islam explained

Did you ever wonder about theology as a grown-up pursuit? I often have; the very notion of so-called ‘revealed’ religions being tinkered with down the generations to come up with ever more convoluted ways of interpreting the ‘literal word’ of supposedly perfect gods. Aside from the ‘perfect’ bit there’s a problem right there with that plural. The big three revere jehovah, the unimaginative ‘god’ and of course the boss of islam, ‘allan’. (As entirely abstract concepts none of these imaginary beings or beliefs deserves to begin with a capital letter – a small protest, but mine own.) But if they all believe in a single perfect creator, as they seem to do, who somehow passed onto his publicists on Earth his exact design for the way his creations should live their lives then I’d suggest theology has much to answer for; Chinese Whispers passing as serious study… and in the process multiplying one creator into several and one ‘revealed’ message into thousands of contradictory rules.

Wait – that’s almost as if the study of religion actually creates the gods, in direct contradiction of the orthodoxy. Best get smoking some more of that good shit, guys. And following that simple chain of thought I can now reveal the bleeding obvious, that the extended study of something most children get beyond as soon as they have to earn a living is indicative, not of any higher calling but of an inability to enter into mature debate about human nature. Much, in fact, as those eternal students of Marx can never accept the evidence that he was wrong on just about everything. How long before the world’s islamic ‘scholars’ tell us that “Of course, REAL islam has never been tried, actually.”

I have often mused thus, so listening on the drive home to Beyond Belief on Radio 4 I welcomed the opportunity to become enlightened about the only religion in whose name thousands are currently engaged in killing and maiming and declaring global annihilation of unbelievers. No, not the Rastas – although you’d be forgiven for being misled, what with all that chat about the mind-warping drugs – but the religion of, wait for it, peas. Several participants engaged in discussion about the koran and the hadiths and their importance to aslan. Well, bugger me if the thing I learned most of all is that – you guessed it – it is all made up!

It turns out that the koran (the literal word of allah) cannot be understood without reference to the hadiths (the verbatim ramblings of mohammed) but there’s a twist or two. You see, not all muslims believe the koran is the literal word of allan and not all the hadiths are thought to be authentic, some being created on the whims of various propagandists as and when required in order to interpret the koran in whatever way the authors wanted. Good hadiths and bad hadiths… and ‘maybe’ the literal word of a non-existent being.  But it’s all okay, they have a rigorous ‘scientific’ method of telling truth from lies. Yes, it turns out that the true mohammedan hadiths have irrefutable provenance; since the days of mo’ they have been passed down by word of mouth from imam to imam, although quite what David Bowie’s missus has to do with it is anybody’s guess.

So that’s all settled. Or rather it isn’t. See, the peaceful muslims are adhering to the exact same religion as the murderous ones and how they behave is merely down to which version they choose to take from the shelf. An Abu Dhabi first edition from 1929, for instance, might instruct you to look out for your elderly neighbour while the 1943 Mecca Press third reprint is quite clear you should behead all those who live in odd-numbered houses. And do you bomb or love-bomb your host country? It’s a tricky little conundrum isn’t it? And there is no point in asking a muslim because they haven’t a clue either, yet all of them are convinced that their current interpretation is the correct one...until they change their mind. Oh, did I mention that is okay too? 

Meanwhile the infidels David Cameron, Barack Obama and all the western leaders are terrified of upsetting the currently good muslims in case they shuffle over to the dark side. They all say they want to work with islam, to understand it, to reach out to its disaffected and strive to defend the best traditions of the faith. Best of luck with that, I say, but until the penny drops, how about reaching out to the disaffected and abandoned millions of your non-muslim citizens whose eyes were de-scaled long ago and can see perfectly clearly what you so wish to deny?

UK End Times?

Humans. We’re not that bright. Nor are we especially cooperative except when in need. Our first instinct is to look out for ourselves – a dead human is no use to any other – our second is to protect that which we hold most dear. At times we are faced with the dilemma of deciding just what that actually is. Is it your spouse, your children, your home, money, possessions or pets? That depends on what the threat is and over what timescale; with enough resources we can save the lot. Short on time we have to choose under duress and we don’t always choose as wisely as, in retrospect, we ought to.

I’d say at the moment we are faced with a very clear choice between safety and security or adherence to the bizarre and unworkable dream of ‘ever closer union’. Greece must go. The borders must be defended. Our armed forces’ decline must be reversed and our island sovereignty reasserted. The great pan-European project has failed and every country participating in it has lost something as result. The poorer nations are in greater debt and greater need as their more able citizens desert them for richer pickings elsewhere. The richer countries have extended their welfare systems both within and outside their own borders, creating an entire industry based on sponging off the labours and kindness of others.

Every developed European country has gone from being prosperous and proud to becoming a dangerous cocktail consisting of fortified outposts of the rich surrounded by the ranks of the poor and unattractive, interspersed with ghettoes of hostile and increasingly alienated outsiders. The architects of the EU may feel they are achieving their stated aims; they are not. Europe is now a powder keg of dissatisfied indigents being progressively supplanted by aggressive invaders, protected by the holy trinity of the law, religion and sociology. Racism is now a more heinous crime than murder. Stephen Lawrence got a sainthood but Lee Rigby got what he deserved? Is this really how you want to live?

As a nation – what we have left of nationhood – Britain should be preparing to defend its history, its traditions, its precious freedoms and its unparalleled geography. This, lest you are too ignorant to realise it, is one of the very best places on the entire planet for humans to scrape a living. We have much to be more than just proud of. But just watch as our own government in collusion with the EU uses the threat of the islamic state to dissolve our borders forever. Watch as the European Army becomes reality, sold as the only way to fend off the forces of the barbarians and Britain becomes nothing more than an outlying and unremarkable EU region.

The ONLY response to ISIS

The upcoming generation know nothing of what we once were and they have been brought up to be in thrall to the warped ideals of the federal European project. When ISIS comes knocking they will practically beg to merge our fortunes with those of the lost continent. I used to believe the final demise of Britain would probably occur after I die. Now I think it may possibly occur in the next five years. There is no point in hoping this won’t happen, it is happening already and there is nobody with power who will lift a finger to prevent it. So, revert to instinct, every man for himself and let the ISIS devils take the hindmost.

Moving on…

One of the non-negotiable planks of the European Union is the free movement of workers, enshrined in the Treaty of Maastricht. EU citizens are entitled to:

·         look for a job in another EU country   

·         work there without needing a work permit

·         reside there for that purpose

·         stay there even after employment has finished

·         enjoy equal treatment with nationals in access to employment, working conditions and all other social and tax advantages

It is held as an entirely settled matter that this is wholly a good thing, much, I imagine, as the rewriting of history to portray the British Empire as unremittingly evil is also seen as ‘a good thing’. There is black and there is white (except when it comes to race) and no gradations in between. The new establishment is simultaneously able, as it did yesterday, to both denounce violence in the name of islam and yet declare without twitching that the same barbarity has nothing to do with islam.

We are not dealing with rational people here; our governments, whether through some misplaced sense of moral justice, allegiance to some higher authority or simple blind obedience to the EU creed no longer even pretend to represent their people. Elections are meaningless; simply mechanisms to return MEPs to office where they are then expected to vote like cattle, being milked on command and at regular intervals with entirely predictable results; ever more laws, ever fewer freedoms. There is no democracy here, so if the commissars say free movement is always good then it must be so.

