What do you mean, you’ve heard it before?

I like to believe I’d quite like Captain Cardigan; he really ought to take up a pipe. I can imagine listening to him regaling the young folk who gather at his hem with stirring tales of helping geriatric old class warriors to cross the road, or rescuing socialist kittens from cruel Tory trees. Regally dispensing Werther’s Originals and occasionally ruffling a tow-haired mop-head he would sit there chuckling, recalling the good old days when six bob would buy you an evening’s entertainment and a bag of chips and everybody spent their days being kind to each other. Ah yes, the glorious forties; we were all so much happier under rationing.

We had to stand together to weather the storm. Jerry, with his pacemaker reminding us that with hope in our heart we would never walk alone; we could hold our heads up high and never be afraid of the dark. At the end of the storm we would find a golden sky and the sweet silver song of the lark. But we had to be strong against the wicked Tory establishment who would try to disguise their evil deeds. You must realise, he told us, when a lovely flame dies laughing friends deride and smoke gets in your eyes. You have to fight, he said, for your right to party.

Jeremy Corbyn’s Leader’s speech at the labour conference had an air of optimistic familiarity about it. Hadn’t we heard some of it before? Bits of it, at least? Some claimed that it was a re-hash of words written for Kinnock, others believed Ed Miliband had rejected it, but this was just sour grapes. Jeremy has a new, original, caring vision for the world. He’d like to build the world a home and furnish it with love. This was something new, something to fight for! He roused the passions with his plea: Don't give up 'cos you have friends. Don't give up, you're not beaten yet. Don't give up; I know you can make it good!

And what of this brave new egalitarian world, what would we be able to do? Why, grow apple trees and honey bees and snow white turtle doves, came the reply. You see, Jeremy ‘JayCee’ Corbyn wants so much more than an end to poverty; he wants happiness and joy unconfined. He’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. He’d like to hold it in his arms and keep it company. And you know what, he’s right! I'd like to see the world for once, all standing hand in hand and hear them echo through the hills - peace throughout the land. (That's the song I hear.)

"He's going to teach the world to what?"

By the time he had reached the end and managed to get in a few home ’spun’ jibes at the Tories’ mission to  punish the poor and grind the bones of their babies into an unsavoury gruel the crowd in the hall were ecstatic. Using all his own completely original words he thanked Mom, Pop and apple pie from sea to shining sea and led the hall in a rousing rebel yell of God Bless America before bathing in the rapturous applause. I thought of the sermon on the mount and his initials, J.C. He’s going to get crucified!

Pride didn't always mean Gay

Once upon a time there was a country to which the whole world looked for inspiration. While foreign natives rent their garments, shrieked in unstifled dismay at the smallest loss and wept uncontrollably for months in bereavement the stoic moustaches of the British Empire sat unquivering upon the stiffest of lips. There is a reason Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’ is quoted to this day as the ultimate response to a world of uncertainty and doubt. “Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And - which is more - you’ll be a Man, my son!”

For many generations there was no finer sight than that of a man in a British military uniform, evoking passion and pride, nostalgia for the fray, memories of genuine camaraderie and most of all reassurance that the established order was being maintained and traditions observed. That man, those men, they stood for all that we did and furthermore they were prepared to place their own lives in peril that others may peacefully enjoy all that our long history had granted us.

It was a partnership and while some fretted about our dependence on Winston Churchill’s ‘rough men’ to keep us safe there was hardly a family in the land in which I grew up without connections in the armed forces. National service, simple tradition or just a yen to serve, a spell in ‘the mob’ was an experience that would stand out honourably in any curriculum vitae. As a rite of passage the experience was not only recognised but encouraged; army life sorted out many a wayward and aimless youth and thousands who served nought but their compulsory two years still regarded it as the making of them. In particular it made them British.

So how far and how wide of the plot have we travelled that just one week after the Battle of Britain was commemorated across the nation a modern-day RAF sergeant attending hospital in uniform was hidden from sight  because hospital workers claimed they didn’t want to upset people as they “have lots of different cultures coming in”. This is just one in a series of such stories. Yesterday a caller to LBC told of his experience being abused on Britain’s streets for wearing his uniform. 

Uniform is a symbol of belonging to something; some cultures insist that 50% of the entire population dress the same – the burka is an aggressive symbol of subjugation. But now the symbol of belonging to the former pinnacle of western civilisation is seen as somehow provocative? The pursuit of the new political holy grail of multiculturalism trumps all attempts to retain monoculture, except where that culture is not indigenous. That is all sorts of fucked up, right there. But, you know what else is provocative? I’ll tell you:

British sensitivities being side-lined in favour of an invading force of productive islamic wombs. Ignoring the systematic gang rape and trafficking of white girls in Rotherham and elsewhere for fear of being branded racist. Tiptoeing around dangerous cults practising the mutilation of their own young girls because of a misguided ‘respect’ for culturally appropriate torture. Allowing unrestricted migration of unidentified, openly hostile hordes of African and Middle Eastern fighting-age men in Europe but criticising those who fear them. These things are truly provocative.

The hospital has, apparently apologised for its actions, but only because of the outrage it caused. Too little, too late in most books. But it won’t end there. Not content with attacking any form of debate around immigration as racist and attempting to criminalise any action or speech deemed ‘unhelpful’ to the political project of breaking down national identities, there is now a new potential crime of micro-aggression waiting in the wings to serve its warped masters. It was bad enough when anything you said could be taken down and used in evidence against you; now any reaction you have to any situation could be misconstrued as a form of assault. Attempt to avoid making a race gaffe? That’s racist. Ask how to pronounce a foreign name properly? Could be micro-aggression. Stare a fraction of a second at the only ‘different’ member of the group? Hate crime. It’s only a matter of time before somebody gets arrested for breathing inappropriately.

Brownies? Even the name is racist!

So, while we still have time and before any form of jingoism becomes a crime in itself, set those top lips a-quiver and sing A Song of Patriotic Prejudice even as they drag you away to the re-education camp. “The English, the English, the English are best. I wouldn’t give tuppence for all of the rest!” You are going down, whitey!

Trabantastic!

Well, well, well, who would have thought it? Giant company fiddles statistics to fool the public into buying their stuff. As the VW scandal gets into finger-pointing mode it is only natural that suspicion falls on those who may have colluded in what is now suspected to be much more widespread fraud. Naturally, while the holier-than-thou types are pontificating, the hierarchy of large organisations everywhere are contemplating spending the weekend at the shredder. There is, naturally, also the accusation that officials have been ‘coerced’ into turning a blind eye and of course there’s no better method of coercion than syphoning some of those profits into unmarked brown envelopes.

Corruption; it’s everywhere. It’s everywhere because it is human but nowhere more so than when the state intervenes. It’s one thing to keep a secret from your customers and competitors for a while in an open market, but it takes the threat of sanctions that only whole states can muster and police to keep those secrets forever. In the bad old days of Soviet Communism jokes about the scale of corrupt ineptitude regularly did the rounds. Comrade Corbyn’s championing of uncapped benefits and rent controls brings us a nostalgic whiff of those heady days when dissent may easily have been followed by disappearance and official statistics could be tortured until they told you whatever you needed to know.

