You know nothing!

Jon Snow was at Glastonbury. While he was there, among his kind of people, he joined in with the chant “Fuck the Tories!” Nobody with half an eye on his sleeve, where he wears his heart, pumping blood red with Corbynism, believes otherwise. Snow says he has no recollection of that, but of course he would say that. Blame it on the adrenalin, blame it on the hallucinogens, blame it on the booze; he hasn’t denied it. Did it happen, did it not - it doesn’t matter; we’ve all already made up our minds.

Those on the left want it to be true because it’s what they want, too. Those on the right want it to be true because it exposes him, once more, as not the neutral, dispassionate reporter he wants to appear. We all like to think we’re impartial when it comes down to things we should be impartial about, but we’re only human. Representing a news outlet there is a fanciful idea that a professional can do it without bias, but he’s only human.

Besides, this was in his spare time; this time he wasn’t being paid to be the mouthpiece of morose anit-liberal leftist opinion; he was just enjoying himself. Which is a rare thing, I’m told as grumpy old Jon Snow can be a prickly character off-camera. Let’s face it, you’d be grumpy if everywhere you went people shouted out “You know nothing, Jon Snow!” In his village he is known as a curmudgeonly old grouch but filled with like-minded killjoys, he generally rubs along.

Although there was that incident with O’Malley’s dog. O’Malley used to be a neighbour of Snow’s and when they lived next door he owned an Alsatian puppy, a great big, gangly, long-legged, sharp-toothed rascal of a thing who went through chew-toys as if they were sweets. In his early years this dog destroyed shoes, slippers, towels, blankets; you name it, he ate it... and Jon Snow took an instant dislike as the dog’s happy growling drifted across the garden fence to disturb his revery.

He peered over the fence, glared at the dog and summoned O’Malley to an impromptu conference. “Can’t you do anything about your dog?” he snapped. O’Mally replied, “Sure, he’s just a pup. He’ll grow out of it.” Snow wasn’t satisfied and said so in no uncertain terms. O’Malley was emollient but Snow was having none of it. As he raised his voice, his cheeks grew redder and he delivered a diatribe on social responsibility, the duties of a neighbour and what was and was not acceptable in polite society.

Now Jon Snow likes to sport a Panama and on this particular day a particularly expensive example crowned his grey locks. Mid rant, a gust of wind lofted the hat from his head and it floated off, into the path of the inquisitive puppy. The hat stood no chance and in seconds it was in tatters. Snow demanded recompense. O’Malley just shrugged; after all, the dog was just doing what came naturally and nobody had snatched the hat from Snow’s possession. “It was just an accident,” said O’Malley. “I don’t like your attitude” challenged Snow. O’Malley thought for a moment, then replied “I t’ink you’ll find it’s your ‘at ‘e chewed!”

The Blame Game

I had an interesting Twitter conversation yesterday, with an electrician. Typical of many in the building trades he seemed like a solid, reliable type, unwilling to cut corners, certain that he is good at his trade. In the course of the conversation he revealed, unintentionally, that his knowledge of the Wiring Regulations – as opposed to acting on third party advice (e.g. what other electricians say) – was at best limited. He was similarly unaware of the name of the qualification his own company’s apprentices were currently undergoing. Naturally he felt his years in the trade meant that, compared to the current intake his own training had been superior to theirs

This is a common theme in all the construction trades; regulations are constantly under review and legislation often serves to sweep aside what was current thinking a moment ago and usher in yet more regulation changes. It can be hard to keep up to date. It is also true that in recent decades there has been a tendency to excise much of the academic rigour from training in order to get earners onto the books as quickly as possible. Qualifications appear to be valued above actual competence, so there is a drive to water down the requirements and really get that sausage machine cranking out certificates.

Along with the new-age goals of diversity at any cost and an insistence on the bizarrely anti-human notion of equality, the dreaded blight of Human Resources has been felt in all quarters. Ticking boxes as they go, stuffing quotas and slapping each other on the back, competence, pride in your work and aspiration take a back seat in many industries in favour of pursuing the politics of business, rather than the business itself.

As a result, many working people – and this is as true of architects, engineers, surveyors, specifiers, designers and yes, regulators themselves - are rewarded not so much for a job done well as, well, a job done. If it carries the right signatures, conforms to the correct protocols and ticks the politically expedient boxes it is considered to be legally beyond reproach. If you can stick an EU emblem on it as well, then all to the good.