People, taken as a whole, include murderers, rapists, child molesters, madmen, disease carriers, fanatics, zealots, manipulators, traitors, human-haters, psychopaths and a whole different order of untermenschen, barely fit for inclusion under the general definition of humanity. How can a system which allows people who genuinely need to be restrained for the greater good free access, as a near-sacred right, to hide among the masses be acceptable? And why should the control of national borders – a system which has maintained order for centuries – be a bad thing?

By a similarly warped metric, diversity is always good, even where it brings conflict, and segregation into communities is always bad… except where it is a community which self-segregates and then abuses the laws and tolerance of the people it has segregated from. It seems some diktats override others, especially where it involves minorities of any kind. Discrimination is a bad word, but ‘positive discrimination’ is encouraged, especially where it upsets the normal order of things. Equality – an impossible outcome – is the dream of those who believe in all this stuff, yet women-only organisations, events and selection lists are fine

Stop thinking for yourselves!!!

I take all this and many similar perversions of the historically natural order to be entirely consistent with the notion that the idea is the thing, whatever the consequences. Just as Labour’s ‘the party comes first’ outburst betrayed their deeper thinking, the EU’s insistence on open borders when it is clearly disastrous to throw together incompatible cultures shows their utter contempt for the lives of ordinary people in pursuit of their goal of a country called Europe. It seems to me that we handed over the word ‘democracy’ to the Newspeak think tank and if we want it back we’re going to have to fight for it.

Here we go again

So, who would ever have thought it? The religion of peace once again fails to live up to the billing and turns out to be the religion of killing in the most bestial manner possible. In Tunisia, France and Kuwait the latest death toll rises to 38. Obviously David Cameron, in common with all the other leaders of the world about to be engulfed by a tidal wave of barbaric slaughter, has felt compelled to denounce this as ‘nothing to do with islam’. But look Dave, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and blows itself to fuck up like a duck, it’s a murderous muslim duck. And no amount of negotiation will deter the other suicidal monsters from following suit.

The official wisdom anyway is that you must not reason with a terrorist. With a terrorist who has lost all reason and is delirious with joy at the prospect of taking your life while he sacrifices his own you have only one option and it is not ignoring him and hoping he will give up and go away. If we can’t even deter desperate, weakened refugees from oozing across our borders how in the hell will we ever prevent walking bombs from taking as many lives as they like? The time for passive resistance is gone and the time for the muslims in Britain to choose is already long past any reasonable point.

There can be no pact with passionate martyrdom; it is them or us, as they have made clear. When will our elected leaders decide to come out for us instead of defending them? I don’t propose that every follower of the faith is a ticking time bomb, but the clear evidence is that many are; far too many to be dismissed as 'a tiny minority'. The muslim community demonstrates surprise and a certain helplessness at the viciousness and fanaticism of its radicalised youth, but that is not enough. It has to open its eyes to the fact, clear to everybody else, that this absolutely is everything to do with islam. And once they can do that they must face what the Germans had to face over half a century ago.

Adolf Hitler was once almost a god to some and a revered leader to the majority of ordinary citizens who saw themselves as good people. The post-war plea of "Wir haben von nicht gewusst" ("We knew nothing") was a simple lie. They knew but did not want to know. Yes, I know, I’ve invoked Hitler and therefore I must lose the argument but pretending that islam is somehow a force for good in the world seems much the same to me as believing the Nazi propaganda about Germany’s divine right to rule all of Europe, if not the world. Need I remind you of ISIS’s intent to establish a world caliphate?

What muslims will only see when they open their eyes.

After the Second World War it became a matter of shame to be a German and even the name of the Führer was banished from speech, not by diktat but by simple disgrace. To non-muslims the visible symbols of islam – mosques, burkas, those ridiculous trousers – proliferating throughout Europe and alien to its culture are akin to marching with swastikas through conquered lands. When muslims realise this and are prepared to feel shame and responsibility for the murder committed in their name, only then will the rest of us believe the religion cares one iota about peace.

Brotherhood of Man?

France is making threatening noises about the migrants in Calais. Again. Not towards the migrants themselves, having largely given up on any possibility of containing them, but towards Britain, whose fault it apparently is to have allowed them all to cross the whole of the EU in order to get into a country that really doesn’t want them. Calais is the last barrier, the cork in the neck of the Champagne bottle which the EU has been steadily shaking for some years now. When it finally blows, as blow it must, there is going to be froth everywhere and few will escape the consequences.

Paris is bulging, while Italy and Greece are swamped by unwanted migrants and have threatened to issue visas which grant them freedom to roam beyond their own overcrowded lands. Austria is talking of resurrecting its border controls and Hungary is actually intent on building a massive security fence. Nobody wants these people, absolutely nobody, and even those with a misty-eyed and thoroughly unhelpful opinion on the sanctity of human life are doing no more than saying, over and over, that something must be done. Who is going to take in an Eritrean, house an Ethiopian or give succour to a Sudanese? These people are not like us; they do not belong here. And their plight is neither ours to solve nor to feel guilty over.

Populations are anxious and frightened and while the EU refuses to fully acknowledge the immensity of the problem, national governments who rely on democratic processes to retain power no longer have the capacity to ignore them. The awful truth of this race of mankind is becoming clear… we are not equal, we are not one big happy family and in the competition for scarce resources we look after our own first. Every time. After years of being under the mesmeric influence of progressive minority thought, brow-beaten by the propaganda of the faux-meek, people have had enough. When governments won’t act to evict the monster the villagers will break out the pitchforks… and mobs are poor observers of due process.

If Europe wants to save itself from drowning in a scummy sea of crime and violence and hate and suspicion it has to have an effective illegal immigration policy. But not only does it not have one, it is incapable of forming one. The notion of European unity is entirely illusory and this looming immigration crisis might just be the thing which reveals the emperor in all his bare-bollocked glory. On top of all that the USA has been caught red-handed spying on the French and of course, we all know they spy on all of us too. Nobody trusts anybody any more than they ever did and the pretence that they ever really did is slipping round the ankles of international diplomacy like a whore’s drawers.

Every man for himself!

Paris is warning that relations may break down between Britain and France over the Calais situation. Every other major country in the EU is shaking their head, if not their fist, at David Cameron’s ‘negotiations’. True colours are being sported at every turn. This might be the best possible time to get the EU ‘out’ campaign properly underway. Upset all of them, I say, stir up the hornets’ nest. Bring it the hell on.

They're not stupid... they're just not well

It is generally understood that determined conspiracy theorists  and left-wingers are quick to imagine a causal link between their shitty lives and a legion of dark forces ranged against them. Now a new study proves that it is all Thatcher’s fault! Actually that may not be true – I couldn’t be bothered to read all of it but apparently self-control yourself is less common in left-wingers than conservatives. The authors of the report found those on the right are more likely to believe they have free will and the power to change things. Like all ‘ground-breaking’ studies, this is a statement of the bleeding obvious. We've been here before of course, the left’s fantasy world being a source of some amusement to me. 