If it ever came about, in Corbyn’s Britain the state would regulate everything in the interests of fairness and the official record would reveal no evidence of collusion between any of the Mao-suited comrades... unless that is what they want the record to show. Everybody will understand the rules and obey them and every single car will be properly scrutinised by incorruptible (code for ‘it’ll cost you’) party apparatchiks for conformity before being released to the scrupulously fair (code for ‘it’ll cost you’) waiting list.

I bring you a vision of that noble future:

A man saves up his $Newbles for half his working life and is finally able to buy a car - the wonderful new Corbant model - in the Glorious Republic of Sovereign Socialists (In GRoSS the queen will be stuffed and mounted as a symbol and sinister reminder of a bygone and foresworn age). After he pays his money and swears on oath that he will not brag about his new-found status as car owner he is informed that he will have his car in three years. "Just three years?" he asks, joyfully "That is marvellous, brother. In what month?" The clerk consults a ledger (nobody dare keep information on a computer in the future) and tells him that the car will arrive in August.

The heroic new model - the Corbant - the people's car

The man claps his hands and enquires, "August? What day in August?" Another consultation and it is vouchsafed that the day of delivery will be the second of August. The man is beside himself with excitement; he can hardly believe his luck. But he has another question to ask. “The Second of August, you say. Morning or Afternoon?" The clerk looks up from his book and says "Afternoon. Why do you need to know?" Our man replies,"The broadband is being fitted in the morning." 

It's a gas

Free market or planned economy? No constraints at all on trade or the microscopic examination of every detail by government agencies to determine what is and isn’t ‘for the greater good’? These are the two extreme economic models that have been fought over for generations and the answer is always neither. Go for the free market, grab-what-you-can format and a few people get national-budget-rich at the expense of all those who have nothing to offer the market. In the wild, so to speak, the over-populated low producers would eventually die out and stabilise their numbers at some wage equilibrium. On the other hand, control everything we say and do and we may as well be in prison.

So, somewhere in the middle it is generally accepted, is where we end up and for all the political warfare engaged in by left and right alike the outcome is generally a pendulum shift to either side of some supposed centre ground. VW/Audi is showing what happens when the highly visible hand of government intervenes. Some favoured climate-ideology, emissions control and fuel prices combined to create the diesel monster, based on only one minor consideration. Diesel cars produce a bit less CO₂ than petrol, so all the manufacturer had to do was fiddle the monitoring of other pollutants to produce a marketing advantage. Lower road tax, better ‘gas mileage’ and hey-presto, a scandal created by government's good intentions.

Whatever talents those attracted to seek political office possess, being capable of discerning truth from fiction is rarely one of them. If genuine experts in a field can’t agree they split into camps and then it becomes a simple matter of funding. For many years the tobacco giants, in the full knowledge of the harm done by smoking their product, pursued highly effective lobbying tactics and staved off (bought off) control of their hugely profitable industry. Today it is the spuriously titled ‘climate scientists’ who have the funding to manipulate decision-making in favour of their own, often also highly profitable, visions.

Forget the high ideals of the save-the-planet brigade, it is money that makes the world go round, or at the very least determines which way it turns. And those who control the purse strings know this very well. Forget also the notion of moral balance-sheet decision making, very few policies are decided by what is genuinely, altruistically best, rather what will deliver the best voting outcome. Political parties are in the business of gaining and holding onto power and while individuals may hold strong principled views, if they don’t fit the party narrative they will be whipped into submission or side-lined out of influence

And thus to Europe. For those on the front line, watching hordes of often aggressive aliens invade their lives, syphoning off their resources, taking precedence over their own disadvantaged, the dangers of open borders are clear. But the little people have no influence outside of election time and even then they can be manipulated by cries of racism and appeals to common decency. The palpably erroneous ‘migrants good, indigenous lazy’ storyline is still being peddled by those who gain from it. But don’t think that the opinions of ordinary people play no part; Philip Hammond has said the migrant crisis is playing into the UK’s imagined renegotiation of EU rules.

Preparing to welcome Europe's saviours...

Indeed it does. It generates sufficient anger on the ground for the majority to support those who will make great play of taking a stand. Watch as the argument develops before the referendum and this government does what all ‘democratic’ governments have to do and tell us the story of why they are the ‘least worst’ option. Because that’s all we will ever get. Cheap travel comes with higher pollution, saving the Earth is an easy sell, no matter how spurious the ‘science’ that supports it. The next government will perpetuate the myth that no matter how different or how dangerous our new citizens are, only ever more immigrants will save our economy. Vote for humanity, vote for decency, vote Volkswagen.

The New Norm

Listen to the outrage which is still flying round; in the minds of some of our more deranged commentators, the prime Minister chose to have full-on sex with a dead animal and thus prove he is unfit to hold office. I expect many a freemason, or similarly secretive society member, is keeping extremely schtum right now, recalling the bizarre rituals of acceptance they have undergone. But let’s get a sense of proportion about it. Embarrassingly popping your flaccid member into a fold of dead meat for a few seconds in front of a baying crowd of other young initiates is hardly the same as eagerly thrusting your engorged, excited penis repeatedly into the orifice that another human being shits through, is it?

Yet the second act is deemed entirely normal indeed, a lifestyle choice; no, not a choice but a biological imperative for some. Something that was once seen as so aberrant as to be illegal for centuries has not only become accepted, but approved and – to judge by the reaction in some quarters – will become practically compulsory one day. Once again persistent lobbying has changed the way society thinks and it is only a matter of time before any dissenters die out. In the odd way that humans have of adopting fads, a recent report suggested that a very large percentage of young people are now minded to give homosexuality a go. The cultural Marxists must be overjoyed.

The normalisation of the not-so-normal is an ever-present theme; once upon a time the English wouldn’t dream of eating brioche yet now the supermarkets are full of such foreign fripperies.On a lighter note, in the USA a paedophile has written an essay to the American public asking not to be judged harshly for an appetite he cannot change but manages to control. His plea reads much like the anguished petitions of gays in former years; Alan Turing was driven to suicide over the way his ‘condition’ was treated yet society now feels shame and a need to make amends. Surely it can’t be impossible for society to learn to differentiate between those who control their urges and criminals who act on them. Will it go from disgusting to ‘in the privacy of their own home’ to being regularly flaunted in public? I guess the real test will be, how long before an out-but-not-proud paedophile will be deemed an acceptable babysitter?

Of course there is always the option to have a dual morality, something which seems to come naturally to those in positions of power. In the devout muslim world, for instance, homosexuality is still a crime punishable by extreme gravity, yet it is far from uncommon for some of that wider community to keep boy sex-slaves whose sole purpose is to be bestially buggered at the whim of the master. Presumably the justification is that if your slave is not given full human status it is not seen as homosexuality to fuck him; and what better way to perpetuate the practice than to continue the cycle of abuse until they eventually come to like it?

Normal - it's not what you're thinking.

What will we next be expected to accept? Those who have won concessions for tastes once considered abhorrent have done so by persistence, by not being cowed by a hostile majority and look how we have eventually accepted their way of thinking. So it should come as no surprise that flying in the face of public opinion and national sovereignty the EU has once again ignored the protests and simply decided that we will accept into our midst hundreds of thousands of people who don’t possess the western mindset to be coerced and persuaded into forgiveness and acceptance. A un-democratic regime forcing unwanted change on its demoralised people? What could possibly go wrong?