This is the cause of Grenfell. Not any political party, not any one piece of legislation, not any single person on a single committee. Nobody is to blame because nobody has done anything outside of what their jobs required them to do. If, as seems likely, the guilty party is the flammable cladding itself, there will be nothing to gain from pursuing restitution from those who were only doing their job, as specified, in a world united by global mediocrity.

Cheapest, fastest, first to market policies; catchiest, zeitgeist-driven, catch-phrase fuelled non-jobs; quick fixes, ‘solutions-driven’ marketing and the placing of personality ahead of reliability. No wonder they say modern life is rubbish. Our schools churn out cookie-cutter replicants with the same casual attitudes to life – anything goes, all must have prizes, forget merit; meet the criteria, tick the box and collect your reward for turning up.

Who is to blame for Grenfell? So many people involved, across so many years and so many administrations make it nigh-on impossible to say. A lengthy and costly inquiry may point the finger of blame but I have little faith in a genuinely satisfactory outcome. Calling for ‘justice’ is just another manifestation of the idea that somebody else is to blame, somebody else must pay. Lessons must be learned, they say; when will that lesson be that sometimes shit happens?

In praise of choice

Phillip Hammond recently said of the Brexit vote; ‘People didn’t vote to be poorer’. Well, of course not because that wasn’t what the referendum was about. I thought we, narrowly, voted to leave the EU for richer or for poorer and to take our chances in the wider world. It should be cause for excitement and opportunity. Instead, those wanting to remain are still rending their garments and pointing at poverty indicators, both real and imaginary.

But what is poor, anyway? There seems scant evidence that – despite all the politicised weaponising of foodbanks – people are actually starving, save through the neglect of those directly charged with their care. For the price of a packet of cigarettes you can feed a family; choose. Through choice people continue to thrive despite all attempts by governments of all hues to ‘improve their lives’. The best thing a government can do is provide basic infrastructure and then keep out of the way.

The second coming at Glastonbury demonstrated the friable nature of popularity; for months JC was derided as unelectable then suddenly, as if by command from on high, they chose to worship him. And lo, he came among them and foretold that all would be well, that one day we will all be given good jobs and good pay and we shalt live off the fat of the land. The people’s choice, for a few hours at least, was to bask in the glow of his glory and imagine he spake true.

But the entire economy – economics itself – is driven by choices.  In the allocation of scarce resources it is the daily decisions we make that determines how the pie is divided. A vote for socialism is to take much of this choice off the menu. In the planned economy, in state provision of every essential need, it is the state that decides what we buy, what we pay for it, what we eat, where and how we live and what work we do. And this always leads to rationing and shortages because the government cannot possibly make those decisions in a timely enough fashion to satisfy your needs.

Choosing to take away choice leads to a lack of competition which leads to a reduction in productivity - the real engine of wealth. And what about the coming of the robots? If many low-end jobs are automated, which they will be to counter the lost productivity of human labour, how and on whom will taxes be levied to pay for the expanded welfare bill? Or would the government then have to actually seize everything just to make ends meet? Some left-field thinkers even believe we should abolish money and let the state decide who needs what and when.

Here’s the thing; people are fallible. In fact, we’re known for it. If anything, we are possibly more fallible in a group than when we act alone, in our own self-interest. Crowd-sourced group-think can cause people to actually act against instincts and urges evolved over millennia to keep us alive. In the echo chamber it is discordant to sing against the choir. Some speak of fear of letting anybody know they voted for the Tories, or for Brexit and students, who live in a world of peer-group conformity, are particularly driven to compliance. Rebellion, they cry... in perfect harmony... in perfect irony.

Meet the new boss!

Today Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour are dangling carrots they can’t afford to pay for as the Queen’s Speech is challenged. Seriously, who do you think most capable of protecting you, feeding you, educating you and seeing Brexit through: the overgrown hippy with a gleam in his eye and an adherence to a kindly-sounding doctrine which has failed over and over again, or the rheumy–eyed ancients who promise you nothing except to steer this ship as many before through the stormy seas ahead? Your choice.

Got your number!

A week and a half on from the Grenfell Tower fire (And how many unchecked variations of that name have been used across various media platforms?) and still the same old politics-as-usual. The Corbynistas have been in full flight-of-fancy mode, variously blaming the conflagration on Tory cuts, Tory councillors, Tory contractors, Tory planners, Tory specifiers Tory procurers, Tory cladding erectors and no doubt,  Tori Spelling, Tori Amos and the elusive Vic-Tory too.