But it’s all quite simple really, this business of failure or success, dependence or liberty. In former times, parents who worked hard instilled basic, solid values in their offspring who went to junior school, passed the eleven-plus and took their work ethic off to grammar school. This possibility was open to all with the determination and those few who were able earned coveted places at decent provincial universities. From there they progressed in their solid, if unspectacular careers, stuck at it because that is what you did and eventually retired, mortgage-free to a comfortable cottage in the country.

Meanwhile their children, from a higher starting place, were urged to work even harder and make it to Oxbridge, where they made contacts, got better career advice and went into professional jobs, earned huge salaries, set up companies, employed people and earned even bigger salaries and were semi-retired almost before their parents were, passing on their businesses in turn to their own kids. Patience, hard work, aiming for the longer goal and thriving as a result; nothing sinister or unnatural about any of that. But the left, unable to grasp the rules of this more complex play and favouring some magical egalitarian outcome, dug up the road that made it possible.

Now, to get that better, more reliable education, well-to-do parents opt to send their children to private schools. In theory this should be a good thing; paying taxes yet paying again for non-state services and on top of that, freeing up places in those grammar schools for the kids from less affluent families. D’oh, silly me, the grammar school system is the very crutch they kicked away. Competition? Rigour? Oh no, you can’t expose the wee darlings to the harsh realities of life; better keep them closeted from the need to excel for as long as possible. Yet somehow the left closing down of the principal route to a better life for working class kids is some form of evil Tory plot to keep the masses down?

The left hate anybody freeing themselves from the shackles of state provision because this is seen as typical Tories looking after their own. Where were you, they ask, when Johnny needed rescuing from his abusive parents in that hell-hole sink estate? Where were you when ‘we’ were dividing up your taxes to help those we made poor? Where were you when the marches for equality were going on? Oh yes, helping yourself to the fat pile of magic state cash we have convinced ourselves was somehow stolen from ‘the most vulnerable in society’.

A Labour think tank considers their next move.

It’s little wonder the left are so quick to stamp and scream; with their bizarre logic driven almost entirely by bitter emotional responses to the negative outcomes their own redistributive policies bring about. Legalised equality stifles competition, extinguishes initiative and makes everybody poorer. In the twisted minds of the ‘progressives’ this is preferable to anybody getting ahead. The report ends with the line “Previous research has found that people who suffer from conditions they cannot control – such as epilepsy and panic disorder - are less likely to believe in free will than others.” If I had the reasoning powers of a lefty I’d have to conclude they are suggesting socialism is a form of illness.

Jobless

A new report states that while STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) graduates are generally satisfied by the value-for-money of their degree, students studying other subjects such as those lumped into the general headings of ‘the arts’ or ‘social sciences’ are rather less happy that they have forked out £27,000-plus to get a Masters in finger painting… and even less happy when they realise that with such a qualification their entire career path is going to have to involve dealing with children, who they have belatedly realised are not actually ‘the future’ but are, in fact, just a pain in the arse.

So much for Tony Blair’s all-must-have-prizes culture; when everybody gets a degree, degrees in general are worthless. If the intention was to sell the true potential of youngsters down the river than I’d say mission accomplished. The real career prospects for many graduates today is not great. Twenty-one/twenty-two/twenty-three years old and the only worthwhile thing they have on their CV is the nebulous ‘retail’. Which in most cases means ‘shop assistant’.

And what is it with CVs? Children at school produce these meaningless lie-sheets when they have nothing yet to lie about. And then they mass-mail them to employers who are only interested in them turning up, keeping their gobs shut and getting on with the job. You don’t need a CV to wait on tables, work in a store, stack shelves, drive deliveries or work on a building site. What you need is a work ethic, some ambition and an ability to not be so up yourself. They say the job of a CV is to get you an interview, so I guess the thinking around degrees must be to have something to put on your CV…

Meanwhile the job specification writers are being no less inventive in pursuing their side of the arms race that the world of jobs and jobbing is engaged in. Where once somebody with the requisite paperwork would have phoned the number on the small ad which declared ‘Drivers wanted – must have clean licence’ and been asked when they could start. Now they have to join the circus to provide national newspapers with headlines that read ‘1000 applicants submit CVs for one paper round job’. The smart guy should have just driven there and knocked on the door declaring himself ready and willing.

It’s all part of a wider malaise which the proliferation of worthless qualifications introduces. Once, the world was your oyster with good grades in principal subjects at school opening the door to a wide range of career possibilities. But turning the education handle and churning out rows of neatly packaged, ever more specific degree-educated clones with no clue about the real world of work condemns many to a miserable future in a narrow employment corridor from which the only escape is yet more expensive education.

Would you employ these graduates?

Almost every job available to the masses – outside of boffins, geniuses and the rarefied world of rare skills such as pioneering surgeons, premiership footballers and a handful of charismatic entertainers – requires only basic education to a good standard and the rest can and should be learned on the job. Training and experience, not pieces of paper, is what makes people employable. So if you have a Mickey Mouse degree from a Looney Toons ‘university’ and you’re languishing on Jobseeker’s Allowance, blame the goofy world of socialism. That’s all folks!

All you need is…

All you need is love” sang the Beatles. They were wrong, too, but it sounds nice, doesn’t it? Who doesn’t want to be part of a nice, caring narrative? Ah, the dear old left. Incapable of working out why the masses no longer follow them after decades of broken promises, they still think the Tories are the enemy and must pursue that fiction as if it were proven fact. Charlotte Church, for instance, tried to tell everybody that not only were the nasty, in-it-for-their-mates Tories going to sell off hospitals, they were also trying to shift a job-lot of schools on eBay for good measure. And how the crowd lapped that up from the voice-of-the-people, millionaire, hit-it-lucky, ex-child star, millionaire, ordinary person who just happens to be worth millions and has never, ever, been advised by accountants who specialise in tax avoidance… for millionaires.

Russell Brand seems particularly wedded to the idea that people who vote Tory spend their days plotting how to procure suckling babies for their barbecues and how to acquire sufficient numbers of the downtrodden poor to pave the roads to their mansions. So certain is he of his do-gooding influence that, cloaked in his messiah complex, he now says he’s sorry for ‘breaking the country’ by telling people not to vote. What a colossal ego; what a bellend. If anything his infantile behaviour and juvenile grasp of politics may well have inspired many more to vote just to ensure the object of his benign patronage - Ed Miliband, remember him? - didn’t get in.

And then there is wee Owen Jones, who supports hard socialism even as he talks of the ‘politics of hope’. If a left-leaning Labour government were running the show the only hope of getting out of the welfare trap would be winning the state lottery. Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott, Len McCluskey and an assorted cast of yesterday’s men took to the streets to protest against the evil of austerity. Before using that word in such a pejorative fashion though, they may like to consider the prospective fate of their comrades in Greece; they face a somewhat more concrete austerity in the coming years. Where was the protest to demand the EU let them make a dignified exit?