Some Nonsense...

Revenge is a dish best served cold, so they say. Fingers in pies, too many cooks, don’t bite the hand that feeds you; there are many food-related metaphors, proverbs and suchlike attaching to politics and public life just as much as to the actual kitchen whose heat you may or may not be able to adequately withstand. There’s also a lot of nonsense talked about both revenge and food. One Mr Edward Lear wrote a recipe for a dish he called Amblongus Pie:

Take 4 pounds (say 4 ½ pounds) of fresh Amblongusses, and put them in a small pipkin.

Cover them with water and boil them for 8 hours incessantly, after which add 2 pints of new milk, and proceed to boil for 4 hours more.

In my life I have never quite got around to swearing revenge. Swearing, by fuck, yes, but never committing myself to actual vengeful action. I remember to this day the chronic alcoholic boss who made my life hell, spread totally unfounded accusations about me among people who had never met me and engineered my sacking from what at the time was a very promising career. I came close to actual hate for that one but revenge? What would be the point? He’s almost certainly dead by now. (But if not, you know who you are, Malcolm)

When you have ascertained that the Amblongusses are quite soft, take them out and place them in a wide pan, taking care to shake them well previously. Grate some nutmeg over the surface, and cover them carefully with powdered gingerbread, curry-powder, and a sufficient quantity of Cayenne pepper.

I believe I’m a better man for not going down that road and for not letting unsavoury, malicious incidents, deliberate or otherwise mar my life by harbouring seething resent. After all, I may have misread the signs; I may have contributed, however unwittingly. I accept that. It’s called growing up. Maye the scions of privilege, or those of meteoric rise have never have to face the harsh realities of not getting what you want? Maybe Michael Ashcroft was motivated by a sense of entitlement so strong he felt that only what he hoped would be public humiliation would be sufficient pay-off for the perceived sleight.

Remove the pan into the next room, and place it on the floor. Bring it back again, and let it simmer for three-quarters of an hour. Shake the pan violently till all the Amblongusses have become a pale purple colour.

But life is not Game of Thrones. Those who plot to discredit others often end up looking churlish and damaged themselves and if Cameron can laugh off Pig Gate as youthful idiocy, put his hands up to naïve stupidity, admit to behaving just as thousands of other little rich kids have acted and then shrug and get on with business, Ashcroft will look like the snitch at public school; the friendless outsider to which status he may yet return. No, I don’t see the point of revenge; it can too easily backfire.

Revenge pie... serve oh, so cold!

Then, having prepared a paste, insert the whole carefully, adding at the same time a small pigeon, 2 slices of beef, 4 cauliflowers, and any number of oysters.

Watch patiently till the crust begins to rise, and add a pinch of salt from time to time.

Serve up in a clean dish, and throw the whole out of the window as fast as possible.

Today the Daily Telegraph reports that Lord Ashcroft may lose his government advisory position as a result of his petulant publishing of this unauthorised biography. A dish best served cold? Or, maybe, a dish best never served at all.

Pig Headed

It’s autumn conference season and the parties are preparing to huddle and regroup and applaud each other and generally reinforce their tribal values. The Tories can relax some of their austerity measures now, showing off their caring side in the certain knowledge that it will be nowhere near the peak-welfare demands of the Corbynistas, who will then seem unreasonable as the ‘entirely independent’ ONS (Ministry of Truth) releases figures to show how much better off a three-child family will be after their tax credits have been cancelled.

What’s that Jeremy, they’ll say, protesting about a move in your own direction? At conference we’ll hear about strategies for dealing with this and strategies for dealing with that. How to handle press briefings; ‘the message’ and how to stay on it. Because it’s all about perception. It matters not what you believe in, nor even what you do; all that matters is what people perceive. Tories good with money but bad with people, Labour hopeless with money but ever so caring. At least that’s what they think.

At least in this respect Jeremy Corbyn has to be applauded. He is telling his troops to behave as he does and keep it political, never personal. So the neo-Nazis in Labour’s ranks who would control everybody by rule of law and police action might have to actually act a bit more like, well, like the Tories generally do. Instead of piling on the vitriol it’s far more effective to laugh at your enemy as he beats his puny fist against your mighty chest. For instance when Comrade Cul-de-Sac has to back down on yet another high principle in the face of realpolitik .

But best of all about Conference Season is that it is a time for all the fruitcakes and fascists and downright lunatics to crawl out of the wainscoting at every party venue. Famous, now officially ex-lefty, Nick Cohen has recently written; “ Labour’s new leader sees a moral equivalence between 9/11 and the assassination of bin Laden, and associates with every variety of women-hating, queer-bashing, Jew-baiting jihadi, holocaust denier and 9/11 truther. His supporters know it, but they don’t care.” It’s surely only a matter of time before we see a clutch of “Jeremy ate my hamster!” headlines to brighten up our days.

There are idiots in every party as there are idiots in every walk of life. The young, the naïve, the foolhardy and the honey-trapped. The press has a field day uncovering transgressions, major and minor and it really doesn’t care which party they are from or how flimsy the evidence. Protected sources are enticed to give up the deepest darkest secrets of party officials and activists, or failing that, their second cousins twice removed. And the revelations will often be beyond belief.

A relative of George Osborne once ate a whole child. Alive. Jeremy Corbyn’s cousin secretly owns most of Saudi Arabia. A high-profile Green Party donor made his fortune from selling incinerators and fly-tipping asbestos. A Libdem councillor named his second son Adolf. A UKIP spokesperson was once in agreement with something somebody related to a member of the BNP said in 1985. Or, get this, David Cameron once fucked a pig!

Samantha and I...

Ah, the excesses of youth. I mean who hasn’t at some time rested their cock for a moment in the dead mouth of a haram corpse? For every story there will be a gleeful roar from the away supporters and embarrassed shuffles from the home crowd and then it will all die down... apart from the occasional oink from the opposition benches. The ancient shenanigans of those in the public eye are fleeting flecks of colour in the big picture, but that doesn’t matter to the press; the perception is the thing, so get ready to do your own colouring in after they provide the sketches... just don’t colour outside the lines. 

Humanomics

While politicians imagine they are playing chess and planning many moves ahead, only to be thwarted in turns by equally clever players doing likewise the rest of us get on with life as it is usually lived. We react serially and occasionally in parallel with events as they arrive at our door. Problems, hardships, opportunities, threats... win or lose, we meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same. Here at ground zero, planet reality, we know that life ain’t fair and not everything goes always to plan. Chess it is not; chaos, more like.

The Domino Theory, the Butterfly Effect, the Law of Unintended Consequences. If Newton were today formulating his laws in relation to human interaction he might observe that every action has an unequal and not entirely proportionate, not necessarily opposite reaction. Press this button and what happens? Nothing to see here, but a butterfly in the Amazon has just been squashed by a falling tree... that nobody heard. The tumbling dice of everyday life on earth knows no easy solutions except the aggregated effects of the millions of one-to-one interactions that make up real human economics... ‘humanomics’.