As a brief respite from the opportunistically manufactured national grief, John McDonnell’s clenched-fist ‘Day of Rage’ turned out – thankfully – to be a soggy squib of an affair as a few of the unwashed persuaded themselves they would somehow ‘overthrow’ their new Thatcher hate-figure, placard by placard. Inside the chamber Jeremy Corbyn piled into the Queen’s speech, claiming it was a meagre affair, thin gruel, insufficient, on the grounds that too few radical changes were proposed. Is this, then, the duty of government, to consistently lay down law after law? Or is it rather to create an environment where individuals can flourish and people can improve their own lives?

Talking of individuals, it turns out that a further 500,000 of them were added to the population in the last year; the pace of population growth far outgrowing our ability to accommodate them, feed them and continually subsidise the lie that we need them. Actually, that figure is only what is known; the Grenfell fire has revealed that we don’t even know how many, or who, were living in the tower block, legally or otherwise; one of the challenges of the coming days is to quantify the political mileage available from the unknown unknowns.

To this end Sadiq Khan’s team have assembled a panel of experts to gather information and form a strategy for extracting the maximum embarrassment from government and the maximum funding possible from the public purse. One of the first tasks is to work out how many lives were lost, how many displaced and how much compensation could be due. Part of the process was to recruit analysts to crunch the numbers, to which end a mathematician, a statistician and an accountant were interviewed for the job of leading the task force:

At the interview the mathematician declared that with, say, 127 flats and an average occupancy of 3.4 people per flat we were dealing with a potential total number of fatalities of 431.8, minus those who had been accounted for and thus a precise figure could be arrived at for both living and dead. He was asked to take a seat in the waiting room while they interviewed the next candidate.

The statistician took a slightly different approach, based on the fact that a number of flats were thought to have been sub-let multiple times. Let us suppose, he said, that 40% of the flats had been let out to unregistered tenants and let us suppose that, typically these would be immigrant families who were on the whole the vanguard for large extended families intending to settle in London. We can take a ball park estimate, based on the probability that at any one time 50% of these apartments contained people in transit, that somewhere in the region of a 1000 people would need to be accounted for and adequately compensated.

The hiring committee was impressed with how easily the statistician had dispensed with hard facts and plucked a number from thin air which suggested they could ask for twice as much as they had originally imagined. They asked the statistician to take a seat while they interviewed the accountant. The accountant took his turn, listened carefully to the question the committee posed and answered, simply, “How many do you want it to be?”

Let he who is without sin...

Forgive me, Blogger, for I have sinned. It is five days since my last blogfession. I don’t even offer any excuse, although plenty spring to mind. In fact, excuses seem to be very much the thing right now. Excuses for inaction, excuses for past actions, excuses for possible future actions; the hardest bit of politics seems to me to be getting your excuses in early, ideally before any blame has been apportioned. Meanwhile the show must go on. The show today being, of course, the subdued state opening of Parliament.

It’s like the worst kind of scripted reality show; mindless fodder for the lumpen masses, where wooden characters act out pre-ordained plots as onlookers agitate from the side-lines. Did I say agitate? Of course I meant – John McDonnell meant – peacefully demonstrate their kinder, gentler opposition; not in any way engage in a Day of Rage to bring down the government; oh no, that would be inflammatory, nobody meant that, did they, John? Hedging his bets McDonnell first called for insurrection then yesterday pretended he really meant ‘a bit of a march’ with a few mild placards.

And over on the other channel everybody is watching the Grenfell Game, wondering who is going to scoop the big prize. The various cheerleaders are whipping up the audience into a frenzy in an effort to ensure that as many as possible leave the game with more than they owned when they arrived. Compensation has gone from being the provision of relief from loss to a system of reward for giving the best depiction of entitlement. Playing the helpless victim of greater powers has become a new career for some and facilitating that victimhood is a full-time occupation for others.

To assist in upping the entertainment value, a bevy of modern-age virtues are brought to the front line: selective outrage, moral equivalence, the race card, the muslim card... along with a whole entourage of faux facts, from mangled statistics to downright lies. He said, she said, they did, we didn’t; the war of words is rapidly becoming a well-rehearsed soap opera in which everybody knows the format. Shit happens, everybody mucks in, politicians on all sides try to spin it as a triumph for themselves and a ‘sad indictment’ of the supposed motives of all the other competing sides. We’re all sinners now; casting the first stone is nothing to do with conscience, it’s merely a matter of timing.