As many have concluded, yesterday’s #EndAusterityNow demonstrations were nothing more than a show of strength against democracy. One of the main planks of their protest was that despite the Tory victory, if you included the non-voters (entirely Jesus Brand’s responsibility, remember) three-quarters of the potential electorate didn’t vote for the Tories. But of course that means that an even higher percentage didn’t vote for Labour either and if the hugely optimistic claim that 250,000 marchers had actually turned out yesterday were even true, that represents a mere fraction of a percent of the population. Numbers, in any form, genuinely seem to be beyond the comprehension of the left. (Official estimates put the total at closer to 70,000 by the way or about 0.1% of the population, which kind of kiboshes their claim to represent the 99%)

Did the Pied Piper’s children know what tune they were marching to; who really knows? They have no answer, but they also can’t define the problem. Their new story is that austerity itself is a lie; that it is simply unnecessary, but the reality is that the kind of people who oppose austerity or ‘living within our means’ as we wage earners call it, are unlikely to be affected by the absolutely tiny cuts, which in many cases simply mean no increases in spending. I saw a tweet a couple of days ago from a public purse employee bemoaning his lot that he’d had no pay rise for five years. Well listen up, son, in the private sector there is no culture of pay rises for simply continuing to turn up. If austerity is a fiction then a much bigger fiction is that nobody should have to make choices about how they budget, that we deserve to have it all. Equals

I said "What would LENIN do?"!

And there it is; the biggest lie of the left, that we are all equal, despite the clear evidence to the contrary. And having swallowed that steaming turd it is just a short step to the conclusion that if we are not equal it must be because somebody – never ourselves – is preventing it. But not being 'equal' is not the same thing as being oppressed. So, like petulant children the protesters can chant all they want but it won’t change a single thing. Nobody is listening, kid. All you need is… a dose of shut the fuck up and when the fuss settles down you still have to tidy your room.

The People's Assembly Against Reason

Parliament voted – narrowly – to deny a vote on the referendum to sixteen-year olds. Cue the outrage from the left, the Jockanese, the Euro-fanatics… and all twenty-seven teenagers who can actually spell Parliament. But they can join the army, get married, pay tax, say those who insist this shows their maturity, to which the response is that they need the permission of an adult for the first two and we all pay tax anyway. Besides, at sixteen they are not considered responsible enough to buy cigarettes and alcohol, so ya-boo-sucks. The plain fact is that children and politics don’t mix well. (And some people never grow up at all.)

If you want an illustration of that maxim you need look no closer than the infantile posturing of the People’s Assembly Against Austerity and their ill-mannered protest against what the largest proportion of our democracy voted for. In particular, the Socialist Worker Student Society betrayed their true motives with the following call to arms: “Hate the Tories?” they asked and in the same breath went on to conflate so-called austerity with racism… simply because in left-wing politics (the natural politics of the very naïve) non-sequiturs trump reason every time.

(Don’t tell them ‘fightback’ isn’t a verb)

So, let me see if I’ve got this. In response to the declared wishes of the electorate to get our economy back on track they will engage in economically disruptive social and civil disobedience actually intended to directly harm the micro-economy of local organisations and businesses. They will deny small businesses trade by deterring footfall, yet have zero impact on the global industries they despise. It doesn’t sound very grown up to me. But maybe I'm not being generous enough; maybe they know exactly how ineffectual their movement is and this is more of a social event than a serious protest?

As for the racism, is it just coincidence that the student banner blatantly uses the Palestinian flag colours? Oh, of course, silly me; it isn’t racism if it is: A) People the left despise, or B) Anti-semitic. You have to love the joined up thought processes of the left which mirror exactly those of the immature; I don’t like it, therefore it is to be abhorred by all. Or what? You’ll stamp your feet and withdraw your labour? Will you also forego your benefits for the period of your demonstrations? After all, it is those you despise who pay for your idleness. End austerity? God help you if you ever come to know real austerity.

The Commons also voted to, quite rightly, not allow foreign nationals living here to vote in the referendum, so a double hooray for common sense. Except in the eyes of those too blinkered by the certainty of youth, whatever their age, I suppose that is racist. For an example of the stupidity of those who rely on the race relations industry to maintain their righteous outrage look no further than those, like Yasmin Qureshi, who can’t tell the difference between a lone racist gunman and two billion people who follow a doctrine of extreme prejudice against anybody who doesn’t believe what they believe. Be it politics or religion, skin colour or culture, there are none who hate so blindly as those who do it because they are told to.

Chicken Run

Following last week’s tale of the heroic pig-cum-family-member it would be remiss of me indeed if I failed to enlighten you with regard to my recent encounter with another habitué of the farm yard. As is my wont I was proceeding at a leisurely pace early one morning along the A21 in rural Kent. In fact I was seeing how many miles to the gallon I could eke out of a full tank of diesel, in the typical fashion of many a man-of-a-certain-age; a penny saved is a penny earned you know!

Anyway, there I was, 56mph and clocking around eighty to the gallon when I saw a vague figure in my rear-view mirror, gradually catching up with me. At first I thought it was a cyclist but, come on, a pushbike pushing sixty? As it got nearer however I became confused; it wasn’t a motorbike and it certainly wasn’t a car… and there was a lot of flapping around the edges of its outline. I slowed a little to allow it to approach all the faster, but it wasn’t until it was alongside me and going past that I could see clearly that it was in fact an oversized chicken. A chicken which looked across at me, winked and then sped off into the distance.

This was first thing in the morning. I hadn’t touched a drop the night before and I’m not on any hallucinatory medication, but it was definitely a chicken. I gave chase and had to get up to seventy five before I started to reel in the yards. A bloody huge chicken with – and this was the part that I doubted the most – at least three legs. Before I could get much closer though and without any warning – they don’t fit yard birds with trafficators – it veered off up a slip road and it was all I could do to brake hard and make the exit myself. I had to get to the bottom of this.

Five miles later and struggling to keep up round the winding lanes I saw the feisty fowl disappear into a farm entrance and I followed, coming to an undignified and untidy halt in a dirt yard. I got out of the car, the dust swiring all about and looked around for the chicken. No joy, but then a voice came from behind me. “Can oi ‘elp you, old son?” I turned to see an old man of the soil, leaning on a five bar gate and stereotypically chewing on a barley straw. I dusted myself down and explained, not without a degree of embarrassment and uncertainty, what I thought I’d seen.

He laughed “Oh yur, that’s wun of our chickens alroight.” When I failed to find an adequate comeback he continued. “You know ‘ow it is,” he said, “I loikes a leg, the woife loikes a leg and my boy, he loikes a leg an’ all. It seemed such a shame wringing the necks of two chickens of a Sunday, so we breeds ‘em with three.” I was astonished and had I not seen one with my very eyes I would have assumed I was about to be the butt of a terrible punchline. But I recovered my composure enough to ask another question.

Ah said, ah said, say there, boy!

“That’s ingenious,” I said, “but tell, me are they as tasty as a standard roaster?” He sighed and spat out the straw. His shoulders visibly sagged and he looked in pain as he took a deep breath and replied. “No idea.” he shrugged “We’ve never managed to catch one!”

Immig-rant

Immigration made this country what it is today? Did it bollocks. What made this country great was what we exported – technology, know-how, a fiercely inquisitive and acquisitive nature and, yes, British values, which account for much of what is right with the world. The traffic was never only one way; for every lefty history teacher trying to spin the evils of empire there are hundreds of examples of the ways we benefited the people we once ruled. The monstrous reputation of Britannia abroad is a modern confection, overlaying the morals of today’s apologetic malcontents on the utter normality of ‘might is right’ back in the day.