When you analyse all those possibilities though, it turns out there aren’t a gazillion different responses to stimuli but in fact just a few: fear, revulsion, love, curiosity and some in-between shades we give clever names to but which are just shadows of the eat/fight/fuck programming of our primitive brains. Tip the first domino and watch them all fall in a horrible, slow-motion inevitability, one after the other. Cause and effect, time after time. Instead of planning theoretical chess moves those oh-so-important leaders might want to stand and observe how the chips actually fall.

A million people are in motion. Like water they flow where you let them. If you open your borders wide it should come as no surprise that they flood in. If you suddenly slammed the door shut, Mrs Merkel, did you think the flow would be turned off like a tap? Put a rock in the stream and the bifurcated migrant-Mississippi will find other routes; if the gaps through which those torrents flow are too narrow the pressure will build and down will come somebody else’s flood defences. Hungary, Croatia, Serbia... one after one they falter and tumble.

All very pretty till it flaps its wings

Was this the best that the EU could come up with? Over the forty-odd years we’ve been paying in (and increasingly so in the last decade) the EU has shown itself incapable of dealing with even the simplest attempts at harmonisation. Imagining it can exist as a central planning regime after the Soviet model, a bunch of detached, unelected, comfortably made men and women make their unhinged decisions, imagining the stupid humans beneath them will quietly acquiesce. But although true academic chaos theory involves quantum mechanics, predicting that if you push people they will push back is hardly rocket science.

Doing the Dirty

Much hue and cry on the Interweb at the revelation that Jeremy Corbyn once had a dalliance with Diane Abbott in the nineteen seventies. As the Telegraph story has it “The couple reportedly went on a tour of East Germany together on a motorbike.” Way to go Jezzer_[sic]! But my, how he loved that bike. It was a cranky classic IMZ-Ural ‘Cossack’ in keeping with Jeremy’s beloved Russian ideology and he looked after it as if it were a delicate child, so much so that he always a kept a small tub of Vaseline handy and rubbed it over the thin and delicate Soviet chrome-work if it ever threatened to rain.

That motorcycle was his pride and joy and so enamoured of it was he that he was certain it would also impress Dianne’s parents, who he been persuaded to meet on their return from the grand tour of the glorious Deutsche Demokratische Republik. The happy couple rattled and bounced along some of London’s last remaining cobbled streets, with Diane’s bum perched proudly around the pillion. Overhead the skies were a gloomy overcast grey. Rain? Maybe, he thought, but not just yet; after all his elder brother Piers is a weatherman and a little of the lore had washed off. As he parked up he reached for the Vaseline but Diane interrupted his preparations and pulled him to her.

She whispered in his ear: “I have to tell you something about my parents before we go in. I know you like to debate politics around the table but please, please don’t do it tonight. When my family eats dinner, we don't talk.” Jeremy is aghast; what other purpose is there in gathering over food but to discuss the burning issues of the day and plot the revolution? But Diane pleads, “Please? Seriously, don’t say a word.” And then, in a whisper she added, “Anybody who speaks during dinner has to do the dishes." Jeremy nods his assent. He quite understands; while he was growing up his parents had servants to do all that.

When they enter the house he is astonished. Everywhere there are dirty dishes. In the hallway is a huge stack of unwashed plates and bowls teeter on every step of the stairs. In the middle of the living room, a neat but grubby pile of dishes sits on the coffee table, surrounded by a tangle of food-encrusted cutlery. And then in the kitchen, the sink is piled high with dirty crockery. There must be a dozen dinner services, he deduces, all unwashed because of some stupid rule. Jeremy hates rules and decides there and then that when he is Prime Minister he will abolish them.

The dining room, thankfully, is neat and the table formally laid. After introductions they take their seats and Diane catches Jeremy’s eye. She holds a finger up to her lips, mimes ‘shush’ and blows him a kiss. Dinner proceeds in total silence save for the sounds of mastication and the occasional gulp and slurp. This is bizarre and Jeremy, ever the rebel, decides to see how far they will stick to this ridiculous principle. He leans over to Diana and plants a long, deep, tonguey kiss on her lips. Nobody says a thing. Emboldened and curiously aroused, he pulls her to her feet and strips her naked, then takes her right there on the table, in front of her open-mouthed mum and dad. Still not a sound.

He had already noticed that Diane’s mum was still a handsome woman and so, amazed at getting no reaction, he dismounts Di and takes her mother in a passionate embrace. Then he gathers her into the astonishing tableau amid the turnips on the table and proceeds to have a frenzied three-way with the two women who, although by now both highly aroused, still utter not a recognisable syllable. During all this time the father has said nothing and has a look of iron resolve on his poker face. He is a man of principle and by god he will not give in now.

Is that the Vaseline in your pocket, or...?

Jeremy comes up for air and notices the first drops of rain on the dining room window. His thoughts immediately fly to his beloved Cossack outside in the yard and he leaps off the table and dives for the zip pocket in his leather jacket. For a moment he looks bereft but then finds what he has been fumbling for. He brings out the little jar of Vaseline and holds it up, whereupon Diane’s dad stands up, flings his napkin on the table and shouts out "All right, all right... I'll do the fucking dishes!!"

Shutting up shop...

I’m still not ready yet to pass judgement on Jeremy Corbyn’s ascension to the leadership of the Labour Party. Plenty of others are doing a great job of that, so I’ll keep my powder dry until I see the whites of his eyes. Oops, I said whites... like a great big nasty racist. Right now I’m rather more engaged by seeing the strife which is rife through much of Europe. Oh yes, we’re back on the migrant crisis, but actually it’s the bizarre logic behind Angela Merkel’s throwing open – and then hastily re-closing – Germany’s borders to one and all that’s got me thinking... again.

Here’s the apparent rationale behind the come one, come all policy: Germany has an ageing population; its indigenous birth rate, in common with many full developed countries, is only at replacement level or just below, so as people live longer, the average age increases and with it the cost of providing health care, pensions, etc. falls on a proportionately smaller percentage of the population. Accepting without challenge that an economy must only ever grow and can never be allowed to shrink or stabilise, the argument is that they need more economic activity in the younger half of the population.

And somehow that is going to be achieved by importing Eritrean goatherds is it? Or Somali stick-sharpeners, Ethiopian khat-heads, Sudanese soap-dodgers or any of a host of others in the brown-rainbow diaspora? This is a very special kind of diversity, where everybody looks and sounds the same, because nobody can tell who is Syrian and who isn’t any more. This intelligence is from the migrants themselves.

But forget the casual racism there and focus on the economic argument. If you want to boost your economy you first look to train up your own; you know where you are with your own. Or at least you should because, brought up in the family firm, as it were, UK Plc, they ought to already know what is expected of them. But, in the short term yes, you may need to bring in skilled, fully-trained outsiders. It’s a win-win. They take up the slack, you pay over the odds for a while and in the meantime everybody gets to experience a little extra in their lives. Cooperation, genuine cross-cultural enrichment, possibly even lifelong friendships. And then we hand over the reins to the new generation and everybody lives, happy ever after.

