We Need to Talk about David

David Cameron has been to Iceland – I hope he stocked up on prawn rings and fish fingers – to spread the gospel according to St Jean. Jean-Claude Junckernaut has baptised and ordained Dish Face Dave and sent him forth as his emissary on Earth with a mission to bring good news to all mankind... but especially that happy breed of men, that band of brothers who inhabit this sceptred isle, this demi-paradise, this precious stone set in the silver sea, this blessed plot, this realm, this Europe.

Shakespeare, as is well known – check out your children’s history books – was a good patriot of Brussels and spent his life writing love sonnets to the EU Institutions, to whom all of Europe owes its survival. Had we not closed up the wall with our European dead, Agincourt may have been lost to the barbarian English who later succumbed to reason and embraced our glorious culture. Elgar, Nelson, Wellington... Churchill; all of them were able to triumph only thanks to generous EU grants and access to our open borders, a thing of envy the world over.

Before the EU the land of the Angles was a blasted wasteland where millions starved, grubbing in the dirt for seeds and meagre vegetables. Now, cradled in the warm and gentle arms of Mother Europe, Albion is a land of milk and honey... but only so long as she remains firmly clamped onto the fat teat of plenty that is Ma Merkel’s wondrous bounty. Outwith the union, the British Isles would once again become cold and bitter and envious lands. And we know because we have pamphlets which tell us so.

Yesterday at PMQs Cameron said, "If we don't get what we need in our negotiations I rule nothing out, but I do think it's important that as we have this debate as a nation that we are very clear about the facts and figures of the alternatives.” And there, right there, is your problem. There are no undisputed facts and figures, only speculation about what lies ahead, economically, in or out. The prosperity argument is a sham; nobody knows. Nobody.

But it is a tack which suits the ‘remain’ camp because all they have to do is to repeatedly state that on the outside of the EU we face a stark future of uncertainty, with no promise of anything beyond bare survival. This is palpable bollocks, an unimaginative line to take but one which the ‘leave’ lobby will find hard to counter. The ‘innies’ don’t even need to present a positive case for staying in, they just have to keep pushing the ‘fear of the unknown’ button.

Choose life...

But, forget all Cameron’s rhetoric about his impossible EU reform and a renegotiated relationship; I don’t want a relationship with the European Union – that’s the whole point. I want a divorce from it. The choice is not between the long road ahead or a blind alley, it is much simpler. In or out, servile or independent, British or European. The question is not so much where we want to be, but how we want to get there. And I would rather be at the helm of the national yacht, free to explore, than chained below decks to the oars of the EU galley.

It's all about you

‘Dr’ Jack Monroe has been off on one. A heavily tattooed, unstable, former lesbian, state-enabled single mother turned transitional role model for non-binary gender identity... I don’t even know where this is going any more. She has decided, in her quest to be an eternal victim, to utilise the worst of all aspects of her multi-faceted mental illness, so that she can scream into Twitter as all the hatred in the world is directed at her... in her fevered dreams. As somebody on my timeline said, Laurie Penny’s people need to up their game.

What is it that makes some people think that the world owes them anything at all? A living? A nice life? Fame, money, happiness, success... not one of these things is even close to approaching a human right, yet there is a whole underclass of people for whom the world has no use who believe that the world is their oyster... but that somebody else has to shuck it for them. Behind those dull, sunken eyes lies a distorted world view at which we can only guess, although it’s not an entirely uninformed supposition:

You have a shit job. You have a shit life. You are uneducated. You spend the weekend off your tits on booze and skunk. You fight with your on/off girlfriend and have been arrested more than once because she has reported you to the police. Your temper is short and because you can’t win arguments with intellect you resort quickly to physical aggression. You are banned from several local pubs and at least one football ground and the local magistrates say you have anger issues. A small fortune has been squandered in just containing your belligerence.

You say school was shit and all the teachers were nonces, so you sacked that off pretty quickly and by the age of thirteen you were rarely in class at all. You left without sitting any exams and spent the rest of your teen years fantasising about setting the place on fire or beating an old teacher to a pulp and leaving them to bleed to death in a dark alley somewhere for once calling you lazy, or employing an insulting sarcasm you were incapable of comprehending. In your estimation you are a somebody on your estate and deserve better from life.

You did try for a job once, in a labouring capacity and as a result of one of your frequent court appearances, but you got pissed off with being told what to do and the last straw was when the foreman criticised your ineptitude. You lasted less than a week but you still tell stories when you’re high about your days ‘working for the man’. You now inform everybody you meet (who are exactly like you, because who else would deign seek your company?) that working is a mug’s game because while they will have to work for fifty thankless years or more to earn a state pension, you will have one waiting should you live to collect it.

You’re overweight, wheezy and frequently dulled by drugs and your self-induced corpulence and malaise is playing havoc with your joints; you have your eyes set on a mobility scooter because it’s not your fault you’re becoming disabled, is it? At least you have no trouble getting a doctor’s appointment – you’re in the surgery with some complaint or other every other week. But what do doctors know about shit anyway? The last one suggested you get about more, become more active, maybe even have another go at working. They are all in it together; your skunk-induced paranoia is ever-present

Nobody gave you a chance, you say? You’ve had nothing but chances; more effort and expense has been expended by a too-caring society in calming you, trying to teach you, restraining you, occasionally incarcerating you, monitoring you and keeping you alive, well, fed and housed than twenty other people will see in a lifetime, yet you persist in believing you get nothing. You get everything you need and more and what does society get in return? Your doppelgänger girlfriend is pregnant again...

Lordy Lordy!

‘Morally indefensible’ is how Bishop Christopher Foster described the government’s proposed reform of Gordon Brown’s electoral bribe of working tax credits. And the House of Lords duly wrung their hands and spent a day reading out begging letters from those whose standard of living is topped up by the rest of us. As a lifelong non-recipient of taxpayers’ cash I say it is morally indefensible for this situation to have arisen in the first place.

No government has ever campaigned on a platform to increase the number of poor people in its population, so whose idea was it to not only let the poor multiply, but to hasten their descent by importing other, even poorer people to compete with them in the race to the arse end of society? Do you know where children get their most powerful and long-lasting life-blueprints from? Unemployable, uneducated parents may occasionally produce future scientists and doctors, leaders and visionaries... but, on the whole they just squeeze out misshaped versions of themselves.

For all the fine words, education has slid ever backward and what was once the most advanced nation on earth is now a sluggish and dull backwater through the shallow muddy basins of which, much of its population trudge. People have low enough aspirations as it is – telly, booze, takeaway, fags – but without a functioning brain they have little chance of becoming anything else. Nor of understanding that the world really does not owe you a living. Such people should not be entrusted with raising future generations – they should be allowed to die out altogether, along with the grunt industries they once worked in.

So, accepting that we need fewer poor, stupid people, unless we actually embark on a cull programme – and I am dismayed by the lacklustre support for such an eminently reasonable solution - the only way to bring this about is to dissuade. On that basis, literally starving them into infertility has its merits. Except, of course, in our far from extreme society (no matter what the idiot liberal lefties imagine) even that is a course of action too drastic to propose. Tax credit cuts it is, then... and every reasonable, rational man can see it. It is simply a matter of time.