So you can fuck off with your ‘Britain was built on immigration’ rhetoric, your appeasement of any and every minority demand that we bend to their will and your determination to paint the British as the villains of the piece in every civil conflict and every foreign war. We really are the good guys, no matter how much the hand-wringers want to portray us as the essence of evil. For instance, right now, who is saving from drowning some of the very people who would behead us, given half a chance? Who is not rioting and burning down the ugly-in-every-sense mosques where native-born people are systematically brainwashed to become killing machines? And who is not doing to the grooming, raping trafficking gangs what their own culture would to in an instant to anybody drawn, say, to loving someone of their own sex?

Immigration is not a good thing; not in its own right. It is just a thing; it neither makes countries nor brings enlightenment all of itself. Human beings are a commodity and immigration is just a form of trade. So why do we import all the cheap and shoddy goods and then turn a blind eye to the social dis-ease and malcontent that come as part of the package? Why do the politicians of all colours keep banging the ‘who’s going to pay your pensions?’ drum but refuse to ask who’s going to pay their pensions? Driving the buses, picking the fruit and veg, running the hospitals – it’s all bollocks; we have literally millions of non-productive home-grown drones who have been priced out of those jobs and kept unemployable by the short-termism of cheap labour.

We have always had the ability to attract scarce talent when we needed it. And British people have roamed the globe selling their own scarce talents. Both immigration and emigration has featured in our past as a thing of necessity, expedience or mere opportunism. How ingenious then for a succession of administrations in thrall to the ideals of Euro-socialism to have manufactured scarcity of piece-of-piss job skills by systematically failing to educate and train our own young while simultaneously inculcating within them a sense of entitlement way beyond their ability. Spare the rod and spoil the child indeed; the new equivalent is lay on the benefits and spoil the country.

Yes, feel the diversity Michelle...

Well, I’m bloody sick of it. I’m sick of being told that we can’t find cleaners and arse wipers and potato pickers from home and ‘have’ to import them from abroad. And I’m sick of being told the same lie over and over again that we depend on these same people, to whom we have to pay tax credits and housing benefit and child benefit to somehow fund the system that keep the idle underclass in Sky subscriptions, fags and cans of Wife-beater. Immigration, of itself, is not a net benefit; every low-grade worker represents a considerable strain on resources. You came here to work, I don’t blame you. But I blame the fuck out of those that made it happen. 

I have a dream...

Yesterday, on the Daily Politics, everybody’s favourite schoolboy mass-debater, Owen Jones, said he would love to live in a world where people like Jeremy Corbyn were in charge. I have no idea if he truly understands what he wishes for, but maybe he just wants a lot more people to understand poverty from a first-hand perspective. The ruinously incoherent blueprint for society planted deep inside the spotless brains of socialists simply has no accommodation for the vagaries of human nature. Or where that nature is recognised, socialism’s first instinct is to suppress it, by force if necessary. You don’t need thought police in a free society, but in socialist regimes the judicial offence industry offers a lucrative career for life. Dream on, Owen.

Not one to be left out, I too have a dream…

Imagine a world where harmony reigns; a world where everybody understands and respects the needs of others and where the very idea of using your identity as a means of threatening or provoking guilt in others would be laughable. Imagine a world where you instinctively know where the boundaries of good taste and decency lie and where to step over an unexpected line is more likely to cause you a little embarrassment and a little learning than to land you in jail. Imagine a world where you can joke about anything you like because everybody else understands what is a joke and what is malignant And imagine a world where you do not fear what is happening all around you all the time.

Yes, imagine a world without the twin evils of islam and socialism; islam to do the harm and socialism to enable and excuse it. In Dewsbury and Bradford, the breeding grounds of both, the air has been rent with the ululations of primitive vocal mourning – so un-British it may as well be the chattering of agitated chimps – over the death of a quiet, scholarly, beautiful child with a wonderful future… or to be more accurate an evil, murdering little bastard acting directly in the cause of islam; that same islam which has yet to be condemned by those who insist that active, violent jihad is an aberration and not a central plank of its teaching.

It’s not good enough to say that ISIS and its ilk are following a perverse interpretation of their holy work of mumbo-jumbo and squiggly lines. It would be far more true, in fact, to say they are following a precise interpretation of the words of their mentally unstable prophet, who arrogantly claimed to be writing down the words of a being conjured from his imagination. Not good enough at all. If any of that sort of nonsense had any validity then why do we not similarly see Christians carrying out the sacrificial burning of children and animals on a daily basis and rampaging through foreign lands killing all the first-born? The idea that muslims are powerless to control islam is utter bollocks; most grown-up religions (if religion can ever be said to be a mature response to anything) gave up the smiting a long time ago.

By their deeds shall you know them.

You can't get much clearer than that

As for those on the left of thought, the simple fact they cannot grasp is that some of society’s differences are not solvable, by legislation, petition, adjuration or otherwise. There is no such thing as a British muslim, their relative values being so incompatible as to be incapable of resolution. You can be British or you can be a muslim, but not both. To refuse to denounce your loyalty to a murderous, Stone Age cult should be taken as volunteering to forfeit your British citizenship. A world without socialism would recognise this and a Britain without the lying ‘religion of peace’ would be a damned sight more peaceful than the encroaching caliphate promises to be. 

Corbyn, Cor Blimey!

Labour. The idea of a Labour Party in government is as far from funny as the notion that suicide bombers are not inspired by islam. But the Labour Party in opposition and in disarray is a joy to behold and its flag-wavers are the collective comedy gift that just keeps on wrapping itself up and jumping into the Christmas stocking. For instance, Jeremy Corbyn scraped a chance to stand for the leadership by gaining the last of the necessary thirty-five nominations two minutes before the ballot closed. Corbyn is, of course, one of the last bastions of the Labour left wing and beloved of the Boy Wonder Owen Jones and his risibly riotous People’s Assembly. 

Guessing the outcome of the labour leadership contest is a bit like a lottery with the unions hopping mad they’ve lost their almighty block vote; they are now desperately trying to get people to sign up individually, as per the new rules, but unlike the heady days of wildcat strikes and one-out, all-out, nobody appears to give a fig. Yesterday morning I heard on the Today programme that of 500,000 eligible union members only 2,500 had bothered to sign up, even at the bargain basement rate of £3 a pop. Tory supporters are now signing up to vote for Corbyn… because it will be hilarious.

The natural instincts of true British people has never been to bemoan their lot and aside from a brief and necessary period of revolt Labour’s mission is history. Nobody has much faith in state-run institutions any more but the fraying remnants of Labour’s Marxist past are still fully wedded to the concept. So, here’s an idea: How about – instead of nationalisation and all that expense and disruption – we set up cooperative-owned banks, power companies, etc and let them compete with private companies entirely on merit. Aside from legislation and some small start-up costs the public purse funds nothing, so committed ‘own the means of production’ adherents will have to buy their place in the organisation by selling up all they own and pooling their resources, thus demonstrating true commitment to the collective ideal and not participating on the sidelines as mere fat-cat shareholders.

It will be like a national game show as slick, moneyed professional profit-makers compete with egalitarian, diversity-heavy ‘enterprises of the people’ for market share and lolz. And if the people’s partnerships fail, just as with nationalised industry, all participants fail with them. Except the national finances won’t take the hit and the good old British sense of schadenfreude will have a field day watching the public demise of those who considered themselves just a little bit more equal than the rest of us. It’s a win-win because if they succeed then bully for them and we may learn something, but if they fail maybe they will learn something and insist on proper education for the next generation.

