Razor sharp

The final scene fades in and the lone gunman cautiously approaches the Mafia don, who is alone at his desk and unaware of the presence of his stalker. The camera zooms in, the intruder filling the frame and a single green blink is seen from the dial of his wristwatch before the focus is pulled quickly out, the point of view retreating vertically upward, beyond the boundaries of the room, revolving to zoom in to a satellite. The signal is bounced twice before reaching Langley, Virginia, where a team of operatives study flashing screens. An alarm sounds and a red button is pressed.

In the grounds of the godfather’s residence three armed guards are simultaneously despatched by unseen assailants and a shadowy figure approaches the ground floor window of the Don’s study. We see the Mafia boss and behind him the stalker. A door bursts open and the main lights are turned on. Two others enter the room and cover the stalker whose pistol is aimed at the crime boss’s chest. One is the FBI field agent who has been pursuing the stalker. The other is a British under-cover cop. The gang boss grabs his pistol and shoots the intruder; the Brit shoots the FBI guy. The cop nods at the don, holsters his pistol and exits. [Roll Credits]

We are left thrilled and disturbed; what have we just seen? Wait, the Brit was working for the Mafia all along? But why then was he seen at the marina in a previous scene? And how did the disgraced FBI man get his badge and gun back? And who, exactly, was the would-be assassin working for? More questions than answers and a plot as full of holes as an Aero but a strangely satisfying outcome. Before we have tried to unravel who did what to whom and why, our memories start to become hazy and we bring our own focus back to the here and now; work, family, money. We were entertained for a couple of hours, but now it is back to reality

Twisted tales, conspiracy theories, shadowy forces controlling our world – we love that shit. But the truth is usually much more mundane. The boss isn’t trying to get you constructively dismissed; he just doesn’t like you. The Jews, sorry ‘Zionists’, didn’t carry out the attack on the Twin Towers in a complex operation twenty years in the making; the jihadis really did just fly airliners into them. And Cultural Marxism isn’t a coordinated plot involving millions of teachers, councillors, police, judiciary and trades union placemen; It’s just what we call the mess of an outcome of years of misguided beliefs in ‘fairness’ instead of pursuing higher expectations.

William of Ockham’s fourteenth century hypothesis lex parsimoniae or ’law of parsimony' states that among competing hypotheses that predict equally well, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. What has become known as Occam’s Razor states that "Other things being equal, simpler explanations are generally better than more complex ones." It is a principle I like to remind myself of, once in a while, in order that I don’t get carried away by the outlandish conspiracy theories that permeate the Internet like a gullible plague of grasshoppers.

Keep. It. Simple. Stupid.

And thus to the forthcoming EU referendum. Prepare for smokescreens, a never-ending hall of distorting mirrors and unsubstantiated, complex ‘explanations’ about how everything is interconnected and like a game of Kerplunk, if we vote to leave the order of our society, nay the very fabric of our universe will be rent asunder. The EU question is not about benefits, nor is about immigration and freedom of movement. It isn’t about red-tape business regulations, the European arrest warrant, nor human rights. It isn’t even really about trade. It is about one thing and one thing only. Sovereignty. As more and more big guns get embroiled in the whole affair, forget that one, important, simple thing and you may as well step into your own shackles. Believe in simplicity, believe in Britain and vote out.

I must protest!

The holiday island of Kos has become a refugee ghetto with penniless Syrian asylum seekers sleeping in the streets and generally bringing down the vacation vibe. Southern Italy has been swamped by wave after wave of migrants fleeing Africa and seeking to suckle at the generous nipple of an alien continent. In Nepal, we have largely forgotten about the plight of the thousands put out of their homes by the recent earthquakes. And even without exceptional circumstances millions in India and China live in conditions that truly define poverty. It is business as usual for Planet Earth and it’s not pretty.

From our heated homes, watching enormous televisions, our shiny cars parked outside as we go about our relatively stress-free existences it is hard to imagine lives spent in merely subsisting. Where would we be without our phones, news on the go, entertainment at our fingertips and instant communication for the sheer hell of it? Our world is full of things we just don’t need; hipster coffee shops, fashions, toys for grown-up children, designer-this and designer-that, fripperies to amuse and keep us from thinking beyond the next fabricated social event.

We tweet about it, we snapchat it, we blog and share and generally immerse ourselves in a world so rich with possibility we don’t even see what we have and take our immense good fortune for granted. And yesterday the Queen opened Parliament with a package of measures that are intended to take our progress still further. Casting off the shackles of the LibDems the Tories at last have a chance to get on and finish the job. The promise is jobs and training and help for businesses and further advances for our truly first-world nation. Unlike most of the world’s population we are fortunate indeed.

Yet all of this appears to have escaped the notice of the rag-taggle band of ‘anti-austerity’ warriors determined to protest the right of the legitimately elected government to govern. Democracy, with all its flaws, is probably still the least-worst way of organising society, so the rights of these privileged but short-sighted and ultimately pointless people to stamp and scream and hate their useless parents in public is a price we willingly pay. If Labour had won we would be back to rule by minorities such as this; no vision, no overarching strategy, just lots and lots of ‘initiatives’ and a hotch-potch of competing ideologies, interests and hobby-horses for the idle.

It's just not fair!

Watching the coverage of the ambush of Douglas Carswell, snarling irony-free faces contorted with hatred as they spat ‘fascist’ at him and threatened violence, I saw nothing but privileged children kicking out. As they filmed their little piece of distorted history on their ubiquitous smart technology and waved their mass-produced banners no doubt they thought they were fighters for some nebulous notion of social justice and not the spoiled brats they truly are. Austerity? What austerity?

Social Conservatism

After Ireland’s gay big landmark gay vote it turns out that within the EU only Italy and N. Ireland do not now recognise gay marriage. It was only on listening to some improving radio the other day that I discovered that such liberalisation is seen as ‘rolling back social conservatism’. Among other measures making up this rollback are the encouragement of fatherless households via the general practice of not judging and saying ‘Hey, there are no rules!” Also not to be judged are childhood behaviour, academic performance and antisocial behaviour; all of these are subject to the ‘invent a syndrome’ method of explaining away why people just can’t be expected to fit into society, like they used to.

Misfits. That’s what we called them. Don’t play by the same rules and that’s what you are. Except that’s a pejorative term and thus not allowed in this brave new world with all the social conservatism sucked out of it. But without societal pressure, how do we make sure people do the right things, say the right things…think the right things? Why, we make the practice of wrong things illegal and not just generally illegal, but specifically illegal. Chief among the statutes of the new liberal society is the growing list of hate crimes. Racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and the many sub-divisions that proliferate under those headings. So that we can all be equal and diverse we must be subject to a legal system that brooks no diversity… and often doesn’t apply equally.

Dare I say Rotherham? In fear of the dreaded charge of being politically incorrect the systematic gang rape and trafficking of a truly awesome number of young girls was allowed to happen with the full knowledge of far too many responsible persons; the same people who would have children taken from a drunken mother, or wouldn’t hesitate to prosecute a young suitor for not heeding his girlfriend’s ‘no’, sat idly by while hundreds and hundreds of young lives were irreparably damaged. Theirs is a life sentence for no other reason than the imperative to ‘roll back social conservatism’. But why?