Turkeys voting for Christmas?

Which is where the Lords come back in. George Osborne’s latest tactic of setting a trap, pointing at it, putting up ‘Warning! Trap!’ notices and then watching his political opponents walk straight into it is earning dividends. It’s worked very nicely with the new Labour ‘leadership’ and it may just have worked to hasten the long overdue reform of the cosy, corrupt, crony Upper House. Well played, sir, the Lords may just be a-leaping to their demise.

Promises, promises...

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away I worked in the oil business. In other words, I regularly came into contact with the Arab world. For all that, like simple people everywhere, they can display a warm generosity of spirit to strangers I was warned to set little store by any promises I might be given. And so it proved to be – a promise made to please at the time it was made could be broken on a simple whim. What they meant yesterday was just a distant memory today, when the promised actions failed to materialise (this is nothing to do with islam, I should add – taqiyya is another thing altogether). We got on with it and simply never banked on fulfilment.

We are living in an age of unprecedented duplicity in public life. A politician’s promise was never a firm foundation for investment but at least in the past lip service appeared to be paid to the notion of personal commitment and intent, even if a pledge could not ultimately be honoured. Now our elected representatives seem to be brazen enough to turn to camera and utter obvious untruths even as they are being expensively inducted onto the committees and company boards who have bought their treachery. How many ‘climate warriors’ have become rich by exploiting the very legislation they helped to enact? How very few of their children have been forced to endure the education they foist on the rest of us?

Staring us in the face is a vote on the biggest heap of nonsensical, dogma-driven, ideological clap-trap yet devised to wrest control from the demos and make democracy history. And Call-me-Dave, who has previously reneged on his cast-iron commitments still manages to keep a straight face as he informs us of the sincerity of his position. A straight in/out referendum, he promised, following a negotiation nobody ever believed he could pull off. The EU is incapable of reform and will stoop as low as it needs to stick its head in the sand and wholly ignore any attempt to force change upon it.

Cameron is an avowed believer in the confidence trick that is the EU and intends to do his utmost to keep us in the infernal disaster zone but he is a politician first and what matters most to him is to court favour as widely as possible. This is why Downing Street is both saying this: “It is not credible to suggest that the majority of the British public could vote to leave and then the UK government would ignore the voters and negotiate to remain.” and simultaneously fanning the billowing smokescreen of UN enforcement of any promises at some future date.

Ali Bongo - taught David Cameron his next trick...

Instead of acknowledging that the EU has no intention of giving any quarter whatsoever, he is now resorting to playing the ‘not enough time for treaty change’ card and offering instead to enshrine any future reformation promises in some UN three card trick. Cynical verbal assurances secured, he and his co-conspirators will perform some simple distraction and sleight of hand to allow him to exit, stage left, at the end of his performance, with the evidence of any covenants miraculously ‘disappeared’ and the hopes and dreams of millions stashed securely out of sight up his capacious, specially tailored conjuror’s sleeve.

What a State

Discussions are ongoing to determine what size the state should be. Well it shouldn’t be so big you can see it from the moon, that’s for sure. Both sides are trotting out absurd statistics which, taken at face value, weave whatever thread you wish into the national tapestry. But the whole thing is so complicated that neither side knows what the effect of any policy will be. The Poll Tax, for instance, was an eminently sensible idea of spreading the load of raising local revenues by asking all of earning age to chip in but the opposition managed to turn it into a fictional monster so devilish it turned even many of her supporters against the best Prime Minister most of us have ever had.

So now, people’s choice of postcode is affected at least partly by the Council Tax band of their potential home. Manipulating wages and rents and prices rarely produces the ideal outcomes such measures seek – rent controls reduce availability of private rented housing and arbitrary wage inflation can put more people out of work. Generous benefits disadvantage those who aren’t entitled. Comprehensive education drives down academic standards. When governments seek to influence outcomes there is the costly way of using financial incentives or the more affordable way of imposing penalties. But is it, truly, the job of government to decide how citizens actually think?

Beyond defence and education, health and infrastructure; beyond the almost unanimously obvious functions of state, it all gets much more contentious and ideological. But one thing does seem certain; the greater the amount of central planning the harder it is to distinguish fact from supposition. And the harder it is even for card-carrying left or rightists to assert that their way is proven to be better. If you earn a wage you can live on and feel you are entirely responsible for your own decisions, the less you want government to come anywhere near you, but at the bottom end of the scale you may rely on government for more than you even realise. If you are independent you can vote the way you believe but if you are dependent would you risk voting to cut off your support?

Nobody knows what the future will bring. After WWII nobody expected the world to see such turmoil and tension as there is in Europe right now. Post the cold war nobody thought they would see a resurgent, military Russia. But some things do seem certain: It is more difficult to take something away once you have started to give it; tax credits won’t be given up easily. And the government solution to the problems caused by government are rarely ‘less government’. The chances of Cameron reforming the state is about as likely as that of reforming the EU and the EU is wedded to the concept of ever greater government, ever closer central control.

Back off, Brussels! 

And that means yet more complication, with its commensurate costs and inability to disentangle incentive from bribe, good outcomes from bad, or fact from fiction. Our membership of this lumbering and expensive-to-feed beast becomes more irrevocable by the year. We can’t even make our own decisions who to pay benefits to. Cameron’s empty promises to roll back the heavy hand of Brussels makes him the King Cnut (spell it how you like) of the modern day.

Big Fun on the Bayou

Bong! It turns out that a uniquely British piece of our soundscape is in jeopardy. Bong! Essential works are needed on Westminster’s Great Clock. Bong! Unless £40million can be found, Big Ben could go silent... it makes you feel like whispering, it really does. But help is on the way in the form of a stand-in Big ben - Little John, the ‘bongs bell’ in Nottingham’s Council House clock tower. I heard them last night, just before the end of PM and they compared well with the potentially soon-silent bongs of the more famous Westminster bell; it could work.

Big Ben and Little John are, of course, just nicknames for the mighty bells that mark the passing of hours and hearing the story I was minded to write of the relentlessness of Old Father Time, but as I began to type I remembered an overheard conversation from long ago, far away in the Deep South of the USA, in New Orleans, where accents as brown and slow as molasses make mellow music out of mere story-telling. I was sitting on a balcony on Bourbon Street and in the distance I could overhear the chatter as three latter day Marie Laveaus tended their cauldron of gumbo.

The Creole witch queens were discussing their menfolk, as women often do and as the daiquiris flowed what limited reserve they may have possessed was cast aside and vanished into the hot, humid night. At one point the subject of nicknames came up and it was this memory that the clock tower story had stirred from its internment in the dark convolutions of my cerebral cortex. “Well, I haz a li’l pet name name fo’ mah mayn!” said the one voice. “I calls him...” There was a pause, “... Li’l Richard!” Her companions asked why and back came the reply, “Well, his name’s Richard and he ain’t but got a little dick!” They roared with laughter.