Can we fuck it up?

The Guardian has been whinging that there is some form of posh apartheid in operation and that only ‘posh’ people get better jobs, when in reality, in a Corbynised Britain they might finally realise that it isn’t posh people who get the best jobs it’s just not Labour people who get the best jobs. There has to be a reason for that

Fight for the right to what?

I was in my mid-twenties during the miners’ strike; a young Yorkshireman newly married and striking out to make a career, a home... a life. I’d been brought up to expect no help from anybody by right and to have to make my own way, whatever path I chose. I chose to accept that advice and get on with it. The backdrop to my childhood was the rotten and decaying world that our dalliance with socialism had wrought. Strike after strike, the derision of European neighbours and the emergence of dependent classes who seemed to believe they should be able to live off the state forever – cradle to grave.

The people who led the miners and their ilk may have been misguided, blinded by the ideology of their adored Soviet Russia but they were, surely, made of stern stuff. They wanted to work and they worked bloody hard; hard as nails, I thought. Then the other day on the radio, following the announcement that there would be no inquiry into the Battle of Orgreave, I heard things that made my blood chill a little. The miners’ leaders and all the big union firebrands regularly used stirring words stolen from history to eulogise about their ‘noble’ struggle against the oppressors. Fighting the good fight you could imagine Tolkein-esque warriors buoying up their troops before battle, resurrecting the words of Shakespearian heroes. “Comrades!” they cried, “We will never surrender!” and the roar of the crowd made the flat caps look less ridiculous.

Now, however, those caps are merely being wrung. On the trusty old PM programme those miners once again gave voice. But now it was the reedy, whining voice of losers who appropriated the vocabulary of others. Boo hoo, they sobbed, not fair and one after another, speakers got up to bleat out ridiculous utterings of defeat. “We ‘ad us cummyooniteh ripped asunder by t’Torehs!” they wept “Thi suffered, did t’bairns; we ‘ad us lives destroyed…” And on and on it went so that after the report I was almost ashamed to hail from Yorkshire where men were once men. These men weren’t the sturdy stock I’d formerly supposed they were; they were just another bunch of entitlement seekers.

Then there was the case of Professor Sir Tim Hunt, hounded from his job and life’s work because some people can’t handle a few words. He made an attempt at humour which fell flat and has now lost everything for what are being called ill-judged utterings. Did he hurl bricks at police? Did he aim a fist or a fence post at a scab? Did he threaten to kill or maim or rape or malign? Of course not, for all of that would not even attract an inquiry; his crime was far worse – he annoyed the feminists, who everybody knows can never see humour where there is an opportunity for attack. And in the face of a trumped-up suspicion of sexism UCL gave him no option but to resign.

The poor, starving, oppressed, huddled masses...

Meanwhile, the self-styled child-crusaders against the imagined dark forces of Tory/Mordor/Nazi evil are plotting to further their agenda by hijacking the sheeple’s marches against the equally fictional ‘austerity’, spreading fear and hate as only the far-left can. Don’t any of these people understand the importance of self-worth? They are not fighting for the welfare of people thrown into abject poverty; they are fighting for the right to have their every decision made by the state in return for a cringing reliance on its charity. The miners, the feminists, the austerity activists are emblematic of all that is wrong with their brave new world. But for all their bluster they are not fighting for freedom at all, they are insisting on slavery. Useful idiots indeed.

Par for the course

Listening to a Professor of Catholic Studies on the radio yesterday, banging on about – what else? – religion, I was reminded of the story of Reverend Ian Paisley as an indefatigable firebrand preacher during the troubles. Between rousing speeches and leading marches and generally shouting his way through the nineteen seventies he used, also, to lay claim to an enviable golf handicap and could often be found getting in a quick nine holes first thing in the morning… before the shouting started. Early one crisp cold spring day he found himself in a short four-ball with some Belfast city councillors along with the Lord Mayor.

It all kicked off perfectly well with all four making decent drives off the first par four and two strokes later all were in with a chance, if slim, of making par. Laid up ten feet from the pin, the good reverend laid his marker and picked up his ball as the town councillors both chipped from just off the green to within a gimme of the hole. The Mayor, a big, ruddy faced man had just a long putt. He carefully strode the green, stooping to see the lie of the land and then gestured for silence as he made his attempt. The ball rolled past the hole and kept on rolling another twenty feet. “Bugger!” he cried, “I missed!”

Mr Paisley was somewhat taken aback by the outburst and chastised the Mayor for his language. “The Lord looks not well on such words, Sir” he said “I would caution you to moderate your speech on this beautiful, heaven-sent morning.” The Mayor looked suitably chastened and the round continued without incident for a few more holes. As the sun slowly climbed in the sky the dew melted away and the full glory of a late spring day lifted all their spirits. Until they reached the fifth.

Councillor one made a textbook par three, Councillor two saved a wayward slice for a four and the good reverend managed a wonderful five iron off the tee to land eighteen inches from the hole and the others applauded and nodded to let him tap in for his second birdie of the round. The Mayor was in trouble. He mis-hit from the tee, chipped into a bunker, took two swings to get on the green and was now looking at a tricky six-footer to save a five. If anything his cheeks were even redder, the sun beginning to make his hefty frame give forth a sweat. He huffed and puffed up to the ball, steadied himself, took a breath and tapped the ball to within an inch of the hole, where it stopped dead. “Bugger!” he cried, “I missed!”

Paisley was not amused. “Did you not hear me, brother?” he admonished, “The Lord will smite you down for such words.” And with that he pointed up into the sky, where in the vast expanse of blue, a solitary cloud was beginning to form and darken at the base. For the next few three holes the cloud darkened and grew and seemed to be following them menacingly around the course. They finally arrived at the ninth, a tricky par four, with Ian Paisley in the lead on a creditable 32, the two councillors on 35 and 37 respectively and the Mayor, face like thunder, struggling with a score of 42. Paisley suggested they trust themselves to the power of prayer and led them in a brief, stirring verse of thanks for their good fortune.

The Mayor visibly relaxed and managed to arrive on the green in just two strokes, the chance of par within his grasp. He putted into a perfect position to finish in four and set up to save his game. The cloud rumbled overhead and Paisley looked up. He said a silent prayer as the Mayor took his shot and watched, dismally as the ball trickled past the hole. The Mayor threw down his putter, thrust his face at the sky and drew a deep breath, “Bu…” he began to scream, but the words died in his throat. Lightning arced across the sky, a bolt of good old, righteous Christian fury and struck Ian Paisley full in the chest.

Crazy? I'm mad as hell!

Pole-axed, the future Lord Bannside fell, gasping, to his knees, a look of bewilderment across his face and whisps of smoke gently curling from his blackened scalp. Above them a cleft appeared in the thick dark, broiling cloud and a light such as no mortal had witnessed in millennia shone down upon the scene. A mighty thunderclap followed swiftly afterwards and then the deep rumble of thunder resolved into the voice of God himself. “Bugger” saith the Lord, “I missed!”

Partial to the BBC?