Meanwhile, the world still turns. Those who pay for everything will still pay for everything. Those who have only ever taken will continue to take. And the poor sods in the middle scrabble for the safety and promise of salvation of the few scraps of flotsam from the wreckage. The ideologues’ multicultural, rainbow-nation dream has been a disaster and the disparate forces of malcontent, jostling to put their special interest centre stage at the expense of others threatens to tear it still further asunder. In pursuit of a world in which everybody wins, against nature itself, we are instead in a place where, with few exceptions, everybody loses.

Ask not what your country can do for you...

Whatever happens today, peaceful or otherwise, it has to be hoped that common sense and common decency prevail and the process of governing the country is allowed to begin again. Instead of demanding from society yet another slice of a finite pie of money, police, emergency services, ‘justice’ and so on, look to the other side of the Grenfell disaster. Follow the example of those who freely gave of their time and resources to help each other out. Margaret Thatcher said there was no such thing as society – and she was right. People conveniently forget that she went on to say: “There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours." Why, she was practically Jeremy Corbyn!

Amateur Hour

There’s a lot said on both sides of The House about immigration. In the wider world people adversely affected – and they are many – find it hard to comprehend how their circumstances have come about, while in other areas – usually those who have known little else – they refer to vibrant diversity and all its wonders. There are valid arguments on both extremes if they could only be heard above the clamour of political correctness, typified by the image of a politician, any variety, clasping knees to chest, rocking to and fro and loudly humming so as not hear any incorrect opinions.

Last night’s ‘comedy’ spot on Radio 4 was occupied by Paul Sinha's History Revision and jolly interesting it was too... were it not for the fact that this son of immigrants was banging one particular drum and banging pretty loudly, too. The tune was, ‘nothing good would ever have happened in the world without immigration’. And he had the history to prove it. Now, I know Sinha is a clever lad and I’m sure he would make for invigorating and stimulating company, but this trope is over-wrought and fundamentally flawed.

‘We are all descended from immigrants’ is irrelevant. ‘The NHS relies on immigrants’ is irrelevant. Immigration, in and of itself, is not the source of all things good, it is merely one of several facilitators. It is the individual, inspired by place and experience, that creates; his or her ethnic origin is often incidental. Sinha’s thesis, inspired by his love of history – literally an ‘amateur’ historian – was based on an acceptance of the innate ‘goodness’ of immigration.

Inventure Place, in Akron Ohio, is referred to as the American Inventors’ Hall of Fame and its exhibitive niches are mostly occupied by immigrants who came to The New World, did good and invented stuff; the USA is proud to adopt them as great American inventors. But there’s a bit of a chicken and egg game going on here – did the immigrants make it happen, or did America provide the means and opportunities? Or did they do their inventing elsewhere and bring the goods over on the Mayflower’s successors? Beware the easy conclusions wrought from a non sequitur.

Anyway, we’ve always had movement of people. One traditional mode of casual migration was the regular cycles of itinerant traders, slavers, tinkers and circus folk, the inspiration for many a running-away-from-home. A friend of mine disappeared one day, some years ago and much gossip ensued. But a decade later, when the circus came to town, there he was, in full carney slap, parading round the ring, an array of ironmongery hanging from a specially designed belt.

As the crowd watched he took from his belt a small hammer, such as are used by piano tuners, which he swallowed whole. The watchers gasped. Next, a toffee hammer disappeared down his gullet, quickly followed by a veneer hammer, a small ball pein and a much larger claw hammer. The applause rippled around the big top but then we were quelled to silence as the lights dimmed; for the finale he took up a six-pound sledgehammer and after some business twirling it around, tossing and catching it he struck a pose and then, with his head tilted far back, he slowly swallowed the hickory shaft until only the steel hammer head remained visible. With a gulp, this too was gone; the audience went wild!

The roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd!

After the show, I caught up with him as he signed autographs and congratulated him on his remarkable achievements. He told me of his life and the wonderful people he had met, from all over the world. I remarked on his unconventional performance and asked if he had ever tried to swallow a sword, a much more familiar act. He shook his head. “No,” he said “that’s a job for the professionals... I’m strictly an ‘ammer-chewer.”

Nice, but dim?