A sudden weak waft of lazy breeze off the bayou turned down the volume for a few seconds and I struggled to hear, but when the voices returned they were still finishing off the belly laugh that the intimate revelation had caused. Emboldened, perhaps, by the vouchsafing of a small secret the second voice piped up: “Well ladies, I calls mah mayn Big Ben!” She started to laugh even before she revealed the significance... “Don’t tell us,” said voice number one, “His name is Benjamin?” Voice two confirmed it “Uh-huh” she said and paused for effect “An’ honey, I gotta tell you, he is e-norm-ous!” Guffaws rent the air.

Thomaaaas!

As the laughter died away and the constant cacophony of competing music genres entered a brief hiatus a third voice came onto the scene. Less raucous than the others, a little more refined and somewhat breathy, the hitherto less forthcoming of the trio ventured the information, “Wayll ma mayn don’t know this, but ah calls him Coin-treau...”  The other two, almost as one, questioned this revelation “Huh?” and number three confirmed, “That’s what ah calls him... Cointreau.” Number one spoke up to clarify the situation; “But sweetheart, ain’t that one of dey fancy French liquors?” Number three quietly concurred, “Yes my dears... Oh yes!”

Beggar's Banquet

There’s an abnormally strong whiff of envious malcontent in the air and the usual non-sequiturs are doing the rounds:

Boo hoo: the Chinese president rides around London in a golden carriage – why do we tolerate that while there are homeless people in those streets?

Boo hoo: look at that lavishness of that state banquet – how dare people dine like that while some people are nearly starving?

Boo hoo: even though we have no idea what the price of energy will be in the future, how dare the ‘cruel Tory government’ take such expensive steps to secure our fuel needs for the next fifty years? (The absurd counter proposal is that they should invest that money in the entirely uncertain output from wind farms, whose figures are rigged and which make rich landowners richer.)

Meanwhile, in many parts of the world people literally die from starvation, not from going two days without a KFC bargain bucket. Homes by the thousand are swept away by floods and landslides and tsunamis and earthquakes in countries whose governments are powerless to help. Despotic rulers disappear their detractors and whole populations are driven to desperate measures to escape wholesale slaughter. And if you ever see a satellite picture of the earth at night, only the wealthy margins of the populated world have any electricity at all.

But - boo hoo - 2.25 million Londoners are ‘living inpoverty’. Oh, do fuck off; the numbers are meaningless, our measure of poverty is absurd, but underlying it all is a common thread – the cloth of gold called entitlement. From where came the notion that everybody deserves so much? Nobody owes you a living. Nobody even owes you life. But you’re here now and if you spend it all waiting for somebody else to fend for you, you will die disappointed. But if you are fortunate enough to possess all your limbs and your faculties, you might want to consider the pecking order for aid while you’re waiting...

The national cake is only as big as we can bake it – no, Labour, borrowing is not free money, you still have to pay for it. So after covering the costs of roads, schools, hospitals, police, defences, etc whatever is left is all there is to go round. Where do you put yourself on a scale of leukemia sufferer to multiple amputee? Is your home an exposed park bench or a cosy squat? Does an adult with a lifelong mental age of four deserve more help than a life’s-end Alzheimer’s sufferer? Do you think of the children or the cancer ward when you give to charity? Is your new hip more important than her new lungs? Who gets the single donor heart when four are needed?

Look deeper and you can go on and on and on – everybody wants a piece of that last slice of cake – in comparison, how great is your need? Nobody in Britain actually starves except by the direct neglect of others. If you’re concerned about feeding you eleven children did you stop to consider for one moment who was going to have to go without so that you could have what you wanted? What unique and debilitating condition do you possess that makes you so much more deserving than others? Just how much of other people’s money do you think you should have.

Thanks very much... I'll have two quid.

So, it’s a shame for the steel workers and homelessness is a national shame and dear oh dear the bloated NHS still has only days to live. But if you can’t see that we must live within our means and that by lavishly welcoming potential contributors to our national bake off we are spending millions to gain billions your argument for the spending to come your way is somewhat short on logic. My suggestion? Unless you absolutely rely on others for your every living need, the first place you should look for help is in the mirror.  

Dumping Ground

Oh dear, the Chinese have been dumping cheap steel on the market. But why not, it’s their steel? And if there is a market for it isn’t that how trade is supposed to work; supply-demand and all that? When it comes to competition it appears the little yella-fellas are winning; I suppose it is all Margaret Thatcher’s fault. It usually is. Labour is attacking the Conservatives for allowing this to happen and for honouring the Chinese president with a state visit, but the close-downs at Redcar and the layoffs by Tata in Scunthorpe are almost certainly just bad timing... unless they held off until now to make a point. Certainly the state visit wasn’t just cobbled together in a few weeks.

Coal, cars, ship-building... all but gone. But didn’t Labour preside over much of this anyway and wasn’t Blair’s government all about putting the heavy horses out to grass and letting the money men in? It’s all very well mounting protests at the loss of manual jobs and the ‘destruction of communities’ but what did Labour ever do to rebuild those communities, other than put them all on welfare forever? And what was Labour’s contribution to the wholesale ‘cultural’ assault on communities such as Rotherham and elsewhere, where concerns over massive expansions in segregated immigrant communities were dismissed as racist?

What are the rules here? Loss of a thousand jobs in Labour heartlands bad, bad and all the fault of the Tories, but importation of hundreds of thousands of unskilled labour to do all the work in Labour heartlands good, good and feel the diversity? Overwhelming public services by unprecedented and unchecked immigration is good news, but making a few hundred steelworkers unemployed is apocalyptically bad? There has to be some committee making these position decisions, surely? What happened to the coopering industry? Were there riots on the demise of the steel-rimmed wagon wheel trade? Who gave a fig for the gas-lighters or turned out to march for lead and tin? Or were those industries not emotive enough, not sufficiently photogenic enough to arouse a guttural whine from Labour’s collective soul?

And while weeping for the steel, Labour is simultaneously denouncing the establishment’s nurturing of potential inward investment worth £billions and many thousands more jobs, which will typically go to yet more wonderful immigrants because Labour wants its own people to wallow in their hurt to make a point. Mounting its high moral horse, the party of perpetual opposition will cheer on the moochers and wreckers and reject out of principle deals that could dwarf the losses.

Steel[workers] recycling plant...

You can’t have it both ways, Labour; you don’t get to have a moribund system of state control with subsidy of failed industry and progress at the same time. When job losses loom you need your work force to be educated and adaptable to be able to retrain and take up new roles and while you may mourn, for a day, the demise of the old you have to embrace the new. Oh but, ‘education, education, education’ was only ever a slogan and just as with any surpluses to requirements the newly unskilled steel workers will be piled high and sold cheap in the market of cheap labour created by the EU. It’s not just the Chinese who are ‘Dumping down’.

Are we EUman?

Nobody knows anything when it comes to what would, might, may, could happen post the EU referendum. Some say that leaving would put at risk the inward investment which creates jobs, but others point out that such investment represents a fraction of what we pay in each year for the ‘benefit’ of being a member. The free movement of people, we will be told, is a fundamental principle which has brought prosperity to all, yet many in the richer nations blame the open borders for their own lack of opportunity and the poorer countries are leaking talent like giant national colanders.