It’s a nice idea, forcing the state broadcaster to be impartial during the referendum campaigns, but how would that work in practice? Seriously, how would you do it? Labour party officials actually complained to the BBC about its ‘blatant’ right-wing bias, while those on the right see the Beeb as one step removed from outright communism. But most neutral observers – or as neutral as you can get – would have to conclude that overall, try as it might, Lord Reith’s gang naturally lean to the left. It is the inclination of instinct for most ‘creatives’ and it shows, over and over again in its output.

Bending over backwards to achieve diversity in the face of all logic, they recently tried to recruit a disabled weather presenter regardless of any actual aptitude to present or understand the weather – the affliction was to be the most important part of their CV. Nobody at the BBC’s HR department, apparently, anticipated the reaction they experienced; presumably they believe everybody thinks as they do and who can blame them? As a great institution they care about representing their audience and imagine them to lack robustness if confronted with ugly reality. This is a problem with many public bodies’ policy makers, introducing quotas for ethnic and other minority groups into recruitment, which inevitably causes resentment from those in the majority group passed over for selection or promotion in favour of somebody less suited to the job.

While pragmatism and with it a certain brusqueness and the possibility that a few may take it upon themselves to take offence is a feature of so-called right-wing discourse, the left care so much about not causing offence that they stray into caricature… with hilarious consequences. Well, hilarious if you are ‘normal’ but a cause of great anguish to the dashing knights of the court of King Equality. So while they trumpet diversity they take care to try not to draw attention to it and in so doing make it the biggest part of the story. It’s the black man in an ID parade syndrome, it’s Gordon Brown’s ‘bigoted woman’ and it is at the heart of genuine tragedies such as Rotherham.

Time and again the BBC reports careful spending as ‘austerity’, efficiency savings as ‘deep cuts’ and any attempt to introduce rigour into the education system as ‘controversial’ or ‘far-reaching’ or ‘brave’ when to many listeners it is simply high time something was done. For my part I don’t believe the BBC is deliberately left-wing in its output, it just echoes the sentiments of its staff. So when it comes to the EU, where the purported intelligentsia are fully wedded to the whole shebang it is little wonder that they report shenanigans from Brussels with a certain matter-of-fact acceptance which many listeners hear as cosy agreement; there is bias in receiving as well as giving.

It's all a big conspiracy!!!

Asking the BBC to be impartial is like asking miners to love Margaret Thatcher. She could be resurrected, return to save the planet, give everybody a gold Rolls Royce, a £100k p.a. pension and life and love everlasting and they would still want to spit in her face. Intransigence is a feature of the left and it’s not likely to change; Labour members even jeer their own leadership candidates if the party line isn’t toed and they dare to voice concerns about the cost of the state. So, I don’t blame the BBC for its natural lefty bias, but I do blame the left in general for a society too in thrall to the power of the state. Be your own man in the coming referendum, however 'impartial' the BBC tries to be. 

A Question of Competence

Well it’s pretty clear from the last forty-eight hours that neither the Conservatives nor Labour have any intention of giving up their sacred mission to keep the people of a once-free nation shackled to a project doomed to end in war. If it’s not a war between neighbouring states forced to comply with laws and regulations that don’t meet their best interests, it will be war between the drastically weakened armed forces of Europe and the invading and accelerating army of islam. David Cameron’s open hand holds no cards of any concern to France and Germany and there will be absolutely no repatriation of powers whatsoever. We might as well start learning German… except they already speak English more better than what we do.

It will be this way, but it need not be. There is no way Britain can get more than token support from any other country; once again we stand alone, but that’s where our strengths lie. Taking on the evil axis and winning is what we are supposed to be made of, not cravenly kow-towing to an authority most of us refuse to recognise. Remaining in a political affiliation that nobody in this country ever voted for is plain insane. It’s a protection racket where we pay the dues but still get beaten up. Britain will always be the odd man out in a Europe which was never designed with us in mind; we have no true friends or allies there, just those we pay to hang out with. It’s like a political brothel.

It’s not about benefits it’s about borders. We can change the benefit rules whenever we like, but it suits the ‘renegotiation’ to pretend we need agreement from the EU apparatchiks. We have nothing to fear from the ECHR either; we had human rights long before anybody had even coined the term ‘human rights lawyer’. Ever heard of British Standards? They are not just stale old books of regulations; British standards and values once ruled the free world and shaped much of what we think of as civilisation. Our standing in the world? One of twenty eight, much of them mediocre, or a mighty one of one? There are no legitimate arguments to compel us to believe we can’t survive outside; of course we can.

In fact we could prosper like never before. Let the whingers of the IN lobby fuck off out and let the UK become a major low-tax, low-waste economy. Reject the miserable raft of strangling ‘equality’ rules and let people shine. Everybody deserves a chance but not everybody deserves the same reward; if you want to live on benefits or work for a pittance, why not move to Europe – I hear it’s all the rage over there? We should look after the sick and genuinely disadvantaged, of course, but let’s not have all this bullshit with tolerating the freeloaders. Don’t like our culture? By-bye, the boat leaves in ten minutes, mind the door doesn’t slam on your arse on the way out.

People my age can still recollect how optimistic we once were. People younger have never known a world not constrained by red tape. Years ago I can remember laughing when I heard that to be a bread baker in France you needed a college diploma. Now in Britain you need an actual degree to be allowed to wipe old people’s arses and change bandages. Not only do mere qualifications not equate to competence, there is a production line system in place that often means the exact opposite. Our politicians, our business leaders and most of our commentators have no more of a valid opinion about our future outside the EU than the millions of mature observers that have been watching their corrupt and duplicitous dealings for decades.

Conflict: The truth of Britain's role in Europe

I don’t trust David Cameron. I don’t trust Clarke and Heseltine and Mandelson and Blair either. I don’t trust any one of the talking heads who have clear mandate to tell whatever lies or unsubstantiated suppositions they think will best scare the electorate into voting against change. Look around. Are you really happy with things as they are? If you don’t want change now when DO you want it? This referendum is a once in a generation opportunity and if you get it wrong not only will you have to live with it, but I, for one, will have to die with it. Vote for hope. Vote out.

The Island

Looking over the stereotypical, post-nuclear-esque wasteland, flyblown rags of curtains flap in the breeze, litter blows in facsimile tumbleweeds down the street and rabid dogs scavenge for scraps. The few remaining humans are lurching Euro-Zombies, searching for brains and Penal Colony Britain has finally voted itself into oblivion. Where once we sent our criminals to a god forsaken outback on the other side of the world, Europe now funnels its unwanted overfill into department EU/AS/01, a gulag where the lowest are sent to survive… or not. Those who try to escape believe they will be gifted homes and good living off the island, but nobody escapes from Ukatraz.

Fortress Britain is quiet; the roads no longer rumble with traffic and industry’s gears have ground to a halt. Flights neither arrive nor leave and the long dead birds no longer sing in the non-existent trees. Mostly concreted over, the only access to the gigantic prison yard formerly known as Kent, is via the heavily guarded EuroTunnel whose sole purpose is to act as a one-way portal into, but never out of the EU’s ultimate immigration holding camp. The only way off is to brave the treacherous currents of the French Channel, constantly patrolled by seaborne drones programmed to intercept and destroy all unauthorised craft.

