Any Questions?

Just because an idea is, or can be made, popular, it doesn’t make it either achievable or true. Among ideas that sound wonderful are: give everybody a meaningful job or a meaningful life, for that matter. Pay everybody enough not to want for any essential need. Stop people being cruel to other people. Educate all children so that a real university place is an option. Let women control fifty percent of everything (instead, presumably, of the mere 90% they already control). End slavery, homelessness, starvation and climate change. Oh and prevent lovely fluffy kittens from growing up to be grumpy cats.

On Any Questions last week I heard repeated the idiot mantra that the refugee crisis was as a result of the first world’s inability to counteract climate change. As if droughts and floods and famine were all our fault. Really? Even if you take the bible largely as the work of fiction it is, there are still historical records of droughts and famine, wars and pestilence in the old world as well as the Old Testament. You’re surely not going to blame all that on global warming? The audience responded warmly to every knee-jerk left wing simpleton response while resolutely staying silent whenever a pragmatic view was offered.

The lefty commentators on the panel were quick to brand every current government policy as being entirely ideological. Everything the hated Tories are doing – including all the things Labour promised to do – is a dogmatic attack on the poor. Austerity is not a case of living within our means, rather it is some calculated right-wing plot to starve everybody to death. Presumably the obesity epidemic is an allergic reaction to hunger? In the idiot world we have created I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody actually posited that as a rational explanation for the explosion of plus-sized infants.

To judge by the audience’s juvenile lapping up of nice-but-dim rhetoric the propaganda has done its job and spurred on by the crowd-mind they cheered ever more fanciful fictions of the harm caused by ‘the far right’ by which I imagine they mean David Cameron. Is it so inconceivable that Conservatives want a better world, too? And that their proposal to get everybody to build it together is as worthy, if not more worthy than compelling one half of the population to forever pay for the other half? But no, if it’s ideology you want you need look no further than the left who have clung fiercely to their little red books and the foolish refusal to recognise difference.

You want equality? Come and get it...

Equality, they cry, unaware that every heavy-handed piece of equalities legislation creates not wings for the underdogs but millstones for achievers. Just as socialist redistribution of wealth tends to make everybody poorer, shoehorning everybody into a one-size-fits-all jelly mould increases the sum total of mediocrity. You want women to be equal? Then stop whining about there being seven men and only two women in the new passport design; although they have a point – they should at least have included Margaret Thatcher. Oh, but that’s the wrong kind of woman, isn’t it? I suppose they mean people like ‘Dr’ Jack Monroe... although apparently she’s not a woman any more. Confusing isn’t it?