The one thing everybody except David Cameron and those loyal to him appear to know, though, is that there will be no ‘reformed’ European Union. At the end of supposed negotiations DC and the IN campaign will be pleading for us to vote for an unchanged and undemocratic system of over-arching rule driven by ideology. There will be no concessions yet Cameron will plead for us to stay under a supposedly better deal. We’ve been trying to get this deal for over forty years; what makes him think now is the hour? Or, that he is the man? This may, however, be the last time we will ever get an apparently democratic free vote as upcoming generations may not even understand the question.

Project EUman continues apace as impressionable children are stamped into cookie-cutter good citizens by the willing hands of artisan teachers. Labelled ‘gender champions’ they continue the good work of eradicating any differences between the sexes; the sign on the Ministry of Truth says “Uniformity is Diversity!” How soon before the abolishing of gendered names altogether? Recent years have already muddied the waters and the interview panel can no longer assume the sex of the next Alex, Drew, Hayden, Billy or Morgan to walk through the door. Does it matter? Well, it might. Just because girls can become engineers it doesn’t mean they must. And just because boys can become midwives, it doesn’t follow that they should.

Operation square peg/round hole will see yet another generation of confused teenagers, already uncertain of their roles in jobs and wider society and now gender-ambivalent, embark on distracting quests for self-discovery right at the time when they should be getting started on fulfilling careers. Selection processes will continue to favour quotas before competence and aptitude and while the best and the brightest will get on as they always have, the second tiers will be awash with also-ran fishes out of water, gills gasping as they wonder how they got washed up on those shores.

The first cuckoos of the Euro spring...

Meanwhile it is said that Cameron has reiterated his threaten to sack cabinet ministers who had planned to campaign for an exit from the EU. Given Lord Ashcroft’s mysterious and sudden illness the dissenters may be well advised to keep their counsel. A political class held on-message by force; an upcoming voter base unable to envisage a future without Captain Euro to tell them how to think. I don’t want to set the conspiracy nuts tongues a-wagging, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the referendum results have been decided already.

Mind your grammar...

Education, education, education, he said... and then a year later Tony Blair’s government passed a law prohibiting the opening of new grammar schools. This law has yet to be revoked and the current Education Secretary was at pains to point out that it was unlikely to be considered when it was announced that a ‘new’ grammar school is to be opened in Sevenoaks. Justified as an annex of the existing Weald of Kent school in Tonbridge, Nicky Morgan is bracing for a legal challenge from the usual suspects who put ideology before education every time: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-34535778

With a long history dating back to the sixth century – long before islam, as it happens - grammars were one of the suppliers of Britain’s great minds during its period of enlightenment and world domination and then again in its darkest, yet finest hour for which all of Europe still has properly to thank us. Yet, ever since, they have been the subject of scorn and derision from predominantly the left-hand side of society. Ironically, they gave their pupils an education far more comprehensive than the so-called comprehensives would ever achieved.

Not that any of that came about without a struggle and although in those days (back when I was a lad) the cane was ever-ready as a last resort, the first few years for new teachers was a baptism of fire. Especially so when faced with the ever-growing and sometimes wayward vocabulary of that one boy in class who shall forever be known as Little Johnny. Today sweary little Johhny would have his own army of classroom assistants and be thought of as ‘challenged’, but back then he was just a little sod... and knew it.

Miss Smith, the student teacher was taking a six-year old class for an English lesson and limbering up by working through the alphabet. “Can anybody give me a word beginning with ‘A’?” she asked. At the back of the classroom Johhny’s hand shot up. The teacher knew Johhny of old and desperately searched for another hand; the last thing she needed was to have to explain ‘arse’ to the innocents. A tentative movement in the front row came to her rescue and she looked down at a sweet little child in a pink dress. “Yes, Emily, what is your word?” Emily breathily whispered “Apple, mith” and the world turned once more. After a brief chorus of monosyllabic ‘A’ words, Miss Smith moved on.

She pointed to the letter ‘B’ and quick as a flash, Johnny’s hand shot up at the back “Miss, miss?” he pleaded as the teacher blushed; far too many expletives began with a B but luckily a small thicket of chubby hands appeared in front of her and she managed to get a boat, a bee and rather pleasingly, a brioche before steeling herself to ask for a ‘C’. Naturally Johnny was right there but she couldn’t risk that; the most horrible word in the world. After gleaning a coat, a cat and self-satisfied clever from the infant throng she moved on to ask for a word beginning with D.

You there! Stop being such a clever cunt!

Johnny was right there and she searched her own vocabulary for possible offence. The worst she could come up with being ‘damn’ she decided to risk it and invited Johnny to speak. “Dog, miss.” he offered, innocently, but there was more. She held her breath as Johnny continued, her fingers tightly crossed in her lap. “Great big spotted one... Dalmation.” Miss Smith was relieved and delighted. She clapped and cried out, “Thank fuck for that!”

Fisc-full of Dollars

John McDonnell has been back pedalling overtime as he seeks to distance himself from things he may or may not have said when he was or was not reversing his decision regarding whether or not, or indeed maybe or not, to back or oppose or agree with or possibly disagree with George Osborne over something or nothing or just some... Oh piss, who knows what he wants? It’s embarrassing and given that everybody’s favourite burger clown appears to be using Owen Jones and Abby Tomlinson as advisors it’s a wonder he even knows what he wants.

So it falls, once again, to me to explain the unexplainable. As always I have engaged in deep and meticulous research, so I am now something of an expert. Here, in a rather voluminous nutty shell is how Corbyn’s Labour under John McDonnell plans to end austerity, balance the books, reinvigorate the economy, make everybody happy and bring equality and wondrousness to the world. Are you sitting comfortably? Then here’s a taste of Labour’s Fiascal Charter:

First, ban everything bad. Ban industry, pollution, global warming, war, famine and disease. Once these have been eradicated we will already be a happier, more fulfilled people and we will naturally want to work together for the common good, because that’s how people really are, isn’t it? The rich people will realise how greedy they have been and once Labours rent controls and price controls are made law we will soon see the true equilibrium of the economy re-established. Freed from the need to compete – there will be no point, once the government sets your wages – the urge to do better will healthily turn towards philanthropic missions and that evil Tory force - aspiration - will end almost overnight.

Farmers will be encouraged to let their cows roam unconfined by oppressive boundaries and dine on strawberries so that strawberry milk will be free at the point of use. Ending the disparity between expensive cash crops like fruit and mundane basics like hay will make this economically viable as will government subsidies for the raising of unicorns and dragons and the planting of wind turbines. These new, metal money trees will generate enough power to run the whole grid and provide a healthy income as we sell the surplus to Europe. What if the wind doesn’t blow, you ask? Our advisors have been instructed to forecast favourable and constant winds for the next fifty years, so this is a matter which does not arise; we can begin the closing down of all fossil fuel plant immediately.

A happy British captain of industry spreading the wealth.

