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.