In the past twenty-four hours I have been told I am a moron. I am also a disgusting person, as it happens. If both are true I plead ignorance; only following orders, etc. I’ve always found it curious how quick people are to label others as somehow beneath contempt while simultaneously providing an excuse for their lack of wisdom or morals. There is generally no point in disputing the charges and especially not in hurling back equally intemperate epithets, but it’s interesting sometimes to examine the claims.

Moron /ˈmɔːrɒn/ early 20th century (as a medical term denoting an adult with a mental age of about 8–12): from Greek mōron, neuter of mōros ‘foolish’. Well, most of this is refutable holding, as I do, several higher education awards and having lived a varied life of independence from the assistance of others. The foolishness, I grant you; I have made poor choices and endured their consequences, but who among us can claim otherwise? But, on balance, I’m not sure my being a moron would hold up in court as defence for my disgustingness. But wherewith comes that?

I admit, somewhat, a lack of general empathy for my supposed fellow humans, but then I have never been an advocate of equality at any cost and while I clearly see difference, I see no reason to pretend that diversity is an unalloyed good, especially where it also brings such obvious strife. The news media recently celebrating the diversity of the dead, whether by knife or truck or fire, are hardly covering themselves in glory as they simultaneously fuel the prurience and exploit the biddability of the masses, but, lest we forget, I’m the disgusting one here.

Yet I have killed nobody, threatened nobody and – while some may wish to tell themselves otherwise – I have refrained from hurling the spitting abuse which comes so readily to my detractors. This is the burden of pragmatism; I accept human frailty and see no reason to hide that acceptance. Why should I dress up my observations of humans reverting to the animal type they are just to meet some arbitrary notion of how kinder, gentler political minds think we ought to behave?

For instance I think that, yes, we should have subsidised housing to allow lower paid workers a decent place to live near where they toil. But I know that corruption would create favouritism in allocation, sub-letting would let in private renters or high earners in public office would seek to take advantage, as Bob Crow did. I would love to raise wages so that a working couple could afford bring up a family on a single wage; but I know that this will put millions out of work as industry seeks cheaper labour elsewhere. I’d like to cap fuel and food prices but I know that this would create shortages as providers decline to meet a demand which would not pay them for their effort.

Shiny happy people... and all of them broke.

The dream of plenty for all is just that, a dream. Maybe in some throwback commune where small numbers of people live in tribal harmony such equitable division of wealth is possible... but somehow every example of communal living is also an example of people eschewing much of the trappings of modernity. Maybe you can be nice but not rich, or else rich but not nice? Or, maybe, you can be both rich and nice as long as don’t openly enjoy the fruits of your success? When the left decide what they want and realise what we can afford maybe we could come to an arrangement other than what we have now. Failing that, keep pissing on those chips.

Extreme Measures

To all you toxic Britons, you xenophobes, you bigoted, narrow-minded racists, you sexist, homophobic, Brexit-voting bastards... welcome. Welcome to the new reality, you soon-to-be re-oppressed. Everywhere you hear it ‘Hope not Hate’. Don’t give in to Nazis, don’t let the ‘far right’, ‘hard right’, ‘alt right’, ‘extreme right’ win. Stamp out hate; hate the haters, destroy the right, kill them, kill them all! The incessant whine of progressive discontent has risen a couple of octaves to fever pitch since the Momentum surge and – in their eyes – vindication of all the labels they have invented to describe the objects of their animus. ‘Remainer’ sounds pathetic in comparison.

Admittedly the referendum result brought a thrill, a sense of belonging, the heartening realisation that in fact we were not just small, isolated pockets of rabid, fruitcake Little Englanders. We felt a sense of relief in the prospect of freeing ourselves from an unhappy relationship in which we had never felt comfortable, a divorce we had hoped for but never thought possible. Yes we did have a little gloat, a dig at our tormentors, a nose-thumb at the politically correct, kinder, gentler, yet somehow more rabidly bloodthirsty politics.

But now the left, who are easily raised to passionate anger, are back in the game and they are pretty full on. Since the disastrous gamble of Theresa May’s not-quite-snappy-enough election and the unexpected Labour vote-share, the activists have been in full gloat mode. Revenge is a word I keep hearing, spat out with some bloodthirsty glee; even at the height of our joy over Brexit we still harboured doubts it would come about, still kept our powder somewhat dry. But the whipped-up delirium of some of the leftist bully boys shows no such restraint.