For those who say Labour does not have an economic plan, I have given above a mere hint at the range of marvellous policies we will enact in the new, kinder, caring economy. And to kick start the process, David ‘Danny’ Blanchflower has been appointed to head a review of the role of the Bank of England, not as a tool of subjugation of the poor but as a resource for all. The printing of our new wealth will commence the day after our election victory. During the coalition years Danny predicted that following George Osborne’s plans we would soon hit five million unemployed. By following Danny’s advice we will easily beat that target! 

Brislam

While everybody else is trying to work out what the Labour party stance is on... well, on anything, really, I happened upon another story which quickly slipped from the headlines yesterday. Apparently, anti-muslim actions are to be recorded as a separate category of hate crime. The PM’s office has stated in an email “I want British muslims to know we will back the stand against those who spread hate and to counter the narrative which says muslims do not feel British.”

Since Orwell popularised the notion of thoughtcrime and the thinkpol we have been steadily working away at its variants; moulding it, giving it strength and adding texture and nuance until finally we have the crime that can barely define itself. A real crime already carries penalties but for a crime to be labelled a hate crime there need be no physical attack, no death threats, nor rape, nor intimidation. Nope, a hate crime needs only to be perceived as such and it is made real – thought crime by another name. And it is even possible to be guilty of hate crime without any intent.

Now, the new category of islamophobia (the fear of being beheaded, crucified or just blown to bits) is like the joker in the euchre pack – islamohatecrime counts double in the top trumps of offence seeking. But there is a reason muslims do not feel British and that reason is islam itself, being incompatible in every way with an advanced, civilised and on the whole forward thinking people. Cameron has said we need to reach out and learn to understand islam, so I thought I might help in this regard.

I give you the Five Pillars of Brislam:

Shahadah: sincerely reciting the muslim profession of faith, that each week the giro will come and rent shall be paid by the good wage slaves of Christendom – pieces be upon them. In this way islam already imposes submission on a host unaware it is harbouring an efficient and multiplying parasite.

Salat: performing ritual prayers in the proper way five times each day and in so doing rendering the faithful effectively unemployable, better so to do the lord’s work. And if you can also stop the traffic of the kaffir at the same time then all to the good of allah.

Zakat: paying an alms (or charity) tax to benefit the poor and the needy... of the islamic community, otherwise known as the ‘cousins’, inbred and without passports, but essential to the running of the restaurants. Or else to help fund the jihadis, noble crusaders against the scourge of progress, whose jobseeker’s allowance alone is insufficient to purchase RPGs and the ingredients for IEDs.

Sawm: fasting during the month of Ramadan, because it helps recruit the sympathies of the useful idiots who will point and say ‘look, what godly, abstemious people’. Meanwhile the booze and fags continue to be consumed as and when we wish... because islam’s rules only really apply when used against non-muslims.

Hajj: pilgrimage to Mecca. Well, everybody needs a holiday, don’t they? And besides it’s a great place to network and exchange new ideas for the overthrow of western nations and pave the way for the coming caliphate.

Shakallakah-boom; this is the entirely fictional sixth pillar... and one that is not intended to remain upright for too long. You’ll know it when you hear it.

Treason and plot?

But, but, but, splutter those who value the establishment narrative over the truth of many people’s experience, islam is the religion of peace! Meanwhile, over in France and in the name of that same religion, a French schoolboy mounts his own random jihad... Don’t you just hate that?

Not England’s Rose

If I ever needed another reason to want to get out of the European Union the 'Britain Stronger in Europe' campaign just gave me a beauty – Stuart Rose. The Daily Telegraph spoiler headline read “People backing Brexit are 'quitters' says 'patriotic' campaign chief Stuart Rose” the now typical breaking-the-speech-before-the-speech paradigm effectively rendering pointless his actually uttering the words. But utter the words he did and he declaimed in near accentless Newspeak that black was white, up was down and two plus two equals five. A smart heel snap, a salute and hearty Hi-Ho Hitler and we’re away... with the fairies.

I’m guessing ennoblement was the price of his endorsement despite his former objections to the EU’s heavy-handed impositions. Everybody can be bought and Rose comes oven-ready, trussed, stuffed and with an apple in his mouth. It’s probably all David Cameron can do to keep his cock in his trousers. Cameron, Mandelson, Blair... one after another they troop across the square, goose-stepping in lock-step to the leaden beat of inevitability; the anti-democratic, ever closer union’s show of strength to the watching world.

Of course the entire IN campaign boils down to one thing – we’re too scared to up-sticks; “Leaving Europe is taking a leap into the dark. It’s just not worth the risk.” The very same tactics deployed to maintain the forced status quo forty years ago – We’re in now, don’t rock the boat, don’t be selfish, play the game, reform from within... shut up, you nasty, racist Little Englander. Think of the children. Ah yes the children, the Grosseuropa Jugendbewegung the Greater European Youth Movement, a coming army of unquestioning Euro-drones, schooled from birth in the project and ready to denounce dissenters to the party. Scared enough yet?

For forty years we have seen not one power wrested back from the EU; not one concession given to our unique place in history. Various leaders have claimed triumphs only to accede to demands some way down the line, trusting to short memories and the disengagement of the general public in matters politic. ‘Whoever you vote for the government still gets in’ we joke, but every succession takes us one step closer to Ein Volk under a single, unelected supreme leader, the bad taste disguised by an apparently benign socialism-lite, the death draft of choice for suicidal nations over the last century and a half.

But the real argument comes down not to what form of relationship we have with Europe but to what form of relationship we have with ourselves. Our national self-esteem has been progressively eroded by the constant nagging from within by fifth columnists. Elements of the press and the privileged classes chipping away at the pillars of Britishness, trying to supplant settled, confident resilience with reliance on the state in return for a quiet acceptance of the dogma: Britain can’t go it alone. Britain will have no influence outside of Europe. We are all immigrants anyway. How dare we adopt a them-and-us attitude? We can’t pick and choose what rules to follow. We’re all Europeans now. “British Influence believes that British membership of the EU makes us a stronger, more secure, more influential and richer country”. And on and on it goes... chip, chip, chip.

This message of doom and disaster will play right up until polling day and given that this is likely to be two years away there is a good chance that, just as in 1975, the cancer of the pro-EU propaganda will grow and eat away at our resolve until enough people say fuck it, I’ll swim the sodding Euro Channel to vote yes if you just stop going on about it. If Rose and his cronies are the kind of leaders that await us on the other side of that once English moat I’d rather, like Churchill, take my chances with the open sea. 

Seasonal not fair!

Christmas is just over ten weeks away and already I'm being chastised on Twitter for not welcoming it with open arms. But why would I? Christmas is like all the bad ideas you ever had made whole, amplified and embraced unthinkingly into a parody of religion, but just for a season; the adoration of the baby cheeses, a bit of good vicarious Samaritaning and fabling via the telly and an apocalypse, all done and dusted in a few short weeks and topped off with the rueful hangover of never-again apostasy as the credit card bills arrive, mid-January.