Social: ‘relating to society or its organization’. Conservatism: ‘A general preference for the existing order of society and an opposition to efforts to bring about sharp change’. What, I ask you, is wrong with that? Yes, things change and yes they should, but for there to be an actual agenda and appetite for such rapid alteration is something we should all fear. The last Labour government actually trumpeted this agenda and then set about rubbing our noses in it. The current ‘Conservative’ government appears to be continuing to obey to the letter the same set of commandments, blaming it on Brussels. I don’t doubt that the EU is fully committed to the rollback, but come on Britain, where’s your fight?

As far as I can recall, in our socially conservative society, we used to generally be polite to each other not for fear of punishment but out of respect. We accepted that others had different viewpoints and while they could be challenged, the idea of creating laws to prevent them from stating their views was a tool of totalitarian states. And nobody called anybody who wasn’t an actual acquaintance ‘mate’. Yes we may have had ‘a place’ and knew it, but there was comfort in fitting into that place. Now though, rolling back social conservatism has also resulted in a lack of opportunity for social mobility.

Now we have politicians who say “I have been very clear” when they have clearly been anything but. We have young people with no concept of hierarchy and consequently no way of understanding where they are now and why they are going nowhere any time soon. And we have armies of socially ‘progressive’ activists who will not stop until we are all uniformly fucked-up, genderless, deranged, lost and helpless human-like automatons. Far from promising liberty, rolling back social conservatism looks a lot to me like, ‘a boot stamping on a human face – forever’.

A touch of Qatar

On the radio yesterday I heard an intriguing discussion regarding Qatar’s hosting of the world cup in 2022 and why this should not be allowed to go ahead. It largely concerned the hundreds of deaths of ill-treated migrant workers who had no health and safety precautions and lived in conditions that European nations would not allow for animals and how Qatar had bought the cup from Sepp Blatter and his band of merry muggers. The scale of the FIFA extortion racket run by Blatter and his corrupt chums is astonishing but it should come as no surprise when a wealthy nation seeking acceptance comes into contact with a committee only too happy to accept.

The plight of migrant workers is a familiar one: Promised employment they leave their homes in India, Pakistan, Nepal, etc. and travel many miles to a strange land where they are treated as slave labour, doing the jobs the locals won’t do for a pittance, with no security and little in the way of the sort of rights most of us take for granted. No security of employment, no guarantee of income, no healthcare, few facilities and none of the home comforts that even prisoners in western jails enjoy. The human rights lobbies of ‘civilised’ western nations have much to say about all this.

Meanwhile, in Britain, Germany and France we also import workers from poor countries to do the jobs our over-stuffed, over-privileged, unskilled idle consider beneath them. We exploit migrant workers because they will work for so little and endure what we might think of as privations in lifestyles, just because we can. Then we allow them citizenship, whereupon they, rightly, demand the same as we afford to those they displaced. As long as a worker is working, even for minimum wage, you could argue they are contributing. But then we give them tax credits, free healthcare, education and those all-important human rights and unlike in places like Qatar, they never go home.

Apologists for this state of affairs say we have no other choice. Our own people won’t do the work we expect the incomers to tackle. But then, in their turn, the children of those immigrants benefit from education in the way our own underclass doesn’t. They get better jobs and then we have to import yet another wave of low-skilled, low-wage workers to do the dirty jobs. But while high-skilled, highly paid and taxed foreign-born workers are an asset, the vast majority are perpetuating a lie; we simply cannot afford - financially and morally - to pay benefits to those we can’t deport, while allowing a flood of desperate incomers to depress unskilled wages still further, giving our shirkers the excuse that now they can’t even afford to take those jobs.

Sooner or later the net-contributors will be unable to support the takers without the rich-poor gap getting ever wider with the consequent malcontent. If we can’t make everybody happy, why not try a little less carrot and a bit more stick? And as we won’t deny foreign-born labourers their human rights, like Qatar, we need to turn our attention to our own. When I was a kid we looked forward to the harvests; spuds, greens, beet, strawberries. We actively sought out backbreaking work in muddy fields because without specific skills we could still make money by grafting. Earning your first wage should be a triumphant moment however you have come by it. I used to regularly stand in a mob of teenagers, clamouring to be selected to pick up discarded race cards, food wrappers, bottle tops and broken glass, often in the rain, following meetings at Thirsk Racecourse. I never for one moment considered that getting dirty, or bleeding a bit was beneath my dignity.

If brown people can do it, why can't you?

It has to be time to break the cycle and sod dignity anyway; anybody can clean, carry, push, pull and generally grunt their way through menial work. And acquiring the work ethic is the most important skill you can have. A life on benefits can never be seen as an option if you are able to do something, anything, else. And if better paid work is beyond your reach you can always pass on that experience to your kids and urge them to strive for better. I don’t want to make foreign gang-masters rich, neither do I want a low-skilled, race to the bottom economy, but if we want to make work pay we have to stop paying people not to work.

County Gayo

Appropriately enough on Eurovision Day, the campest day of the television calendar, Ireland voted in favour of gay marriage. This affects me not one little bit; I genuinely do not care who stuffs what parts of themselves up whatever parts of their partners they wish, how often or how vigorously. There are far more egregious physical practices engaged in within the heterosexual world than to be upset over buggery. But what gets me is the scale of the celebration. I genuinely don’t get it (yes, euphemism).

I have absolutely no issue whatsoever with the concept of committed partners entering into legally recognised contractual pairings of the sort practised between men and women for centuries. It’s the urgency and the vehemence, I think, that I find slightly odd. At a time when fewer and fewer male/female couples can be arsed (yes, euphemism) to plight their troth/s, opting for a generally more liberalised arrangement, doesn’t it strike you as strange that a sector of society seen as extra-liberalised should want to adopt the bondage of a former age? ‘Till death us do part’ is somewhat at odds with the notoriously free coupling associated with some elements of the homosexual population.

I don’t care for the ‘cultural Marxist’ objections that making a formerly illegal practice legal is tantamount to making it compulsory. I’m not that engaged by the ‘what’s normal’ argument for inclusion of same-sex relationships in sex-education for children. I no longer understand what ‘normal’ means because it certainly doesn’t mean ‘majority’ behaviours, inclinations or allegiances any more, rather ‘normal’ means that whatever you want to do must now be accepted by everybody, regardless of their own sensitivities… by law.

Again, I have no objections, I merely offer observations and my observation is that we live in extraordinary times when a tiny but vocal minority - for don’t be fooled, it IS a tiny minority - can achieve by sheer clamour and persistence what years of less obtrusive campaigning might never do. The moral of the story is clear; if you want it badly enough and shout about it loudly enough for long enough you will eventually gain the sympathy and support of people for whom it actually makes no difference whatsoever. Look at the polling numbers; at least ten times as many non same-sexers must have voted for their cause than did the LGBT community themselves. That or else Ireland is the gay epicentre of the planet.

There is a precedent for happy separation

Meanwhile it’s ‘nul points’ for the UK once again in Eurovision; they really don’t like us very much, do they? So why not take a leaf out of the book of gay and get everybody on our side? The ‘OUT’ campaign for the EU Referendum needs to look like an oppressed minority and stage demonstration after demonstration to illustrate how badly done to we are within the European community; how we are cast as pariahs and ignored as irrelevant oddballs. If we seriously want a chance of exiting from this loveless marriage we need to continually ram it down the throats (yes… again) of those who want everything to just stay the same.