Except something has gone horribly wrong. Necessary, as-required, skilled immigration has become, in the minds of the politicos, synonymous with opening the doors to anybody regardless of their talents. And this new underclass, if not going straight into the black economy, is seized upon by mass employers of menial labour. We are still crying out for and need to look further afield for the talent but we are denying entry into base-level work for our own underclass, which we have put out to early grass, retired straight after ineffective schooling, ruminant remnants, grazing the welfare system for survival.

Fortress Europe - it's the only answer

Spin boys, spin. Tell ‘em the immigrants pay into the national pot, even if the tax credits they receive exceeds the tax they pay. Even if the combined VAT on all their outgoings is still below the cost of housing them, educating their children and keeping the NHS afloat. Spin and spin again that immigration is not only good, it is essential to support the lazy indigenous racists. And totally ignore the fact that those who actually do pay the bulk of the tax, those who actually do support the system are working longer hours into older age to support the broods of children born to those migrants, muslims to a man, who are here in the service of another calling altogether. Wake up, Europe. It’s time.

Hey, teacher! Leave them kids alone!

As technology gets smarter, humans get dumber; at least they seem to. Education used to be about preparing young people to go out into the world capable of surviving, ideally without a step-by step instruction manual. Last weekend, admittedly showing off, I got out my 1970s slide rule (mandatory for A-Level Maths) and out-performed my class in a number of calculations which, while rudimentary to a child of the sixties, were as rocket science to generations who have learned to rely on machines. I was denounced as a wizard and sentenced to be burned at the stake.

The thing is, my generation is as capable of using the machines as are the youngsters of today, when useful outcomes are required; we just don’t trust them because experience has taught us that you don’t always have a calculator when you need to compute. Likewise, through normal interaction with others we learned friendship and compromise and when to stand our ground and who to respect. We just didn’t have social media to tell us what to think, we just had to do that for ourselves. For the same reason, although I have a smartphone (and very handy it can be) it’s usually the last port of call when I’m searching for a solution, not the first.

Of course younger people are going to be slicker and some are going to make real money on the back of technologically enabled connections we greybeards will simply not comprehend but guess what, those kids are the ones who would succeed anyway. They could get rich, hit it big, bestride the world in any time period you cared to drop them into. Leonardo today might out-Apple Apple. Michelangelo might out-Pixar Disney. But edu-tech as engagement for disenfranchised pupils who can barely string a sentence together or look another human in the eye is the equivalent of sweeping the dirt under the carpet. And even the OECD are now saying so.

The lazy adherence to the educationalists’ experiments in the dumbed-down, conveyor-belt, certificate production line that much education has become focuses on ‘achievement’ as a euphemism, rather than actual, you know, achievement. The learning of principles comes secondary to following a recipe for success and the sound of boxes being ticked overwhelms and drowns out those lightbulb moments when real learning takes place. This has genuine consequences, not least the several generations now with progressively poorer critical thought processes.

One of the reasons Labour fell from grace in the seventies was the direct experience of its disastrous outcomes on people who cared about this country and its place in the world. Now, however, with all that as ancient history, the glorious stories of revolutions that were never won are being dusted off, rewritten and presented as fact to new voters who will happily accept without cynicism, the lies that sound the nicest. Anti-competition, anti-adversarial combat, anti-non-conformity, anti-racist, anti-fascist, anti-anti-anti... if you, with a good career are for it, they are against it.

But I need Bluetooth!

I can’t wait to see how Jeremy Corbyn’s new model army of bright young drones will fare when their costly demands meet the empty coffers of state. Or when we hoary old geezers with free minds and a healthy disdain for technology fail to fall in line with the barrage of new conformity laws they would usher in. (Pretty soon I’m expecting even being born white to be deemed racist; it’s certainly headed that way.) But worry not, there is a solution and a rather neat and apposite one at that. Once the energy fails and the power cuts become the norm and the great silence falls on the land,  the batteries powering their iPhones will run out and then none of them will know what to think at all.

Who needs Schengen?

While Twitter and the rest of the media world continues its feeding frenzy, with many a speculation into how far left the Labour Party will lurch under Comrade Corbyn, eyes are averted from the other notable result of the past few days. Labour’s folly in letting the sorriest apologists for Marxist failures into office should only really hurt Labour, although I believe it may also sharpen up the Tories to see the appetite among unintelligent people everywhere (people who nevertheless have a vote) for the hastening of their own impoverishment.

But losing out financially and putting the life-success of your children at risk is nothing compared to actually ushering in the agents of your final destruction as a mature culture; a culture that was once the most advanced on the planet. The erosion has been going on for some years but it accelerated dramatically under New Labour’s deliberate – and admittedly so – experiment in socially engineered diversity. The monstrosity that is multiculturalism is simply not possible at humanity’s current level of evolution beyond that practised in very small communes which, under scrutiny, turn out to be far more homogenous than the face paint appears to show.

We are under threat from a tidal wave of those fleeing islamic countries and like many mass movements before them they carry a plague. While they may currently be concerned only with their own safety, once settled in richer, western countries they will disdain our apparent decadence, segregate, multiply and overwhelm. Ask anybody who used to live in any former industrial city and they will tell the same story: Bradfordistan, Oldhamabad, Lutonpindi... all now degenerating into stone-age shitholes as whites flee and the statistics slowly turn brown. It isn’t racist to simply point at the measurable effects of non-integrationist population change.

David Cameron, in many misguided attempts to be all things to all voters is quick to ape the ideology of the left, whose ultimate aim is the destruction of western capitalism. To out-diversify the progressives he has insisted he wants to see more muslims in positions of power. Ask the people of those former prosperous cities where corruption is rife in muslim-led councils and where a hands-off attitude is taken towards policing it whether they think the solution to islamification is more muslims in positions of power. Ask the Londoners of Tower Hamlets whether Lutfur Rahman’s reign was indicative. Ask the parents of minority-white children in the overcrowded ‘Babel classes’ of formerly British schools how they feel. Ask anybody who can’t afford the means not to be adversely affected.

The British form of soft Communism under Old Labour wore away the work ethic, with strike after strike on flimsy grounds in a blatant class war, so at first we welcomed the industriousness of the early eastern immigrants. They kept their religion largely under wraps. But indigenous and incomer can only have a harmonious balance when it is clear where the balance of power lies and we slept while the Islamic snake slithered. There is, it turns out, no such thing as a moderate muslim; either you observe the faith and defend it against the kuffar’s disdain or you are not a muslim.

How many visibly ‘moderate’ muslims have had an offer they couldn’t refuse, a leg up from their local ummah, favours given in expectation of future redemption? If we are unwilling to acknowledge the problem others are more forthcoming. But those who speak out, like Paul Sabapathy are quickly silenced. How often recently have we heard a cool and accurate appraisal of the situation only to get a retraction and a resignation soon afterwards?

Sadiq Khan doesn’t seem like a bad bloke but when he tweeted “I am deeply humbled that so many Londoners have put their faith in me today. Together, we can change London” I can’t have been the only one wondering what he would change it into, if elected. How long before favours will need to be returned? How long before Kentish Town transitions into Karachi? And the reaction of white Britain? To do the decent thing and not make a fuss. Sell up and move out and hope to die before causing offence. The problem with civilisation, it seems, is that we lose the appetite to fight. 