The approach of Christmas heralds the deepening gloom of months when you never see daylight (not that I generally see much anyway, working as I do in windowless, air-conditioned spaces), when doing anything outside is a matter of chance and you grit your teeth as you wait for the sun to return. And the event itself is a prolonged disappointment, like watching shares you bought ill-advisedly slip ever further away from returning a profit. Or seeing your pension pot disappear over the side of Robert Maxwell’s yacht.

Christmas it has been said is a time of year when you are forced into the company of people who you really don’t know as well as you ought... and if you are honest, people you don’t really like all that much. Like your investment, everybody loses except the recipient of all the money - the Christmas God. How is it, you have to wonder, that with the exception of the kids everybody puts far more into Christmas than they get out? Even the time honoured method of saving up a bit at a time to even out the strain has become sullied since the Park Group Christmas club went bust in 2008.

In the run-up to the season of bad will to all men, sincerity is disposed of in a shallow grave as promises turn to dust and everybody starts blaming everybody else for the fiasco. Families use Christmas as a time to inflict on those too young to flee for the holidays the horrible truths and distorted allegiances behind why they spend their weekends at daddy’s and although they shouldn’t really say this, daddy’s girlfriend is a bit of a slut, isn’t she, darlings?

This Christmas, once again, the NHS is in need of a bit of cheering up and although they really want to help and they understand how it got this way, it really is the fault of the Tories. Oh, they don’t mean to be nasty; they just can’t help it, you see. But like Saint Nick himself this is a story which comes around as regularly as the frosts. There has always been but a few days or hours to save the NHS and this tale of old has been gleefully told around Labour conference camp fires since the NHS began. 

Ah, the old traditions die hard...

So this year, let’s ALL save the NHS. Cancel commercial Christmas and help the homeless instead. Drink less, eat less and lessen the load on A&E and stop falling for the bullshit, else your blood pressure may bring on a stroke. We claim to be sophisticated and intelligent celebrants, so let’s all wake up and realise that Christmas is sod-all to do with prophets and Christ and everything to do with profits and vice. Cheers!

Last Gasp

I’ve had an unpleasant chest infection for a few weeks now and just as I was beginning to breathe again I’ve managed to contract a magnificent, full-on, streaming chesty cold. Honestly, there’s snot going everywhere and my deep, hacking and extremely productive cough is admired by diehard smokers, probably as far afield as Marlborough. It’s a sight to behold, what I can eject from my lungs just now... although you probably wouldn’t want to behold it.

But, between convulsions, I am reminded of Dave, an old friend of mine, who recently went for an over-50s medical MOT. As a lifelong indulger in the hedonistic arts and no stranger to social and chemical experimentation he had a bit of a scare a few months back when he woke up one morning with chest pains and subsequently spent the best part of twenty-four hours in A&E before being released back into the wild with an all-clear, for heart attack at least. He would welcome the latest new troponin test which might have cleared him in a fraction of the time. But suitably sobered he underwent something of a Damascene conversion and vowed to change his ways; most of his ways at least.

Anyway, last week he rocked up to undergo a comprehensive health check, which would otherwise have gone swimmingly had he been able to quit smoking. A hardened 40-a-day man, his lungs at least had a comprehensive daily workout and the day of the test was no exception. He entered the consulting room gasping for breath and wheezing heavily and collapsed into a chair as the doctor began his interrogation.

“Do you engage in recreational drug-taking?” asked the eminent quack to which my friend, in between bouts of painful coughing replied that although he had dabbled since his youth he had partaken of not one tablet, not one toke, for over five years and he had never been tempted to inject. The doctor, slightly alarmed at the ferocity of the coughing fit, duly made note and moved on. “What about alcohol?” he asked “How many units a week would you say you drank?” to which Dave quickly responded in a strangled gasp that he had quit the booze altogether and had been teetotal for almost seven months, before another spasm racked his body.

Bent double he wrenched out a few deep, chesty coughs, almost to the point of gagging. His face turned puce and tears sprang from his eyes. Sagging back into the chair he gasped as he brought his breathing under control, the doctor looking on with professional concern. He asked if Dave was feeling well enough to continue with the questionnaire and Dave indicated with a flap of his hand that he was. They moved on to the more intimate subject of his sexual health to which Dave responded that he had been without a partner for some years and was not in the habit of indulging in one-night stands.

“Now” said the doc, “do you smoke?” The patient’s eyes widened as he struggled to form a reply. From deep inside his chest a splutter sparked off a new wave of coughing that lasted for what seemed like several minutes, although the doctor was timing it and could attest that it lasted barely sixty seconds. Dave’s eyes bulged as he convulsed and fought for every breath. The heavy phlegm burbled in his pipes as he battled to bring it into control and he spat into his handkerchief. At last, weakened by the effort, he managed to inform the doctor that, yes, he smoked forty unfiltered Capstan full-strength a day, which he obtained from a specialist purveyor as they were not generally available in most shops.

What the doctor ordered!

The doctor watched as Dave launched into yet another horrible, hacking bout and picked his moment to ask the obvious question in the brief quiet interval between strangled barks. Dave stopped suddenly and sat himself up straight. He composed himself, hacked up a glob of mucous-flecked spittle and brought his breathing under control for just enough time to reply “What, quit smoking? You mean you want me to give up the only pleasure I have left in life?”

Roll your own

David Cameron had a rapturous reception to his grandstanding closing speech at the party conference. Of course he did; everybody has one eye on keeping their job after all. But did his High Chaparral, sunlit uplands, aspiration-heavy schmoozing actually hold water? It would be nice to think so, but we’ve been here many times before. I have no doubt he is sincere – who wouldn’t want to make the world a better place? But words are cheap and plentiful; cheap because they are plentiful. The laws of supply and demand work just as well on oratory as they do on economy.

Nobody goes out shopping to buy something they don’t want or don’t need, but how often do we fill our lives with junk that just takes up space and needs dusting? How often does the marketing mislead? Better, faster, longer-lasting. New, improved, cutting edge. How many brands of cornflakes do you have to try before you realise they are just cornflakes after all? The same old stuff re-boxed and rebranded to look like something new. But who eats plain old cornflakes any more, now that there is a world of sugary alternative offerings? So what that they make you fat; we’ve got surgery or pills for that.

Instead of accepting the long and arduous cure for the cause we are ever looking to treat the symptoms. War? Send weapons. Poverty? Send money. Poor education? Send gadgets. NHS? Throw yet more money at it. It’s always somebody else’s problem, so when somebody else – anybody else – offers you what looks, from a distance, like a lifeboat it is tempting to take it rather than strike out for the distant shore on your own. But as everybody piles on board and the inevitable bailing out has to start, some cling to the few dry spots on deck and steadfastly refuse to get their feet wet.

Everybody cannot expect to be supported by the state. We can’t all look to the public purse to keep us healthy, wealthy or wise. For all the stuff that David Cameron was banging on about and for all that he was stealing some of Labour’s hippy clothes, at the end it comes down not to what your country can do for you, but what you can do for yourself. What some decry as cruel austerity we used to applaud as thrift; it was considered normal to do without what you could not afford. And that ‘less than 60% of median income equals poverty’ metric? Rubbish; if you’re fed and housed and dry and warm you are rich beyond the dreams of half the world.