Euro Lies

There’s been a lot of euro-propaganda about this last week. On the telly, on the radio, spat out in newsprint… it’s everywhere and it’s hard to refute. That’s because nobody knows what lies on the outside; while on the inside it may not be a bowl of cherries, at least it’s a bowl. Back in 1973, to a Britain less than twenty years out of rationing, when trade mostly depended on oiling the wheels through official channels and information could be strictly controlled,  de Gaulle’s repeated “Non!” was tantalising. What were we missing? How could we survive, frozen out? Ted Heath – inducement or not – probably felt he had no option; he certainly didn’t trust the workers to make the ‘right’ choice.

Since then the big question of Europe – in or out - has never changed, but all around us the world has. Today an entrepreneur can get rich from her bedroom without ever having to negotiate trade agreements and export deals. Vast industries deal in instant global communication and the processing of data and information online, so individuals can telework from anywhere. The factories have closed, or moved and fewer organisations rely on fixed sites. To mine coal you have to dig where the coal is. To mine information all you need can be in the palm of your hand, wherever you happen to be. The black-and-white days of nine-to-five are history for many in the globalised world and many have migrated to cheaper, calmer lands to work to live, rather than live to work.

Life is better for everybody than it was forty years ago, so why rock the boat at all? That’s going to be the constant mantra from the Euro-politburo and it’s very likely to work. Big is beautiful, they’ll say, the greatest trading bloc in the world… but who wants to live in a bloc? Not me and I’ll tell you why:

In a small community there may be a king but if he doesn’t do a good job of kinging he will be quickly deposed. A more benevolent dictator could rule for a lifetime, or even found a dynasty but in a small economy there is only so much wealth to go around and as the gap between rich and poor gets beyond the tolerable, again, the peasants can rise. But build a super-structure like the EU and corruption is rife; you no longer know who is to blame and the super-rich are people you will never know. And it is only in enormous corrupted economies that people can get very rich through doing very little.

Those businesses arguing for more EU have vested interests in its army of cheap labour and a never-ending supply of consumers. But if your customers are also your workers, is the model whereby they end up on the lowest possible minimum wage the best there is? The EU sells itself on providing stability and prosperity and peace for all while simultaneously exercising the most detailed social engineering on the vast majority of its citizens; mere drones to fuel the machine. The kings of the European Union cannot be unthroned and just as with Orwell’s Ingsoc they tell us what to believe. All that information on the Internet is no use unless you can think for yourself.

Tin Cam... floating

The populations will still exist. The consumers, the workers, the bosses and the leaders will still do what they have to do. The world will still be there and the sky won’t have fallen in. But outwith the EU what will be gone is the lack of accountability, the uncontrolled herd migration for greener pastures and the ridiculous notion that the cure for too much bureaucracy is more bureaucracy. Britain would not be isolated. We would, once more, be an independent nation capable of acting directly in our own best interests instead of having a succession of puppet Prime Ministers who pretend that we can. Instead of meekly accepting what we are told is the inevitable ‘in’ vote, it’s time we started listening to what the ‘outers’ have to say. Brexit does not have to be a dirty word.

Out of the mouths

The Conservatives are promising to make illegal immigration, er… illegal. It strikes me that the very term ‘illegal’ surely carries with it the explicit notion that you are doing something the law doesn't permit. It seems odd then, that they had to make another law making it ‘specifically’ illegal as opposed to, I guess, ‘sort-of’ illegal. Is this anything to do with EU influence over our jurisdiction? Or is it yet another home-grown fuck up?

Maybe the switch of focus onto illegal immigration is an attempt to steer us away from the massive problem of the 318,000 – almost a third of a million – net immigration figure of the last twelve months. Remember that is net; it doesn't reveal the real total of people coming in, which turns out to be double that at 641,000, which means that 323,000 people left the country during the same period. Some of that number will be made up of immigrants returning home but how many are native Brits fleeing the sinking ship?

Britain is changing beyond recognition, just as Tony Blair and his cronies intended, but the biggest change is not from accommodating Europeans, with many of the civil and cultural values we hold, because 290,000 of the incomers are not from Europe at all and Brexit would not help. Of course ‘not from Europe’ does not mean Canadians, Australians, Americans and others; it means overwhelmingly an invasion which has been gathering pace for some time. It means a change so significant that even children can plainly see what our leaders refuse to.

During the years of branding native British identity as shameful and not to be celebrated few non-politicians can fail to have noticed how the younger generation are being replaced. The Michaels are being replaced by mohammeds, the Alices by Aishas. A recent study reveals that the view from the playground is that muslims are taking over the country. But if you read the article in the Independent you will notice that it makes a big deal of the lack of awareness of the children. It completely ignores the reality they see around them, much as modern politics refuses to see the raging fire it is trying to extinguish with a cup of water.

You heard it in the playground...

Meanwhile, in the Middle East playground ISIS is sacking Palmyra in its unquenchable lust to return the world to a stone-age caliphate. Does anybody seriously doubt the aim of muslims in Britain to eventually dominate and impose the sharia in Britain's islamic state? Especially when vocal elements have publicly declared exactly that intent. Whatever your reaction to that statement, whatever your conditioning has compelled you to screech, it is not racist to point out that people who don’t look like us, don’t speak like us and don’t share our values should be treated with suspicion. Strikes me that the kids are all right.

Continental Drift

In the dying days of Victoria’s reign Cecil Rhodes is said to have pithily declared: “To be born English is to have won first prize in the Lottery of Life.” (This line is also credited to one Mr Kipling – presumably in between making exceedingly good cakes.) For a century or more we believed it, too. So much so that on several occasions during the last century newspapers would regularly report the weather thus: “Fog in channel; Continent cut off.” Nowadays the lines might read “To get into Britain is to win the Bingo of Benefits” and “Never mind the fog; they built a tunnel.”

But at least there was always the fact that while you could be born an Englishman and hold a birth certificate to prove it, the closest you could get to that as an immigrant was eventual, grudgingly bestowed, British citizenship. And that particular paperwork was certainly not given out like confetti until very recently – ask Mohammed Al-Fayed. Despite what many see as a massive decline in our fortunes and our desirability, still they come, pretenders to the title; you can dress British, act British and speak like a native, but to be actually born here is still a winning ticket.

But not if the EU gets its way because very soon the Royal Crest which adorns my birth certificate will be denied the next generation; they will emerge, crying, into the light as citizens of the European Union and their birth certificate will say so. This is not advantageous to us in any way; in the past British citizens were pretty much welcome anywhere because we traded with the whole globe for many centuries before the current inept bureaucracy was dreamed up. To be born British WAS to hold a passport to the world, whereas in future we will have nothing to distinguish us from any other Eurodrone.

As ever the capitulists wave the blue flag as if they were born under it. Paul Mason, Channel 4's News economics editor, doesn’t, want to be English and Chuka Umunna is encouraging bosses to bully their work forces into seeing the EU way. Vote ‘out’ in the referendum, he is effectively urging them to say and you’re sacked. So much for reasoned debate. You will do as you are instructed and forget those terrible olden days when free nations raped and pillaged lesserfolk in pursuit of their greed. In future histories no good will ever have come from the shameful adventures  of advanced European countries, save for the valiant efforts of the comrades in union.