Some still talk of Albion and of a boy King who will symbolically free a sword from a stone and somehow bring about resurrection, but others know this wasteland for what it is; the end of the long road. It is used to corral those inflicted with madness, rage and the crime of expressing an opinion. Some still speak of a divine creator and heavenly father who will save the faithful in the final apocalypse but others know that fantasy for what is it. This land is also used to contain those infected with islam and other irrational superstitions; their deities appear to be quite happy to leave them to it.

Britain finally achieved what many wished for, to be self-contained; because there is no traffic with the rest of the world other than the inward traffic in people of a dangerous mind-set. The islands of Crete and Malta and Cyprus and Kos eventually proved too small and too easily accessible for efficient containment purposes and have been returned to their former status as holiday camps for rewarding public sector workers – there are few other types of worker nowadays, with private businesses all propped up one way or another by the impenetrable system of bureaucracy which administers the sovereign EU.

Meanwhile, back in Fortress Britain – ex-Airstrip One – the siren sounds, signalling another escape attempt. Ironic really: as one boat-load of refugees from Africa is rescued from the warm, azure Mediterranean then transported across Europe and through the tunnel to their destination of choice, a similar boat load of escapees is blown to bits in the cold, dark waters of the Channel and transported to their own end. The EU has a final solution for Britain… don’t think it couldn’t happen.

Fighting Fair?

It will not be a fair fight. And in the end the result that has already been decided will be delivered as some form of triumph for common sense and humanity. If the likes of Lutfur Rahman can rig election results and police forces and social services spokespeople can face the cameras and flatly deny they knew anything about the systematic rape of thousands of teenage girls, it will be simplicity itself for Westminster to finagle the outcome of a referendum in which nobody risks actually getting hurt. And those who can will up-sticks and abandon this land to the totalitarian socialist satellite it threatens to become.

Every day there is a thread of pro-EU propaganda stitched into the news programmes. Every day another cohort of future young Juncker Youth will be inculcated with the party line and despatched to berate their parents for daring to contemplate betraying their glorious future in the land of Oz. The choice of staying in will be presented with a matter-of-fact breeziness with adjectives such as ‘obvious’ and ‘sensible’ and even ‘conservative’ applied to people and policy in favour of in. Likewise the outcome of a vote for inertia will be peppered with happy, contented phrases conjuring up apple-cheeked vitality and children standing up to sing ‘Tomorrow belongs to me’ through lips backed by perfect, white, smiling teeth.

In complete contrast to the reality of future life in the Federation of European Soviets the IN campaign will show expensively filmed flags of all nations waving merrily alongside each other in harmony and common purpose while happy workers go about their joyous, apparently free lives. It will be shown as a Technicolor world of plenty, every bit as optimistic as those long lost days of nineteen-fifties California. The best writers and directors and ‘imagineers’ in the world will be employed in building the fictional future, because money will be no object. Our own money will be spent against us.

In contrast the OUT campaigners have an uphill struggle because whilst all those who remember free speech and genuine hope – as opposed to the ersatz, government-sanctioned, do-as-you-are-bidden, hope-lite – will have to top the golden offerings of the stay-ins. Look out for descriptors such as 'controversial' and 'brave' and anything indicative of untried theory. We will be portrayed as grey pessimists, with bad dentures and failing health, in grainy backward-looking newsreels. And every attempt we make to reveal the regressive nature of the EU project will be seized on as typical of Little Englanders longing for a never-was past. Of course it never was; the EU put the brakes on all we might have become by now.

Even as our annual and solemn reverence for the fallen war dead who gave us the freedom to now vote for our own subjugation has been slowly, year-by-year turned into a maudlin reflection of the evils of all our finest national strengths, it won’t be enough to turn the tide for us to show what is wrong with the European Union. We have to say again and again, what is so right about independence. The nations we conquered by superior force in the past we eventually delivered back to home rule. But when it came to ourselves this fierce island race allowed itself to be led into the stockade and now, like battery hens even with the door open wide we blink yet we don’t understand the meaning of the light.

Inside the European Union we are limited in what we can do. Our borders are not our own and our laws are not of our making. Our trade will be regulated, controlled and ultimately we will achieve what we are ‘allowed’ to achieve – and that will be governed by what others wish to achieve. Our farmers will work to the plan and our military will bolster the police in maintaining civil order. Our politicians will be mere administrators of the taxes we will contribute and the downward pressure of the ‘equality and fairness’ agenda will ensure that in a few generations the very thought of leaving will become near impossible even to articulate.

Just do it!

See that door, chickens? It is wide open. And on the other side are all the possibilities you ever dreamed of. So instead of trying to counter the IN argument, why argue at all? OUT is freedom, OUT is self-determination and OUT is a whole new adventure. Who’s up for an adventure?

Slaves to the rhythm

50 Hertz. Fifty cycles per second in a never ending rhythm of technology and boy it hurtz. The drum beats on and we march to it; slaves to progress and happily shackled to the oars. I thought that labour-saving inventions were supposed to give us more leisure time, but instead of slaving all day Monday over the washing, now every day is washing day. Instead of engaging in the creative pursuits we all secretly believe we ought to we create work to fill the time and avoid the perennially tricky business of creativity and confronting our abject lack of it. It seems we need to work; maybe work really does set us free and technology is the tool we use to manufacture our ‘freedom’.

Compared to times past we are vastly rich, so individual transport means that every day, on every road in the land, people pass each other to do the same jobs in towns fifty miles apart. It is monumentally stupid, this human need to make everything more difficult; there has never been so much paper used since the invention of the ‘paperless office’. The faster cars get, the slower the average real speeds become. Nine-to-five is replaced for many with every-waking-hour and always the relentless need to be in contact. Social media has practically killed off actual social behaviour for a whole new generation who think that their friends live in the shiny gadgets they carry around in their pockets. The whole of human ingenuity has come to this?

Even when we try to redress the work/life balance instead of simple, wholesome meals we explore imagined continental fripperies involving a hunt for exotic ingredients whose wasteful procurement and preparation is an experiment in how far we can stretch our capacity to imagine the emperor is actually clothed. Chicken, however you process it, turns out to taste much like chicken. And for all the pizzazz and elan deployed, the back garden is a poor substitute for the olive-treed taverna terrace and by the time we actually eat the booze has taken its toll and our reward for all the effort is a gargantuan hangover as we realise there is still work to be done before, er, work on Monday.

Thus I find myself, on Sunday, our traditional day of rest, engaged in a mammoth orgy of feeding the beast that is education. Instead of simply passing on from my head into theirs, by methods proven effective through millennia, I feel the urge to use all this marvellous technology to create wondrous materials of unimaginable sophistication to my didactic forebears who would have queued up for a go on the hand-cranked Roneo machine in the staff room. Today I can spend all my waking hours scanning and editing and pre-preparing material that my charges will appreciate no more than if I made it up on the fly and scrawled it on the board. The big difference is that now it is the teachers who seem to do all the work. This, they call progress.

Keep it up fellas, we've get to get to work...

The same goes, of course, for all of life. Where once we got up and got on with it, calling a spade a spade, if you will, now we have to employ a progressive vocabulary which seeks to describe the mundane as the extraordinary, the average as the superlative. All must have prizes and none must fail. Yet failure is often the spur that kick-started the success of our wealthiest, the shame that prompted endeavour and the price of sloth. So get your kids out of their lazy pits and get them revved up and trying; the economy needs feeding. Meanwhile it’s Sunday; put your feet up; I’ve got this