All that government intervention in wider society generally achieves is to create another generation of parasites who learn the skills to take the taxpayers’ money. Experts, advisers, ‘thinkers’ and the army of hangers-on; like thirty-year old student union presidents or twenty-eight year old ‘welfare and diversity’ officers. Like eternally workless professional demonstrators, demanding more from those who have quietly got on and ‘done the right thing’. Governments always say they want to encourage self-determination, but then accede to the demands of others whose determination is that the nanny state must pay for them.

So, Bahar, what DOES a Diversity Officer do?

Do I want a world with less welfare? Of course I do, as long as those who need it get it. Do I think you shouldn’t produce children you are incapable of providing for? Absolutely. Do I want a country peopled with those who can largely do without the intervention of government? Who doesn’t? You get none of that by electing governments with incontinent pockets. So, let Cameron and the Conservatives bang on about the brighter world they want to bring for everybody, while you get on and quietly light up your own.

Butterflies

They say a butterfly flapping its wings in an Amazon forest could possibly set off a chain of events that could culminate in a hurricane laying waste to a community some weeks later. This particular phenomenon has never been proved to have happened, but the butterfly effect is a well-known descriptor in the form of study of nonlinear dynamics known as Chaos Theory. One wonders why it is not more commonly employed in the study of politics to discover why perfectly predictable outcomes are rarely foreseen by those whose initial actions bring them into being.

I am fortunate enough to be on the road early enough most mornings that I regularly catch the end of Farming Today on Radio 4. As the Conservative conference continues there is talk of the EU referendum and naturally the farmers are frit. The debate yesterday was ‘in or out of the EU. Which is better for the UK?’ and in particular, what will become of the Common Agricultural Policy. The CAP is of course one of the perverse incentives that now leads some dairy farmers to sell their milk for less than it costs to produce. Remember the butter mountains, the wine lakes and the cornflakes cast out to sea? (Now I’m a farmer – The Who, 1974)

In order to protect the relatively inefficient French agricultural industry of the times and promote food security the CAP was introduced in 1962 and since then it has ensnared ever more farmers in its web; paid for not growing, penalised for overproduction and generally fucking about with none of their bloody business. Want to keep the farm in the hands of those who have tended it for hundreds of years? Then grow as you’re told. Everybody agrees it’s a mess but nobody will tackle it. This is what happens when you do business under artificial incentives.

Then we heard Theresa May admitting that all immigration is not necessarily good immigration. No, really? You mean the thing that everybody has been called racist for daring to speak out about is now the government’s official stance? I expect Nigel Farage is merrily laughing his bits off down the old George & Dragon. What was it, Theresa that made you say openly what all parties except Ukip have been actively denying for years? Can it really be that you are changing your mind in the face of new evidence, or is it mere opportunism to pretend to democracy at the start of your leadership bid?

Of course we welcome the genuine ‘diversity’ (sociology for ‘They do WHAT?’) that immigration brings but is a Balti house on every street corner a fair exchange for the systematic rape and trafficking of thousands of teenage girls, the forced accommodation of muslim ghettoes in Britain’s large cities and wailing fucking muezzins, moaning monotonously from manky minarets with no planning consent at all times of the day? Who could possibly have predicted that allowing half the sub-continent to just walk in and set up souk could possibly have ended this way?

All actions have consequences and the actions of government spread their ripples wide. Financial incentives to behave in a particular way create rent-seeking professions as ‘making a living’ supplants performing a genuinely useful function. The complex web of interdependence allows armies of advisors, gurus, facilitators and plain old crooks to flourish and feed off the subsidies. Why turn your hand to an honest day’s tilling the soil when you can just mow the grass around your motionless wind turbines? Why seek better employment when tax credits and housing benefit top up your Saturday job wages to the equivalent of that of a full-time nurse?

So it is refreshing at first to hear government ministers and well-placed MPs airing their understanding of where we have gone wrong. Refreshing, that is, until you realise that being in Parliament these days is just another rent-seeking activity and rarely constitutes honest service to the country. As Boris begins to show his hand and others are busy rallying their own support you realise that conference is just another exercise in chaos and what we are seeing is one big butterfly spreading its meddlesome wings.

Earth Salt

“Shame on you!” shouted the peaceful protesters at the Conservative Party Conference, “Shame on you!” How dare you seek to bring prosperity and peace and how dare you try to foist any of that nasty dignity upon us? Don’t you know it is our right to look like cave dwellers, to believe in the Earth Mother and eat only what the good lady bestows? Except animals, of course and why would we work for and be led by animal murderers? Meat is murder and work will be the death of us and might is not right and the meek will inherit the earth once you filthy Tory scum have finished despoiling it.

Ah the dear old, queer old left; the salt of the earth, so much so that their preferred habitat ought to be a cellar. I watch with amusement as ever more outlandish charges are brought to bear against a party which, while being very far from perfect are at least trying to grapple with real, tangible, solvable problems. Yes, the Tories are devious and manipulative and will seek to dress up their policies in different clothes but, you know, that’s politics. And at least they have, um, policies, a thing the Labour Party appear to have completely forgotten about as they seek to out-left each other in JC’s brave new imaginary world.

How do they get that way; how do you make a lefty, assuming it isn’t genetic? (Although hereditary leftism is a possibility, given that like moths battering themselves against the killer light a huge number of lefties declare themselves Labour from birth, that it is in the blood. Cut them in half and they have Labour written right through. Somebody should do medical research on them.) But for those who are not born into the movement there must be a process of some kind and assuming they can’t all be mentally deficient, I imagine it goes something like this:

Start from a desire to make the world a better place and begin to associate with the eternally aggrieved. Suppress the gag reflex until you can mouth breathe in their presence and become a vocal defender of freedoms and liberties for the oppressed masses. Get Billy Bragg’s back catalogue for free on Spotify on your smart phone and learn all the words. Perhaps you buy a guitar and sing those songs until you are as convinced as he is that you learned them at the feet of the Jarrow marchers; make their story your story.

Your feet itch, you long to march so you attend a trial protest, just to see what it’s like. You feel the thrill of shouting ‘pig’ at the police with impunity and rush through some narrow streets away from the cordon, later telling your circle on social media how you were kettled by the agents of the fascist state. Start slowly, but steadily build your confidence until you can one day spit, hurl bricks and scream “Tory scum!” without any doubt in your red, red heart and dismiss as hate any voice that dares to question your credentials or your mission. Add salt for that bitter, bitter taste and relinquish forever the ability to imagine an act of humanity perpetrated by somebody who voted for living within our means.

Where Labour lost it.

For balance I should also elucidate the way in which righties are probably made: Watch with dismay as your old friends start dressing like street dwellers. Try to understand their convoluted, colander-like arguments and attempt to intervene by injecting facts into the conversation. Give it up as a lost cause, shrug, get a job... grow up.

Reclaim what?