But why do we have to apologise for getting our shit together, for creating the modern world? Why have African states been unable to capitalise on the technology and business methodology already created? Why do they carry on killing each other when they could cooperate and build a great successful continent? No individual European country wants to take the African migrants, importing who knows what troubles they bring with them, but the faceless European Union would impose quotas. The European Union has no borders.

Go west, young man!

But we have. As an island we have the perfect border and we should be allowed to police it. You call me a Little Englander as an insult? I accept that as a compliment and refer you to the wise words of Flanders and Swann: “The English, the English, the English are best; I wouldn’t give tuppence for all of the rest.” Now everybody grab an oar; lets pull up the anchors and get ready to row west, where our lottery tickets have a better chance of winning; as far away from the European Union as possible.

Withdraw Labour?

Ed Miliband is back from his sojourn in Ibiza and  must be grateful at least that the expression is not “Your nose must have been burning” because the airwaves have been a-buzz with mention of his name… and it’s a hell of a nose. Everybody has been talking about Ed in his absence and most of it is not very nice to hear. It turns out he was wrong about everything and the shadow cabinet of ‘the nice party’ have fallen over themselves to say so. Well we, the hoi polloi, knew all along but wasn't the party one-million-per-cent behind Ed all the way? Yes, it turns out they were right behind him and pushing him towards the cliff.

On Monday Yvette Cooper attacked Ed on his approach to business. Chuka Umunna did it last week before stepping down from the contest on still-unexplained grounds. Even union-man Andy Burnham expressed disappointment and a recognition that any government needs to keep business onside. And the reason all the knives are out? It seems, at least right now, that the leadership contest will be won by the contestant whose blade plunges the deepest into Miliband’s back. If I were Ed I think I’d just stay away from England forever.

But I thought they all wanted Dan Jarvis to stand? Dan who? Dan the war hero who nobody outside Labour had ever heard of before last week and is now the darling in waiting; the man to lead Labour from the shadows. Except he doesn't actually want the job. Not yet at least; he’s backing Andy Burnham instead. When I first heard about Dan Jarvis I was perplexed. Former Parachute Regiment officer AND Labour man? Surely it’s been a good fifty years since that juxtaposition of allegiances was normal? In Thatcher’s day the armed forces and the police were Conservative to a man. But wait, let’s hear what he has to say.

Oh, I get it now. He’s backing Andy Burn'em because he thinks Captain Scarlett has the greatest appeal to the public and therefore he has the right credentials to lead the party. Meanwhile Red Len McCluskey, true to bully-boy form, is threatening Labour that its financial backing could be put at risk if they fail to represent “the voice of organised labour”. Hmm, I wondwer if there's any particular reason that Unite is backing Burnham? So, Emperor’s new clothes then? Nothing new from labour at all; it’s not about policy it’s about whatever will get them elected; it’s about appearance. Well, they appear to have a bit of as problem then, don’t they?

Still? Hasn't anybody read the instructions?

You see, original Labour became Old Labour the moment Blair, Mandelson and Campbell unveiled the ‘bit-like-the-Tories’ New Labour. Then, under Ed, they were sort-of Unite Labour a bit like Old Labour again… almost. But now that Yvette Cooper has been talking about adopting Tory policies towards business and immigration and the deficit, the term Blue Labour is looking likely. But maybe it’s time to finally admit that after whatever branding and re-alignment and new-directional tweaking they decide is necessary to make the party palatable, the only electable name remaining is Not Labour.

Books do furnish a room

I’ve been here before. Packing up my entire collected belongings and paying to store them expensively until some uncertain future time when we can be reunited. Last time it took about four years before I recovered my stuff and to be frank, the reunion was something of a disappointment. I hardly looked at the old photographs and my precious books remained boxed as I hadn’t space to shelve them. Then,two years back, I finally spent a week constructing shelves and unpacking the lot. Ah the books; I have just filled, transported and stacked 30 archive boxes of them and I’m wondering where the rest of them went.

Over the years I have given up, given away, misplaced or otherwise lost hundreds, if not thousands of volumes of literature, science, politics, philosophy, engineering, comment, and whimsy. I have purposefully pursued the classics and the trash with equal alacrity and consider myself widely, if thinly read. A part of me wants to read everything. Another part of me knows I may never get around to reading even the ones in my ‘unread’ boxes. History, great thought, sweeping drama and just the stuff I feel I ought to read because everybody else has – although to be fair this is often a turn off.

But why? In the Internet age, with the world’s knowledge at your fingertips or in the palm of your hand in an instant, why the urge to not only read clumsy great paper tomes but to acquire and covet them? And given the receding ability of minds, young and older, to concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time, it is almost a wonder that the book survives at all; or do people now only read 140 characters at a time and then write, “no YOU fuck off!” in the margin? I raise a guilty hand as I realise that while I talk a good game, my only dedicated reading time is now reduced to the few minutes in bed before sleep takes me.

I spend more time writing now than I ever do reading, like the literary equivalent of the pub bore. But packing away these word treasure hoards for what seems like forever this time, I wonder if by the time I get to open them again my own hands will look like parchment and the liver spots will tremble and dance with whatever old age ailments have beset me. Worse, will I never get to see them again; the old friends who have dutifully followed me around from address to address only to be ignored, time after time? And as I type this I understand that it is not death I fear but going before I have read my allotted selections.

A Dance to the Music of Time

So, as I pack I make a promise to my library. I WILL read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall and I WILL read Churchill’s histories. Antony Beevor’s Second World War will be consumed as will Lady Antonia Fraser’s Perilous Question. Paradise Lost will be found and I will revisit some of those collected wisdoms whose percipience was wasted on me first time around. Is it A Question of Upbringing or A Buyer’s Market? Or in Hearing Secret Harmonies will I finally get to have the last waltz in the Dance to the Music of Time? One thing is certain – only time will tell.

Think Tank

Deep in the heart of Labour Land there is a crisis. Correction, there are crises. Leadership, policy and identity are three of them and I’m sure many more lurk beneath that oh so thin skin. Andy Burnham says, “By gum, that-there immigration IS a problem after all,” and “Let’s have a referendum.” And while Labourites on Twitter instinctively cleave to the #toryscum hashtag, party spokespeople are doing their best to appear wise after the event yet still fail to fully grasp how far from their core voters their bubble has wafted.

Giles Fraser, Owen Jones and Polly Toynbee have done their public handwringing and confirmed what we already knew – that Labour hold the British public in such contempt that they don’t believe they are intelligent enough to wield their vote wisely. Pretty much in their own words – certainly in Giles Fraser’s words – they just don’t know what’s good for them. Tony Blair’s focus group approach to policy doesn’t seem so cynical now, does it? To get their vote you have to give them what they want… even if they are too stupid to know what that is.

Not left enough? Too far left? Where does the party want to be? Well, in power, that’s where, for the raison d'être of any party, even the former party of the people, is to rule over the people, preferably with an ironclad majority. The irony is that to obtain the power to make the little people dance they must first be offered inducement to vote the right way. And this time round Labour’s politics of envy will be labelled ‘aspiration’. In prospective leaders’ inner circles think tanks are being formed to decide what level of envy – I mean aspiration – will appeal to the Benefits Street generation; who do they want to be jealous of now? And how can we dress that up as compassion?