All aboard the Schengen Express!

All over Europe now, populations are driven to protest because while they may have humanity and decency they have seen their own governments usher in masses who will take advantage of those values. Although the media describe such protests as being ‘far right’ the reality is that they are simply white. EU governments have flooded their countries with outsiders against the express wish of their majorities. But it makes no sense; white people are so much less trouble than their replacements. Germany's reinstatement of its border with Austria might just be belated recognition of that. But look on the bright side; when Germany falls, the EU falls. The winds of change blow hard these days, but it's an ill wind, they say...

All quiet on the Western Front?

All the chatter over the last week has been about what everybody is finally agreed is a migration crisis. Forget your squabbling over terminology, by any account we have swarms, floods, deluges and hordes of overwhelming and unprecedented numbers. Unprecedented? Yes because in the past we had sovereign countries, with borders whereas now all we have is a loose connection of weakly allied states in a fledgling country called ‘Europe’. We islanders may be the final frontier in a few short years although, as far as many of us can see, our battlements are already breached.

They are already here, so the first part of the project to utterly alter white Europe’s culture and character is firmly under way. Now they have to persuade us that it is a good thing. To this end, Germany under Führer Frau Merkel is busily explaining what a good thing the sudden acquisition of a million alien young men of military age and stone age mentality is. Nobody any more believes the trope that mature economies need immigration to maintain them. Quite apart from being a form of Ponzi scheme it doesn’t even make sense to those in receipt of welfare, reliant on the state; even they can see that somebody paying virtually zero tax on minimum wage is simply not part of the solution.

But, on the other hand in these turbulent times, all European nations are now aware of the need to beef up their national defences. And some of these fit young men have already had military training, of a sort. The solution is obvious to a Teutonic mind; conscript them into a resurgent German army and equip them all with the very latest weapons. What could possibly go wrong?

Talking of Germany and armies reminds me of the stories they used to tell about the First World War, in the trenches of the Western Front. Although the fighting was frequently fierce and men going over the top were mown down by rapid fire, there were times of uneasy quiet and in the still of the night the snipers used cunning to draw out their targets. The classic technique was said to be simple and rely on the ostentatious and formal discipline of the German troops...

1915: The moon broke through a gap in the clouds, casting a pale blue light over Flanders' Field. In the half-dark the British sniper called out, “Hans! Hans! Are you there?” Three German heads popped up above three trench lips and almost in unison replied “Jah, here I am!” Three single bullets spat from the muzzles of the Enfield No.1 mk3 sniper rifles and three German soldiers breathed their last. The clouds closed, the darkness rushed in and once again silence reigned.

An hour later and another break in the clouds. The vague hillocks and spikes fell into sharper focus as a pale moonlight cast weak shadows. From the Allied trenches a voice called out “Fritz! Fritz! Where are you?” Once again several German troops popped up to attention and declared their presence. Once again the Enfields delivered their deadly message. The Hun was taking a heavy toll this night. As the dark closed in again, Herman decided to act.

Pack up your troubles...

The early streaks of dawn appeared in the eastern sky and Herman readied his snipers; he crept to the top of his trench bank. The Mauser Gewehr 98s were a far superior weapon and he intended to level the tally. Cupping his hands round his mouth he shouted out. “Tommy! Tommy! Are you there?” Silence. German guns were brought to aim, but nothing happened. Once again Herman shouted out, “Tommy, Tommy, where are you?” After a few seconds a voice rang out from the British lines, “Herman, is that you?” Herman sprang to attention. “Jah!” he cried.

EU Lullaby

Hush little baby don’t you cry, momma’s gonna sing you a lullaby. Hush, hush, hush and dry your tears, save them all for your adult years. You need to grow up big and strong and free the world from the Nazi throng. All around they kill and maim but worry not, we know their game. You must learn to sit and wait and then attack with all your hate heart. Momma’s gonna buy you a mocking bird, but first you need to embrace the absurd.

Sing your children to sleep with glorious songs of the demos, comrades. Inculcate your kids with the morals of the left, by telling them at every turn how evil are those who pay all the taxes and give people meaningful work without the express consent of the state. Teach them how we all depend on one another and that individual success is a malignant cancer, eating at the heart of national unity. For, one cannot profit except that another loses. And to excel at academia is to play into the hands of evil capitalism, unless it is in the fields of diversity studies, wimmin’s issues or macramé in dance as a form of expressing the eternal struggle for illusory equality.

Mildly berate them should they win any prizes denied to the whole class, explaining to them how the elite seek to divide and rule by offering the lure of riches as reward for effort. Constantly refer to that elite as the one-percent. For does not all reward lie in the warm glow of candle-lit vigils and shared kettling experiences with the ninety? The state provides both unity and division as it drives you to protest and simultaneously suppresses your dissent. All aided and abetted by a national media so obviously Fascist in its ethos as to be nothing but propaganda for the lizard overlords who try to drive a wedge between us. Hate the lizards.

Solidarity, brothers and sisters and should the evil workers advance you have a moral duty to fight back. Don’t forget an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. They take your eye, you give them a tooth. The flag they fly is pure provocation; patriotism is the preserve of the weak, driven to hate. Never forget the sacred mantras:  It is racist to love your country. It is racist to like white people. It is racist to express any concerns about the cost of housing an additional 300,000 people a year. And it is especially racist to give a job to a fully qualified British national when an unknown refugee with a fake identity is all ready and waiting to have a go, just as soon as he can beat the Calais blockade.

Take no responsibility. If you fail, if you hurt, if you don’t get what you want, remember it is all the fault of Thatcher, who stole the milk and tried to steal your dreams. We are raising a nation of sleepers who can be relied on to toe whatever line the party tells them, when the time comes. Drip, drip, drip; sowing the seeds of entitlement deep within the psyche. Like the simpletons who swallow the lies of islamism, we need an army of dupes, brainwashed into believing in miracles and trusting in the hereafter; the state can still provide, even if it has no money. Financial gravity can be overcome. Saving the NHS is more important than saving lives. And all immigrants are good immigrants.

It wuz Fatchaa wot dun it!

At the heart of the project is the EU. Is the new communism an aim of the EU or is it the other way around? No matter. When you are needed, our minions, we will tell you what you need to hear. Public opinion, the national mood, what ‘ordinary people’ want, is whatever we say it is. And if that mood needs to change we will tell you how you now feel. Come the revolution, comrades, there will be no revolution.

Stormbringer

In the Atlantic, depressions become tropical storms and rush towards the Caribbean and the southern United States. Homeowners batten down their properties, hide in the cellar and hope, guiltily, that the devastating forces of nature pass them by and take their neighbour instead. Island communities are devastated and thousands can lose their living, if not their actual lives in a single night of howling, hurricane-force winds and thousands of tonnes of rain cascading from angry skies, for no reason whatsoever. Weather, like islam, doesn't care how many it kills.

