fact we should resist with all our might the politicised dumbing down of our beautiful language else soon all we will be left with is a meagre and anodyne Newspeak. As Syme, in 1984 says, “It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.” commenting on the intention to completely eclipse Oldspeak before 2050. It’s already happening and unless we fight back we won’t even have the language to express irony within a generation, let alone the irony of introducing new words plundered from the German language.

Franglais was fun. I reckon Deutschesprechen will be a delight and we should do it more often. It’s a game anybody can play. I'm going to call it British-German... or "Breutsche".

Thus I present:

• Schpendentaxundspchendenmoretillvearepoorhein = Labour Party
• Komödiehoistencockundschaften = Boris Johnson
• Istmannorfrauwhoknau? = Harriet Harman
• Gromitidentitätswechsel = Ed Miliband
• Wreckenzeerailbahn = Bob Crow
• Scheenischinidishengesichtdave =Shiny Dave Cameron
• Baschendeboschennigel =Nigel Farage
• Detwatökonomische = George Osborne

UK Eurovision entry 2014

Feel free to add your own beiträge in the comments box hereinunten. Danke schön

Old heads on old shoulders.

The shitstorm is just around the corner and what is the biggest news on the BBC? Matt Smith announcing he is leaving Doctor Who, that’s what. Dr Who has been with me all my life from the days of hiding behind the sofa while William Hartnell fought the green monsters (in black and white) through the unwatchable drivel and cardboard sets of the eighties to the slick plots and special effects of the modern show. But it could all end with Matt’s incumbency and seriously nobody would suffer as a result. Because it’s just fiction.

When did we ALL become children? (And when will Boris Johnson be anything else?) When I was a lad there was a coming of age, a point at which you largely shrugged off childish things, dressed as your dad (or mum) and set out to make your way in the world as what we used to refer to as ‘an adult’. You were allowed to do a thing we used to call ‘voting’ and take responsibility for your actions. What the fuck happened to all that?

Drunken, shrieking grandmothers on hen nights, dressed in pink, sporting fairy wings and trying to shag boys half their age. Overgrown schoolboys with gadget spending power to shame James Bond cruising the streets blasting out hip-funk-dub-hop or whatever name they give to the same old shit they listened to when they were in primary. Encouraging your kids to call you by your first name, as if you were equals and calling everybody, whatever their age, ‘mate’.

And - ever wanting to be down wit’ da kidz - it’s rubbed off on politicians too, at least with those wunderkind brought up under New Labour's betrayal of everything British. What Harold bloody Wilson started in the sixties, Tony sodding Blair finished a few short years ago and we now have a political class long out of short trousers but short on gravitas. I, for one, don’t think this is ‘a good thing’.

The world is up in arms. Wherever you look - the Mediterranean, Scandinavia, the Middle East, the UK - people are taking to the streets under a number of banners, but most of their animosity and misery and cut-it-with-a-knife frustration boils down to one thing - the politicians have royally fucked us all over and it's time to start again.

But I don’t want young people or young-thinking people making decisions that affect millions. I don’t want to see them doing fun runs, or being set up as Aunt Sallies on lowest-common-denominator television shows. I also don’t want the product of the Westminster crèche ruining all our tomorrows, playing political pranks on each other while the country goes down the tubes. I reject quotas; what is the point of a politically correct balance of young and gay and female and shemale and blackanasian gypsies and special needs cabinet members if between their competing ideologies not a sodding thing ever gets done?

 Anybody who has ever worked in HR, diversity awareness, or for any kind of minority struggle should be ruled out straight away on the grounds of having too narrow a focus. Their useful role is lobbying; lobbying the people who should rightfully be in charge. Sensible, mature experienced and pragmatic leaders with just enough charisma to get noticed and not enough ego to care about being popular. And as for the top job? I’m really not sure the world is ready for a one-legged, black, lesbian Doctor with attention deficit disorder.

DSS Bingo

Now you too can play Downing Street Shaggers Bingo.

It's easy, anybody can play and you can have as many goes as you like.

All you have to do is select one from the left and one from the right and/or one from the middle or a line in any direction and you can create your own cross-party, sexy shenanigans speculative punt in seconds.

(Members of the opposition included because, diversity & inclusion, innit?)

Go on, give it a go - select your very own 'roll over' jackpot!

Rules. 

There is only one rule in DSS Bingo - you can't select Lord McAlpine whatever you do!

(PS: Can you let me know when it's revealed? Ta!) 

(PPS: Click on the Daily Limerick link at the top while you're here!)