The food bank rhetoric is just bouncing off as nobody can identify a single person who would be dead of starvation for want of a discretionary food parcel. The NHS just refuses to lie down and die and much to Labour’s chagrin has just returned its best overall satisfaction survey in twenty years. Wages are starting to rise and homes are being built. The thing is, ordinary people are just getting on with their lives and the serried ranks of academics on the left have no idea how to deal with it. Mondeo Man and Worcester Woman have moved on; they have worked out, without the ‘help’ of government, that wealth needs to be amassed before you can start sharing it out. They have also worked out that the state is not a good arbiter of that dividend.

Turning blue?

A tank is a big, lumbering war machine. A blunt instrument, with blind spots and an inability to wage subtle, stealthy warfare. A tanker is a giant ship with such momentum that it takes many miles to change direction. Labour’s think-tankers have similar problems and they are starting, perhaps, to realise them, but it will take them many years before they finally understand that the political offering which most appeals to the electorate is the one they just selected. I look forward to the day that particular penny drops and Labour finally gets that the people’s flag is not red at all, but deepest blue.

Farage-oh!

I have harboured a mistrust of the European Union and of politicians in general since long before 1975. I saw union power cripple industries; wildcat strikes, flying pickets, one-out/all-out and often on a whim. Two minutes-worth of tea break, efficiency drives, mechanisation and more; any excuse it seemed, back in the sixties and seventies and the all-powerful shop steward would snap his mighty fingers and the crack would be heard across the land. But in one thing the unions and I were agreed; there was something rotten about Project Europe.

Then after Wilson’s victory in 1974 on a promise to hold the first referendum in our history I saw the way in which the two sides, pro and con, handled the debate. Despite the overwhelming feeling in the country that we lost something of ourselves when Ted Heath signed us up, the big money of the ‘in’ campaign bombarded us with the slick propaganda of fear. We were already in, they said, and it’s fine. To leave before we gave it a chance would make us look ridiculous. As a declining world power our voice could only be heard as part of something bigger. If we weren’t inside the Common Market we would be outside all markets. It stank. And as a result of that stink the British pinched their noses and voted against their heart.

Twenty years later that heart returned as Britain’s confidence had grown and a small new party was formed. Since then the Internet has allowed access to follow the debate in far more detail than hitherto and although there is no precedent to show we would be better off out, there is precious little to show we’d be better off in; but one hell of a dirty pile of evidence of corruption, coercion and a hell-bent agenda of eradicating the nation state. On pragmatic grounds the generation that got to vote in would now vote out. The generation that just missed out – me and millions like me – are even more certain we have nothing to fear from stepping outside. But move to the under-forties and the picture is blurred by a relentless message from Brussels that to leave would be suicide. It just wouldn’t.

But for Ukip’s dogged persistence we would simply not be discussing it at all. Conservative rebels have serially failed to bring their party to heel and many sit firmly on the fence, occasionally hopping to one side or another – I’m looking at you, Boris – whenever politically expedient. And Ukip would not have had the success it has had without the dogged persistence of one Nigel Farage. Red Ukip, Right Ukip; however the party has lurched, whichever vote it has courted I have always viewed it as a one-issue – one crucial issue – party.

They say power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. This may or may not be what is happening with Nigel Farage right now, but now is not the time for the party to fall apart. David Cameron may or may not honour his cast-iron pledge for an honest in/out referendum but we already know he is 100% on the side of in and his whips will do their utmost to keep his dogs in line. You can say what you like about Nigel Farage and I know you will, but I am wholly convinced of one thing: we would not even be having the prospect of a referendum were it not for him.

Come the referendum...

Others have written at length about what Patrick O’Flynn has said and sharp are the knives, ready to carve Nigel’s early epitaph, but the political landscape might have been a sterile wasteland without his towering presence. As a one-man thorn in the side he has done more than any Euro-sceptic Tory to give the people of Britain the choice they never really had 40 years ago. So, I no longer care about whether or not Ukip is 'different', or whether the man at its helm is a true anti-politician or just like all the rest; none of that is important now. But the 'out' campaign needs a strong voice and there is no bigger and more coherent than Team Farage.

None so Blind

Can’t see for looking? Can’t see the wood for the trees? Yesterday brought yet another flurry – or is it a rash? – of Labour apologists suddenly discovering what they struggled to see for five long years. But I’m not so ready to forgive their casual myopia; there’s none so blind as those who will not see. For all those years (and many before, while still in office) the Labour Party steadfastly refused to acknowledge what their own voters tried desperately to tell them. The very people who brought Labour into existence felt abandoned as their lives degenerated and every time they tried to raise their concerns the party cocked a deaf ’un and pretended all was well.

But their supporters are a stubborn bunch and clung onto their belief even as the existence of the godhead was being shown to be just smoke and mirrors. The conjuror revealed the cards up his sleeves, the stooge in the audience and the dove in his pocket and still the faithful willed it to be real magic. And then the little boy in the crowd pointed at the Emperor’s naked bollocks and, as if he had counted to three and snapped his fingers, they all woke up. Stunned, they realised they had been led up the garden path; tricked, betrayed and abandoned and all for an ology looking for an idea. The dream was over and the ballot proved it.

Yes there are still some too stupid to fully understand and yes there are those still willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, but only now, their credibility in tatters and their enemies triumphant; only now do the party leaders even begin to admit what we all knew for years. Not only wasn’t Labour working, it wasn’t listening either. The voters are innocent; all they did was try and try and try to get through. But the party apparatchiks deserve every last bit of humiliation that can be heaped upon them. Shame on you all; this wasn’t incompetence, it was wilful ignorance.

For a century labour didn’t need to listen – they knew what their people wanted because they were their people. And even now they are not apologising because they are sorry for anything, they are doing it because they think it’s what we want to hear. Tony Blair took a leaf out of Margaret’s book and led his party to the right and into the light, but he still allowed himself to imagine the party knew best what people wanted. Things can only get better, they sang, and then assembled focus groups to find out what things people should be told would get better. The New Labour babysitters had little in the way of a vision, but they sure knew how to bribe the kids into keeping quiet.

Smoke. And mirrors. And now, as the latest line-up of bright-eyed hopefuls takes to the stage, they wonder what they can do to repair the rift. Surely not ‘The Third Way’ again? It is telling when agitators like Owen Jones urge them to take up the mantra the Conservatives have chanted for years. “Don’t let the Tories steal aspiration – we on the left must claim it” he squeaks in his latest piece for the gutless Guardian. Is he turning away from ultra-socialism and embracing Maggie’s way? Is he bollocks; in true Marxist fashion he really wants Labour to continue turning left, but just appear to occupy Tory territory and alter the meaning of the word.

Lost Causes

Thankfully, the true party of aspiration – you’d have to go a long way to beat the vision of a home-owning democracy – has five years to steady the ship and prove to the country that a hand up is far better than a hand out. Things can only get better? They can now.

Same-same

We are a strange species, the human race. We continue to exist because of our cooperative nature, but we excel because our competitive urges favour mighty mutations that simply don’t fit the cooperative model. If we were a herd of buffalo these big beasts would either gather a harem and found a dynasty, or else be cast out and fall prey to the wolves. No, not the Tories, real wolves; I’m talking about pre-history here. It is not in the nature of species generally to tolerate extreme variants; where they appear, if they survive, they generally initiate speciation. But humans are all equal, apparently, or so we try to tell ourselves.