According to Wikipedia, Hurricane Katrina was the eleventh named storm and fifth hurricane of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season. It was the costliest natural disaster, as well as one of the five deadliest hurricanes, in the history of the United States. Over 1200 people lost their lives and over $100bn of property damage was caused. Meanwhile, in Britain, we’ve had it tough. In 1883 the Eyemouth Disaster killed 189 fishermen. In 1953, severe winds and a high spring tide killed 300 in the North Sea flood. In 1987 Michael Fish narrowly avoided forecasting a hurricane with the subsequent loss of lots and lots of old trees and 22 people. And in 2013/14 the cessation of dredging and a bit of heavy rain submerged the Somerset Levels. I don’t recall anybody dying as a result.

But now the Met Office want to start naming UK-bound storms ‘...in an attempt to improve awareness of major weather threats’. Perhaps the Met Office hasn’t noticed our national preoccupation with the weather... And our almost universal shrug of indifference when it finally hits. Yes there’s the odd YouTuber who posts pictures of bollock-sized hailstones or a family of ducklings happily paddling along a flooded gutter, but in the main we tend to just put on a coat or stay indoors.

But no longer is this level of ‘meh’ acceptable. Derrick Ryall, head of the public weather service at the Met Office, said: "We have seen how naming storms elsewhere in the world raises awareness of severe weather before it strikes.” Yes, indeed, Derrick (you really spell it that way, like a lifting device?) in places where storms cause devastation and death on a regular basis, it’s a bloody good idea but in Britain where most of the housing stock has steadfastly refused to be blown down, year after year, all you are doing is feeding the increasing propensity of Brits to seek compensation for imagined losses. We do have insurance, you know?

Further, another Met Office spokesman said: "There is no system at the moment for naming storms. It is random and you can get the same storm being given different names by different forecasters. This is what leads to confusion in the media and the public and why we are piloting an official system." Who was confused? Weather forecasts come at us a hundred times a day and all we need to know is, is it going to be windy/wet/dry/hot where I am? Naming it? Haven’t you learned how inhospitable we are to even desperately needy refugees? The idea that we are going to adopt a fucking bit of wind and give it a personality by naming it is a tad fanciful to say the least.

There's a mo-storm coming...

And anyway, this is Britain. If we named a storm John we’d be called racist Anglophiles. Lloyd would be pandering to the Welsh, Gordon would be howled down by the gays north of the border and Patrick would risk raising the ire of Ireland. If we opted for girls’ names we’d end up with wet ones like Cissy or Petunia. But give it a few years and that problem will go away. In the coming UK Caliphate every storm will be called mohammed.

Planned Parenthood?

Much chatter in the air about morality and moral duty regarding the increasingly tedious refugee situation. Frankly I’m getting compassion fatigue already and I no longer know what the state of play is. Do you? Are we already overrun or are we effectively stowing them in special muslim quarters where their numbers will go unremarked? Have we declared war on Germany yet? And if not, why not? Are we even still in the EU; it’s kind of hard to tell... well, except for the gushing national artery, haemorrhaging money into the bottomless well deed-polled ‘compassion’ but whose given name is guilt. It’s all too big to contemplate.

So let’s scale it down a bit and pick a manageable subject for scrutiny. How about this for a morality tale: Jennifer Cramblett, a white lesbian US citizen, had a mixed-race daughter after she was accidentally[sic] inseminated with a black man’s sperm. Now she and her partner are suing the sperm bank over the mix-up. The couple rarely meet non-whites and the little girl will be the only black kid in her school where, if the ‘parents’ attitudes are anything to go by, she may have some difficulty in fitting in. I sincerely hope not but questions need to be asked and one of those questions should not be “How much compo am I going to get?”

Colour me cruel but did anybody consult the poor child as to the sort of parents she wanted? Maybe she will grow up to wish she had both a mummy and a daddy; one black, one white. Maybe she will be sublimely unaware and succeed with ease, going on to become a pillar of a colour-blind community? Or maybe she will fall pregnant to a drug-dealing, gun-toting gangsta at the age of fifteen, be disowned by her estranged carers and live a short life of squalor and despair. Who knows; there are enough uncertainties in life, even for those born to privileged families, without adding in any extra.

The liberal media love to portray the children of unconventional pairings as extra-loved, as if two women or two men can easily be better parents than the boring old one-of-each model. Maybe because they believe that overcoming stigma, in some cases, means they better understand the trials of life. But this is an absurd position; why should any couple – or any lone parent for that matter – be so freely allowed to experiment with another life? For all that you may believe that having a child will complete you, the poor kid has no choice in the matter and it may well be that your influence in completing the kid could be disastrous. There are plenty of examples to demonstrate that parenthood should not be seen as an automatic human right.

There are no non-selfish reasons for creating another to share the shitty vale of tears we call life. Nobody has a child for the benefit of society and as much as they may love their offspring, nobody knows to what influences they will be prey. But one thing we do see time and again is that the apple rarely falls far from the tree, so before you have kids of any variety you should ask yourself why you would do something so thoughtless. The children of poor people most often end up poor. The children of abusers frequently become abusers. Yes it’s a gamble, but you are not gambling with your own stake money.

Nobody asked me...

Here we all are, moralising about taking in the unplanned outcome of unchecked breeding in a society alien to our own and perhaps in doing so welcoming the Trojan horse of our own destruction. But nobody seems overly concerned with the daily atrocities carried out on our own soil, the indiscriminate forcing into life of potential future refugees, criminals, deadbeats, drug addicts, thugs, racists, inadequates... Yes, yes, yes, they may go on to be Nobel Peace Prize winners, but the odds are stacked against it.

The Thin Line

It’s a thin line, they say, between love and hate. Bollocks, it’s a mile wide, that divide. If your emotional recognition skills are so poor that you can’t tell the difference you may be less well evolved than would be ideal to survive in this unstable world. While you may have little control over falling in love, although you may have to learn to curb your more stalky urges, you can always decide whether or not to hate. Hate is a tricky thing to maintain; a fire that has constantly to be tended and even the most severe antipathy fades with time. Hate is a narrow-minded, weak and needy emotion and I, for one, do not have the energy or inclination for it; I’m just not that dedicated.

But while hate itself may be a weedy thing, a sickly, light-deprived sapling that withers and dies without constant attention, the sound alone is a powerful word-weapon in the wrong hands. By the wrong hands I don’t the mean children and teenagers, for many of whom it is practically punctuation, I mean people old enough that they should have grown out of it and those who manipulate them. So while most ordinary people do not hate immigrants and certainly don’t hate genuine refugees, the idea is seized upon as part of the project of painting those whom the left despise as the hirelings of sinister forces. ‘Hate crimes’ are pushed to the top of the agenda so that normal preference for the company of those you know is spun as hatred of others and called racism.

Of course some of those same teenagers who use that word so freely are useful idiots who can easily be persuaded to prolong their inability to think with any nuance; many of them are at university, after all. Peace and war, love and hate. And boy are they quick to the latter, hurling their invective at anybody they deem insufficiently impressed by their clumsy black and white arguments. They are ideal foot soldiers for other, more cynical groups who know how to exploit them. Unite against Fascism, Hope not Hate and other such righteous-sounding groups seek common cause with the naïve and thus recruit unwitting white jihadis to the crusade. 