The butt-hurt on the left knows no bounds. It was their election to win, they were sure, but they didn’t. For all their sloganeering and courting of naïve and unthinking celebrity mouthpieces, for all their pink battle buses and Edstones, for all that they truly believed they were destined to win they came up short, much as England failed to make the quarter finals of the Rugby World Cup in a record-breaking defeat. But unlike rugby – a game of controlled aggression and solid teamwork played by the very epitome of true sportsmen – whose supporters roundly cheer both winners and losers and retire for friendly after-match booze-ups, the game of left wing politics is a rough-hewn, lawless affair, propped up by gangs of pugilistic flag-wavers who teeter always on the brink of retributive violence.

The 2015 Conservative Conference is being besieged by thousands of such ill-wishers and their camp followers. Manchester right now looks like hajj in mecca, except this religion has no god to worship – despite the return of the Messiah in Corbyn’s clothes – just a world of fictitious demons to fear. So vehement is their hatred of the comic-book villains of the Conservative and Unionist Party that practically anybody not of the mob is jeered, spat at and derided as Tory scum. Even the Daily Mirror’s own Toynbee, wee Kevin Maguire suffered the indiscriminate vituperation, showing just how little evidence the baying crowds need. Tell them a tale of Tory evil, wind them up and line them up as water cannon fodder.

The unthinking masses desperately need it to be true that the Prime Minister actually had full-on climactic sex with a dead animal. In public. Followed by a celebratory cigar. They cling to their ‘cruel Tory’ mantra despite all the many decades of suffering brought about by socialist regimes unable to maintain ‘equality’ without brutality. They have to repeat the third-hand tales of Atos systematically wiping out the old and sick for some form of Tory blood sport. And – oddly – they seem to have a virulent strain of quite abhorrent anti-semitism running rampant through their deep red veins.

What is in the leftist mind that again and again they wish harm visited on others yet still, when they look in the mirror, see compassionate justice warriors struggling and sacrificing themselves for the salvation of mankind? Is it a form of body dysmorphia, political realities ignored in favour of an image they need to believe? Daily Mirror on the wall, who is the unfairest of them all? If they say it three times is a devil with the head of Iain Duncan Smith summoned to dance like a dervish before the altar on which they sacrifice all reason?

Denis Healey just died at the grand old age of 98. The best leader Labour never had, they say; if he had been leader Margaret Thatcher – the grand Satan of Cruel Toryism – would never have been elected. This ignores utterly the fact that the country always elects a Thatcher after a Labour government. The ordinary working taxpayer puts up with just so much of the left’s profligacy before finally being goaded into voting some sense back into governance. Jeremy Corbyn’s little army of Marxist, ‘anarchist’, Trotskyist, Bolshevik, tattooed, pierced, air-headed hired thugs would see new generations of ill-educated, zero-aspiration untermenschen preserved in the aspic of state-sponsored vote farms.

The repetitive, brainwashed narrative of the left has no room for nuance. When the NHS struggles under Labour it is the fault of Thatcher. When foreign investors leave these shores under Labour it is somehow Thatcher’s doing. When the jobless totals rise and employers turn to immigrants because our own school-leavers can barely speak English it is Thatcher’s legacy. And when misguided, mindless followers of the rabble rousers bring about their own lack of sympathy by striking without thought of who it really hurts it is to effigies of the sainted Margaret that they turn with their angry, impotent gestures.

Rallying en masse, without a viable alternative to what is being so vigorously denounced, is pointless. It’s like the ten-year old threatening to leave home, the teenager becoming pregnant to the local bad boy in an act of defiance against caring parents or the unstable prisoner engaging in a dirty protest. To paraphrase Orwell, if you want a vision of the future under socialism, imagine a human face having its nose cut off in spite, forever. But, they say, the right also has its violent bully boys. Look and you will see they are cut from the same cloth; it is never those in gainful employment, dutifully paying into the pot who turn out to cause trouble.

Sooner or later the teenage rebels, the Marxist ideologues, the bearded pacifists, have to make a living and only a very few of them continue to seethe in their union-funded, welfare-fuelled, class warrior squats. Denis Healey died a rich man, and the Kinnocks live on as fabulously wealthy, famously hypocritical empty vessels. Meanwhile it is curious the lengths to which the ‘morally superior’ will go to promote their troublesome agenda. However unrepresentative these people are, their spitting, egging, rape threatening intimidation is an ISIS-like enticement to recruit others with an untargeted sense of grievance about their aimless lives.

The caring, sharing, missile lobbing left...

Regardless of whether the majority of the protesters have the first clue about the people they so readily attack and those they so thoughtlessly support, what is absolutely certain is that they are one angry mob and the devil makes work for their idle hands. Expect more, much more as they try to recruit others to adopt their prejudices and take up cudgels. As always, the crowds will eventually disperse but not before they have damaged local businesses intimidated ordinary people who are on neither side and brought the left into ugly disrepute again. There will be no real winner here, but the biggest loser of all will be Britain.

Shopping Channel

I was sort of nonplussed to witness a discussion on Twitter regarding the practices of the big supermarkets and pricing. How unfair, they agreed, that they quite deliberately use different package sizes and different pricing labels to con the unwary into paying more than they need to, or believing they have found a bulk purchase bargain when in fact the smaller size is better value. We all know it goes on, we all find it frustrating but ultimately the prices and weights and measures are all there on display and it is buyer beware.

At least the supermarkets openly display their prices which is not always the case for many smaller businesses who rely on subterfuge to get you to pay over the odds. On the whole supermarket prices are okay, you can browse as long as you like and you are not under any pressure to buy what you don’t want or can’t afford. But this wasn’t good enough, they said; the government must do something to make these bad boys conform to some system of uniform presentation. It always amazes and saddens me, how some people need others to continually be looking out for them.

But on that subject a word of warning for anybody out there who regularly visits B & Q stores in and around Kent.  Last month I became a victim of a rather clever scam while innocently setting out to buy shelving. And simply popping out to procure hinges, nails, screws, nuts and bolts and the like has turned into quite a traumatic experience. Don't be naive enough to think it couldn't happen to you! I feel it is my public duty to warn you; here’s how the scam works.

Two seriously good-looking women in their early thirties come over to your car as you are packing your shopping into the boot. They offer to clean your car ‘for charity’ so naturally you agree, but this is where it gets sinister. These girls are very scantily clad and if I’m honest they are not even very good at cleaning cars, but they throw themselves energetically into the business, pouting and posing as they squeeze foam from big, soft sponges. It’s hypnotic; their tee-shirts are soon soaking wet and when they start stretching across your windscreen it is simply impossible not to look.

My bulging tool belt...

When you thank them and make to pay they decline your offer of money and ask you instead for a ride to another B&Q or possibly a Wickes or a Homebase, never very far away, so you will feel churlish to turn them down. They hop in the back seat and once you pull out in the traffic they start kissing, right there in your rear-view mirror. As if that wasn’t distracting enough they get you to pull over in a quiet spot, then one of them climbs over into the front seat and performs oral sex on you, while the other one steals your wallet. It is outrageous.

I had my wallet stolen on September 4th, 9th, 10th, twice on the 15th, again on the 20th, and then again on the 24th. Also twice on the 27th, three times just yesterday and very likely again this upcoming weekend. So, please be careful next time you innocently go out to buy some tacks.