But aren’t we utterly fascinated and drawn to difference? Especially if that difference is very very good… or very very bad. Serial killers, despots, freaks of all kinds; the more extreme, the less like humans, the more we are intrigued. We celebrate not uniformity but variations; of appearance – tallest , shortest, fattest, prettiest; and of ability – cleverest, dumbest, quickest, most. The poorest in the world are endlessly studied, photographed, catalogued and classified, while the richest are creatures of almost beatific adoration for some. Is it odd, do you think, that a species which relies the most for its continuation on sameness reserves its greatest accolades for those who don’t share that quality?

Further than that, we go out of our way to invent even more ‘differentnesses’, with a whole industry dedicated to finding new looks or identifying new diseases with which to parade our lack of conformity to the all-important norm. We are all different – just like everybody else – and all sorts of variants of psychology and sociology and contemporary anthropology seek to expand our vast catalogue of uniqueness. Thus were my musings on listening to Matthew Parris’ ‘Great Lives’ programme yesterday evening, where Marlon Brando was discussed at length as a complex genius of his age.

The women – for women it was – were waxing lyrical about his allure, his charisma and the way in which he transformed acting forever. Now I’m not saying he didn’t have an influence, but I would dispute somewhat the way it is interpreted. The man was a lazy, arrogant brute, who often admitted as much. Among some admittedly towering works are other roles played with nothing but indifference and he held in contempt the industry which gave him his fortune, often saying – like a churlish teenager – that he would have liked to have done a different job. “…could have been a contender.” Even HE wanted to be different.

Be honest - do I look gay in this?

But I’m not arguing about Brando; I have no axe to grind. I just find it fascinating that there are millions of people around the world who seek out conformity via membership of cults, religions and political systems and somehow in becoming subsumed into that great uniform mass, lose a vital aspect of humanity. The fact is we are all different and we each find different solutions to our personal conundrum. Why would we want to all be the same? Groucho Marx famously said he would refuse to join a club that would have him as a member. Not me though. I’m different

Heeps of fun!

I blame Jesus, basically. It always has to be somebody else’s fault, after all… hasn’t it? I was going to rise above it all today and not indulge in the delicious bout of gloating that right-thinking people are still enjoying, most of all because of the pain it’s causing the left. I was going to find something entirely neutral to riff on, but then I heard about Rebecca Roache. Now come on, we’re better than that – cockroach doesn’t even have an ‘e’ on the end – but if some were to compare using a privileged platform to plant hate-eggs in the minds of the impressionable with, say, an infestation, who am I to say it ain’t apt? Especially as she is saying that she is innately superior because she doesn’t judge people – unlike those hateful Tories. (Stewart Francis: “My kids are quick to judge – they get that from their mother”)

Now come on everybody, she’s entitled to her opinion after all; even if it isn’t actually her opinion at all but that of the hive mind – there we go with the insect thing again – which seems to control much of the academic left. It’s as if those whose lives have been spent in the entirely theoretical have no ability to communicate with those who mine, refine, transport, shape, sell or deliver things for a living. At the heart of the current meltdown of ‘the left’ (how they hate us for using that generalisation) is the hilarious irony that their utter hatred of 'the other' is so deeply embedded they can't even see it for the bigotry it is. And watching them try to figure out why we are all laughing is simply divine.

Take the cringeworthy Guardian article by Rhiannon Lucy ‘Chicken Licken’ Cosslett in which she tells of the coming apocalypse and perpetuates the unvarying lie of the left that those who do not share their weakness, their meekness, their moist-eyed wonder at the preciousness of everything, have no compassion, no empathy and no concern for anybody but themselves. In Lucy’s world the shades surround us and darkness falls upon the earth. Well it would do if the nice people who labour to make and distribute electricity one day decided to abandon their principles of pragmatically addressing the practicalities of modern-day technology. It is significant that those who make things work almost never write articles about how unfair everybody else is.

Without the doers the thinkers would starve. And those who graft not only have little time to think fanciful thoughts, they also get to come face to face with the hard facts of existence. The left love to parody anybody who holds a different world view as right-wingers; nasty, selfish, uniformed, human-hating gargoyles ready to piss on the chips of anybody below. They are racists, bigots, whateverophobes, etc, etc etc. What’s funny is that being pragmatic and life-hardened we mostly hate nobody with which we have no personal animus and we know there is no such thing as a free lunch. We also accept that what lunch we do gather may need to be guarded from thieves and freeloaders before we get to share it with friends. We’re good friends to have.

So what’s all this got to do with Jesus? Given the level of ever-so ‘umble ‘and-wringing worthy of a whole nation of Uriah Heeps, I think we now know who the meek really are and The Big J said they will inherit The Earth.  Maybe they will, but I wonder how long they’ll get to hang on to it without the big, rough boys to see off the competition?

Shop soiled

Due to not fixing the roof the last time the sun was shining, I was up there repairing it yesterday. Oddly enough the sun was actually shining, but as I toiled my thoughts turned to roofs at large, some of which may by now be the subject of contemplation by the poor and dispossessed, the ‘most vulnerable’ and those who care about them as the best position from which to launch the ultimate protest. Throwing yourself on the mercy of gravity and concrete and leaving the clearing up to others is, of course, exactly appropriate for those who can no longer live in this cruel, cruel world. A world where, if you believe social media, the Tories are planning to introduce policy so nasty it will intentionally kill thousands; a world where Maggie’s ghost will stalk the land stealing the breath from colic infants in the night.

At times over the weekend I felt as if I had been transported to a Dickensian squalor of the very worst of times. While most ordinary people, voters or not, went about their days with a feeling of relief at the general election outcome, or else a feeling of nothing very much, a small but vocal and disruptive minority with access to impressionable young minds set about protesting at democracy. On Twitter it emerged that because 36% of the votes went to make 50% Conservative seats the result is invalid and the 64% should have prevailed. In other words let the largest party become the minority in parliament so that the disjointed forces of the confused and left and anarchic and plain bonkers can represent the basket case that Britain has so clearly become.

Basing your majority on everybody that didn’t vote Tory and then expecting that bizarre assembly to somehow come up with coherent policy is exactly what simple democracy would be; or as I like to call it, chaos. It betrays a level of thinking that cannot move beyond the propaganda that Tories are evil, Tories kill the poor and sick, Tories are not human. I spent a rare weekend off being variously reviled, insulted, mocked and threatened by the lovely parties, despite never once declaring myself blue or otherwise. Pointing and laughing at the self-destructive ‘left’ was all it took; if you are not with them you must be against them. How in the world do lefty comedians manage to undertake an enhanced scrutiny of humanity yet still believe that raging, screaming hate mobs are the caring side of the divide.

Of course, for we observers of such matters it is all hilarious, like watching YouTube videos of pets and children falling over, tripping up, diving into soup and performing stunts which, to the educated eye, can have only one outcome. But sometimes you wonder if there isn’t something going on at a more sentient level. Take Matt Woodruff of the family business Woodruff’s Yard in Lewes. He erected the sign you see below to express his disgust at the election outcome. A small businessman, against the Tories? Ah but plants, see…

When this hit Twitter (my bad) Matt took to a local forum to defend his possibly illegal discriminatory approach to business. If it works soon we will be able to enjoy the good old days of ‘No blacks, no dogs, no Irish’ at establishments nationwide. And compensation will be paid to those Christian guest house owners prosecuted for preferring not to accommodate gays, or bakeries averse to making lesbian wedding cakes. But of course that won’t happen and nor should it. Matt will not be prosecuted and there are enough who feel like him to do his business no harm. So while 64% can go on hating, the other 36 are quietly getting on keeping the world safe for them to do so.