In the last couple of days people have been posting links to the Frankfurt School and their plans for destabilisation of formerly ordered societies. Much as I resist the call to fall for conspiracy theories it is hard to argue this is not exactly what we are seeing. And yet still I don’t hate those who do this. I feel a certain skin-crawling loathing at the sight of yet another atrocity. My distaste is aroused and I feel abhorrence, revulsion and an aversion to their company. Their words and deeds are an abomination, their hostility an undoubted provocation but while my dander may be up and my ire may be only thinly held in check it is, nevertheless, held in check. I am not stooping to their level and succumbing to the helplessness of hatred.

Uncontrolled emotion is for babies

But in the race to appear reasonable we forget at our peril that it is not a race, it is a pursuit and we are the quarry. We need to fight emotion with reason and we need to treat anger with ambivalence and pragmatism. You have your fists up? I’m closing the door. You’re kicking down the door? I’m building a wall. Face you on the battlefield? No thanks, we have drones. Sun Tsu said “He who is prudent and lies in wait for an enemy who is not, will be victorious.” So don’t let those who so freely use the ‘H’ word to describe you, get within striking distance. Don’t hate them; they’re just not worth the energy.

The Diana Gene

In 1997 the United Kingdom had a mental breakdown. Grown men who had never had a thought for anything beyond their immediate circle of acquaintances and narrow fields of interest turned into foreigners. You know the kind of foreigners; the ones we used to see on the telly, ululating and self-harming in grief at the funeral of a family member. I remember how it used to make me glad to be British; to stoically bear tragedy and loss and to go on and get the job done “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs...” I watched the wailing fuzzy-wuzzies with unconcealed disdain and a sense of, yes, some superiority.

Pith helmet, bristling moustache, rigid upper lip, sleeves rolled up and getting on with it; and that was just the women. The Boys Own Paper images of Tommy Atkins and his comrades cast from a similar mould, if it ever existed, is long gone and now Britain has truly become the mongrel nation many in our governments have long yearned for. Expressing grief is normal. Doing so en-masse and in public and so loudly and pathetically unreservedly is, well it’s not how things ought to be done; it’s not cricket. When that self-obsessed royal clothes horse died the process of turning the UK into the Middle East began in earnest.

The mass importation of people who neither looked like nor thought the same way we did was done with no concern to the effect on the indigenous. Positive discrimination was practised freely and openly in the name of the new idol of diversity, bringing unquantified and unqualified and too-rapid a change into how our public services operate and who they operate on behalf of. A blind eye was turned toward transgressions all who objected were berated and labelled as simple-minded racists. It appears to have worked; if we all originated in Africa, as some believe, the presence of our diverse cousins seems to have awoken the long-dormant mewling gene.

We no longer have to assemble in garment-rending mobs to loudly and openly mourn though; now we have the internet to do it for us. And all it takes is a tiny little trigger to get the tears flowing and the high-pitched shrieks synchronising into a cacophony of awful, self-pitying, stream of demands for relief devoid of reason. The border numbers released a few weeks ago had over half the country demanding controls on immigration. Now, however, the pictures of Aylan Kurdi have flipped opinion among the weak who are now demanding we fling our doors wide. People who normally don’t care much about anything and can happily spend hours revelling in video violence have come out of the woodwork all weepy when confronted with images of things they don’t normally have to deal with. Where is the common sense, the level head?

And across half of Europe it seems to be spreading. You would think, now that islam has shown its teeth, its infection of Europe would be curtailed. But no, now it’s adopt a Syrian week. I’m sure they are perfectly decent people, like the hard-working Pakistanis and Bangladeshis before them, but what of their kids? Will the agents and apologists of IS prey on their frailties and create another generation of ‘nice boys’ who turn into British born jihadis? It is foolish to pretend it will not happen. And what then? Will we just shrug and say something about it being the price we pay for decency?

New Towns Commission - Housing crisis? What housing crisis?

Emma Thompson says Britain’s unwillingness to take in Syrian refugees is racist.  But are we not just afraid of repeating what we have seen in front of our eyes? She says “If these people were white, European, that were coming from some dictatorship in Bosnia. If they were coming I think we would feel quite differently about it.” On the same day Richard Delingpole on Twitter said, “It's a brave or stupid man who speaks the truth while the current wave of immigration self-flagellation is going on. I'm not that man.” If self-defence is now racism isn’t it about time we all adopted a healthy respect for those who dare speak out?

Meat

Well, I was going to write about the changing of the referendum question from yes/no to remain/leave. Seriously, the question is now planned to be “remain or leave” the EU? Have they considered how this may bias the outcome towards those in favour of ‘leaving it as it is’? And ‘remain’? Maybe that’s a harbinger of times post-EU when, once the UK has led the way, few others will remain? What about those who will ‘remain’ in the leave-it-be camp? Not really thought through is it; who’s surprised?

But no, something much less important has come up, so I’ll bang on about that for a bit. A body has been photographed, washed up on a beach. You all know the one, which is a bit odd, really, because before him thousands of other children, unnamed children, have been killed, maimed, executed, murdered, butchered, mutilated, tortured, raped, bombed, mined, burned alive and you didn’t really take all that much notice. Why did it take this one single image to get you all going?

And when I say ‘going’, boy, is that an understatement. The world has gone mad over this beautifully framed Athena poster death. For some of you it will be the defining image of your lives; personally I prefer the blonde scratching her bum on the tennis court but hey, each to his own. While nobody should be gleeful at the sight of dead flesh I have to say I am disappointed by the degree to which many have chosen to take this personally. This is what I mean when I say ‘mad’. You didn’t know him, he will feel no more pain and there will be many more to follow him; why this one? Why didn’t you identify with the 1400+ serially raped girls in Rotherham who may suffer as a result for the rest of their lives?

Humans are irrational beings – not me, obviously, I’m a dead-hearted monster; that’s the nature of pragmatism – but there is something worryingly wrong with this crowd hysteria, evoked by a single photograph splashed across the entire world’s press. Every political Svengali would be wanking himself into oblivion if he’d thought of it but this is a thing of accident. Much as in art, there are many who can spread the acrylics across the canvas but few who can push the buttons and this is the Mona Lisa of mind control. Watch me do it in the last paragraph with a single word... 

Politicians, however, are made of sterner stuff and if they can’t generate the mass outcry themselves they certainly know how to exploit it. The parade of crocodile tears has been shameful. A good day to bury bad news indeed – and yes, I did think about typing ‘bury’ and then typed it anyway; see how cruel I am? Which brings me to Twitter: People whose primary interest is second-rate football and have never given the refugee crisis a moment’s thought are all of a sudden beatified and become one with the heavenly father. So saintly are they now that, in response to my stating that I am unmoved, they wish on me a horrible and painful death.

Feel the love...

Some people really do believe they have the monopoly on caring, don’t they? And so exclusively caring are they that anybody who doesn’t see what they see must suffer for their shortness of vision. There is no compassion like their personal compassion and the only way to express it is right there on a handy internet sleeve. If you’ve formed an opinion based on that dead kid, then it’s not really your opinion at all; you have been manipulated. But it’s worked; David Cameron has caved – like he was always going to; like he will on the EU ‘renegotiation’; like he has every single time public support has threatened to wane. And he didn’t seem to hesitate in using meat on a beach to justify it.