The Left are revolting...

There have been demonstrations. Is it all a protest against the oppression of a violent dictator state, which ‘disappears’ troublesome upstarts, or imprisons them for years in torture dungeons? Is it a protest against the wholesale eviction of council tenants so their homes can be flattened to build munitions factories? Is it a Jarrow March style demand for jobs, to save the shipyards, the coalmines, the steelworks? Is it, even, a resurgent CND, trying to bomb the whale, or whatever? Nope; it’s a protest against democracy. It is an outright denial of the right of free citizens to elect the government of their choice by a simple majority. How ironic that the left want to impose the values of islam, a primitive totalitarian cult which they may not criticise.

See the democracy!

“This is not the government we need!” they cry and in their hyperbole make risible comparison with Nazi Germany. “The people demand better!” But of course that is exactly NOT what the people demanded. There has been much talk over the weekend about ‘shy Tories’, people afraid to admit to their ‘progressive’ acquaintances that their lives haven’t been blighted by the coalition and don’t expect much blight in the next five years. People made to feel ashamed for not wanting to allow the parlous experiments of socialism free rein to ruin the lives of the poorest. Because it is always the poorest who suffer under Labour. Always.

But don’t worry; although the massed mobs hurl abuse and bricks the children of the left are not the legion they believe themselves to be. And they only represent themselves, a whining multitude of entitlement-whores, convinced the world exists for them alone. The best that can be hoped is that they one day grow up and leave the cult. The worst is, well, have you seen Arthur Scargill lately? The teeth of the left, like much of their character, are made from mediocre stuff and those who don’t regain sanity are to be found mewling in corners and sucking on their rusks. We’ve been here before; the left are a spent force.

Meanwhile, meet Jim. Jim dutifully voted Labour all his life because, as his dad told him, “That’s the party for us, son.” Jim is lucky to have a job and come Monday he’ll kiss his wife and kids goodbye and drive to work in his small car, on which he has only a few payments left. Jim worries about his children’s education and is saving up, when he can, to help the with tuition fees in the future. With his young family the state of the NHS is also of some concern but his experiences thus far have been all good and he pays his taxes from his average salary without complaint because we all have a part to play.

Although Jim is not a regular charity-giver he would never want to see the genuinely needy going without. The poor and the sick need help and he sees it as the state’s job to provide for those who can’t do it for themselves. But he has no time for those he knows carve out a perfectly reasonable life on benefits and see it as a right. He doesn’t blame them directly but he does blame the system which has made that an option. And although he doesn’t believe himself to be a racist and feels lucky to live in a country to which half the world’s poor people see as a dream destination, he has a niggling feeling that mass immigration isn’t helping.

Vicious, nasty, murdering Tory scum!

Jim hopes to retire with his mortgage paid off and his state pension supplemented by a small works pension he is fortunate to have. He won’t end up rich, but his children will have the best he can give them and hopefully he will have instilled in them the need for self-reliance and a civic duty towards less fortunate others. As he watches the riots on the television Jim wonders if those demonstrating actually do understand the lives of those they say they represent; the lives they say the Tories don’t understand. Jim dutifully voted Labour all his life, but this time he put his ‘X’ against the Conservative candidate. He has yet to feel the urge to stamp on the heads of poor babies.

The Incurable Shiteness of Being… a Lefty

The use of hashtags, bringing metadata into common currency, is a curious phenomenon and prone to blunder. The latest trending tag  #ThankYouEd is a classic example; started by the garment-rending children of the left to be competitive in their bereavement, but swiftly hijacked by others to praise Ed’s ineptitude in handing the keys to Number Ten back to the man best able to use the office. For the eternal irony of the mewling left, praising Ed as a saviour come to deliver them from evil itself, is that the greater good is served by a Conservative approach to almost everything. And while bile and hatred comes naturally to the caring parties, adherents of the nasty party are more likely to just find their cringing highly amusing. Thus Ed is thanked for his valiant efforts in putting the right man at the helm. (Of course, it is all the fault of Margaret Thatcher, still, even though this time it’s ding-dong the witch is Ed.)

The thinly-disguised communist Giles Fraser writes in the Guardian “Right now I feel ashamed to be English. Ashamed to belong to a country that has clearly identified itself as insular, self-absorbed and apparently caring so little for the most vulnerable people among us. … Maybe that’s why the pollsters got it so badly wrong: we are not so much a nation of shy voters as of ashamed voters, people who want to present to the nice polling man as socially inclusive, but who, in the privacy of the booth, tick the box of our own self-interest.”

And the child-commentator Owen Jones wrote “There will be a big debate now over the future of the Labour party, and what the left does next. This country desperately needs a politics of hope that answers people’s everyday problems on living standards, job security, housing, public services and the future of their children… What is needed is a movement rooted in the lives of working-class people and their communities. The future of millions of people depends on it.“

I’m tempted to taunt with cries of diddums and in my weaker moments I confess I’m not above a bit of gloating, but the problem is self-evident; once again the privileged left-wingers just can’t see what is in front of everybody’s else’s eyes. Much the same thing happened in Maggie’s day as Kinnock’s goons just failed to understand the motives of the ordinary working man. Labour were shocked by how many ordinary workers voted for Tories, then and now. But why wouldn’t they? What most seek is a steady job, a home, a family life and as little government intervention by way of taxes and rules as possible; in other words, core Conservative principles.

Even in the heady days of union strength though, that apparent solidarity was driven by a desire for collective power spurred on by the thought of individual gain, but it was heavily enforced by sanctions. Ask any strike-breaker tarred with the tag of ‘scab’ and he will explain how 'caring' leftist ideologies are made to function. If the only effective means by which you can order society is through coercive legislation – race laws, hate crimes, restriction of speech, enforced multiculturalism skewed by privileges for the few, etc, etc - I’d suggest you look a lot more like fascists than do the Tories.

What we need are nice uniforms...

Meanwhile, as the Blue Team roll up their sleeves and take up, unfettered, where they left off, Labour and the rest of the raggle-taggle left will fire up their well-oiled electoral thinking engine and without any meaningful consultation with those they seek to represent they will convene insider focus groups, gather in Marxist study meetings and come up with some really pithy slogans. You just see if they don’t

Bull run

So, we were all wrong. Or at least most of us were wrong. Professional commentators, political analysts the guys in 'the city' betting the farm on the outcomes... practically everybody except Janet Daley.

Now the election is over and with a slim Conservative majority we can let the fun begin. If it all goes right, hopefully a whole new generation can have the opportunity to grow up without ever knowing the possibility of living an entire life on welfare. Get back to work and let the welfare budget help those who genuinely need it rather than using it to retain a client vote. It's the best of all outcomes, so I hope DC and his crew don't just piss it away.

Strike while the iron's hot and start slashing those public service budgets. Get those sleeves rolled up and forget about running a five-year election campaign and instead let's dig out the rot from the NHS, education and government itself. Properly fund what needs to be funded and restore a sense of purposeful action, rather than the helplessness and re-action that has typified the state for twenty years or more.

I'm serious; we probably have this one chance to restore the country to rude health and start to educate-out the entitlement culture. Ed Miliband has already begun the 'nasty party' narrative with his resignation speech and the cudgels will be taken up by all his flag-bearers. But fuck the lot of them; start as we mean to go on and let's rebuild the country on the back of some proper hard graft and re-instill that long forgotten work ethic.

Remember folks, the harder you all work the more secure my pension will be. And look sharp about it - nothing lasts for ever.

After the ball is over...

Now, I may get to regret my words later and in many ways the forthcoming thoughts are more of a wish list than actual prediction, but given that the campaigning is effectively over (except in majority muslim communities where the electoral beatings will continue right up to the line) I am turning my attention to the leaders. Or, rather, where the leaders will likely be once the votes are counted; every ‘X’ in every box takes us one step closer to their political end times. So here goes with Old Battsby’s Almanac for post-election 2015. Release the tumbleweed…

Ed Miliband: Following a lacklustre final showing despite all the bully-boy tactics of Unite’s rent-a-mob, trained by the LEA (Lutfur’s Electoral Academy) Labour lose every seat in Scotland, much of the North of England and despite retaining shithole constituencies in Wales and East London it fails to turn its percentage into posts. Although coming second overall they can do nothing without the Scottish National Party, so Ed resigns in favour of pursuing the 'family' business: He and Justine take over the Kinnock’s lucrative EU jobs and discover they can actually do more to influence UK policy from an anonymous office in Brussels than they ever could in Downing Street. There they plot to continue the progressive decline begun under Harold Wilson.

Alex Salmond: Disappointed at Ed’s copping out, Wee Eck realises that the only the strings he can still pull are connected to Nicola Sturgeon and despite her fan-dabby-dozey support in Holyrood the SNP is still an also-ran without a Labour Party to blackmail. The unionists breathe a collective sigh of relief, unaware of the gathering sentiment south of the border for a truly independent Scotland. Oil prices remain low and after the English get their Scottish Independence referendum in 2016 the Scots economy relies once again on whisky and shortbread. Salmond is exiled, via a wee, bonnie boat, to Skye and never heard from again.

Nutty Natalie Bennett: Still the leader of the Green Party which now has a round number of MPs – zero. No challenger emerges to replace her because, well, the Greens just aren’t like that… you bully. Also, as few people can understand what she says, largely because they fall asleep within minutes of her opening her mouth, they figure that it would be unfair to remove her just in case she has got a credible policy struggling to get out.

Meanwhile a number of former safe seats fall with the result that the odious Douglas Alexander, the ginger Danny alexander and the titty-selfie-fixated Simon Danczuk all retire to run think tanks and quietly become rich in taxpayer-funded, self-congratulatory non-jobs. Russell Brand’s career goes into a slow decline until he ends up playing at provincial comedy clubs to dwindling audiences composed almost entirely of crack-bound pseudo-anarchists who still live with their ‘stupid parents’.

Nigel Farage: Naughty Nigel – just scrapes in at South Thanet despite Dan Hodges almost obsessive attempts to write him down in every column he has written since 2012. He presides over a Ukip parliamentary showing of seven MPs. Less than he wanted, but more than anybody had dared to predict. This is just enough to counter the few LibDem rebels in the coalition. Oh yes, because:

Nick Clegg: Remains Deputy Prime Minister after the Tories came to his defence in Sheffield Hallam. He still has to fag for George Osborne as part of the deal, holding his nose whenever he has to vote against all the natural instincts of his party; whatever they are. Nick continues to host ‘Call Clegg’ on LBC radio and is rumoured to be lining up a media career for the very near future. Nobody predicts he will retain his seat in 2020.

David Cameron: Once again Call-me-Dave manages to be Prime Minister despite not actually winning the election. He plans, as promised, to stand down before the end of the term, but he presides, as a broken man, over a coalition made up largely of fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists. There is still no sign of a referendum on membership of the EU any time soon.

Big Brother Dimbleby... always watching.

As always the only real winners are the Dimblebies of this world. The commentators, media hacks, columnists, bloggers, sketch writers and Andrew Neil Cobbley and all; Hodges, Toynbee, Jones, Marr, Robinson, Utley, Brooker, Letts et al are still at it. Proof, if proof were needed, that the best way to get rich in a gold rush is to sell shovels and blankets.

Just Kipping?

Yesterday morning, on the Today programme, I heard Nick Clegg described as the most abused man in British politics. I suppose in BBC-Land that would ring true, given that in their closed world Nigel Farage simply does not exist if they shut their eyes and chant loudly enough. In truth the kind of people who make up the majority of the Beeb’s staffers could quite cheerfully insist that he is a figment even as they hold their nose and conduct a constantly interrupted interview with the leader of the third most popular party in the country. What, somebody other than Holy Labour actually listening to 'ordinary people'?  It. Does. Not. Compute. There is also plenty of anecdotal evidence of huge porky pies being told on doorsteps by activists of other parties and a failure to prompt for Ukip by polling organisations. What is everybody so scared of?

In support of the establishment thesis that Ukip is insignificant and thus by inference so are the opinions of those who will vote for them, the general election media coverage in the last 48 hours is steadfastly playing down any Kippery, unless of course it plays into the narrative that Ukip supporters are all unhinged, frothy-mouthed racists obsessed with and blaming every single ill on immigrants. Yet Ukip have categorically stated that it is not immigrants but uncontrollable, high-volume immigration, stemming from our membership of a political union that nobody was ever asked to join that is the root cause of our inability to arrange our own affairs sensibly. Hence the name; the United Kingdom Independence Party and not the United Kingdom Darkies Go Home Party.

Given that all the other outfits are similarly campaigning on stretch in the NHS, the ‘crisis’ in education and school places, a lack of housing, the downward pressure on wages and our creaking infrastructure, is it really too outlandish to surmise that a greater population than our society can comfortably accommodate may be contributory to every single one of those problems? And if – I hesitate to use the word - ‘mature’ parties like the Tories and Labour are insisting they will bring immigration under control despite the failure of both of them to actually do so, why is it that when Ukip flag up that particular failure this is taken as proof positive of their ‘vile’ racial hatred?

Fruitcakes, loonies, ignorant, ill-educated, racist rabble? There are poor spellers, bigots, verbally incontinent morons and deluded fools voting for every political party in the land, statistically in easily greater numbers for red and blue than for purple. Some idiot children will vote Labour because Russell Brand told them to, some others will vote Green… because Russell Brand told them to. But only the ‘Kippers are racist? Maybe they just got fed up of voting for more of the same, but if it’s racism you really want, look no further than those cuddly third-world communities so beloved of one party in particular.

Do fuck off back home, dear...

I don’t have any such misty-eyed recollections as John Major’s “long shadows on county cricket grounds, warm beer, green suburbs, dog lovers, and old maids cycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist.” I know it wasn’t like that for the majority. But I do have very real memories of growing up in what felt like the best country in the world. The country that had saved - actually saved - the world from Hitlerian fascism. Whoever you vote for, surely wanting to prevent us 'sleepwalking' into becoming just another EU sub-regional backwater is a legitimate ambition to recognise and not just to slap down with hysterical slurs. Is Britain just 'Kipping? Or is it waking up?