In recent years we have seen the march of the left globally: book burnings, violent mobs contesting the free speech of others, empty-chairing invited speakers and campus revolts against anybody with differing views. We have witnessed openly anti-Semitic attacks and seen a sinister new alliance with islam, a religion whose extremely devout openly call for the killing of Jews, gays and apostates, in the name of such clearly misunderstood aims as equality and cultural harmony. Where do you start to discuss peace with a pink-haired, tattooed, transsexual, body-modified, professional protester who spits in your face and screams “death to the islamophobes”?

Who are the extremists here? Those of us who in the main, slog out our lives earning and saving and trying to be as little a burden as possible, who wanted to regain a sense of national pride before we died following a reasonable retirement, or the entitled hordes who march at the drop of a pink beret, sing The Red Flag and demand, with menaces, that we throw open the treasury doors, throw open the borders and throw out the rule book of society so that their muddled ideology of ‘anything goes’ can be allowed to hold sway.

Irony in action...

But, perversely, their understanding of equality and human rights does not extend to an acceptance of normal, decent, working people who have no political agenda. In fact segregation is the norm, with every sector of society identified and labelled and judged; exclusive ‘safe spaces’, gender-segregated work places, women-only and black-only events (anything but white men, eh?) and persecution of anybody perceived to have acted on or have displayed anything which they can seize on as ‘prejudice’. These hooded, armed, violent reactionaries call themselves Anti-Fascists? They look like Nazis to me. 

It's all gone horribly wrong!

So, I was wrong. Again. I was wrong about Brexit, wrong about 2015 and wrong to have underestimated the passion in some quarters for what they honestly think is doing the right thing. I admit it; I was wrong. Being a natural conservative – both big and small ‘c’s – I will do what we always do and get on with it. To be fair, very little in political life directly affects me anyway as, being as big a C as I have just declared, I have made it my life mission to look after my own affairs and never expect anybody else to care a fig. Long may that continue.

That said, where do we go from here? Theresa May has little option but to cling on, at least for a while and hope that when the clamour dies down she can carry on getting us out of the EU. The last thing anybody (except Labour) needs right now is a Tory leadership contest. But I’m fully prepared (and partially expect) to be proved wrong again. Unlike the rabid hordes of Momentum, however, I refuse to rip up the streets and threaten people with personal violence if that happens.

In the short term at least as far as my life is concerned, it makes little difference. I expect I’ll get by whatever system rules over us. In the longer term as well it won’t really affect me very much whether we’re in or out of the EU, whether we collectively pay 2p more or 2p less in tax. Whether or not our population is 80 million or 800 million, whether we join the German Army or become a caliphate etc, etc. But if this marks a shift towards a Corbyn-style of Marxist regime the people who will be adversely affected will be the children of the children who have just voted for a change they may not like very much when the money runs out.

Oh yes, a gentler kinder politics may be what’s on the masthead, but when you see how very, very angry the mobs can get even a newly minted Labour voter must, surely, have qualms about what sort of society we may become. Will the tendency to restrict freedom of speech intensify yet further? Will the ever-expanding and contradictory lexicon of human rights prevent us from actually having meaningful human rights? Will profligacy replace prudence, to the financial downfall of us all?

What of business confidence? Voting to pragmatically leave a restrictive union with 27 other squabbling nations might have been the very thing that would bring a new prosperity; will a new dawn of socialism bring about a return to the misery of the 1970s? The prospect of a future left wing Labour government is not likely to encourage investors to spend money in industries which could be swiftly nationalised. The drying up of tax revenues and the fleeing of the entrepreneurs will inevitably end in said government borrowing still more to fulfill promises made in opposition.

Theresa May adopts a new look... wrong.

Unless the Conservatives get their act together and shore up the breaches the future does not look very bright at all. The British, by their very nature, are conservative at heart; minor corrections, left and right, to a steady and unexciting course. But maybe we’re going to approach things in an increasingly less British manner over the next few decades? Has anybody taken the pulse of Venezuela lately? I really can’t see any of that going well at all, but I could be wrong. Please, let me be wrong.

The enemy within...

Election day is upon us and the security services are on high alert. Warnings are flooding into police call centres across the land as the threat to our democracy increases by the hour. They want most to disrupt our way of life to force on us an ideology which is abhorrent to people who love freedom and they would enslave us forever to the worship of their own idols, eschewing the decency, the humanity, the civilisation which has been Britain’s bequest to the world over the last thousand years.

Fifth columnists, the antagonists are home grown, living among us but not with us, keeping to their own communities; some of them have never spoken to an outsider, never heard the arguments of those who follow a different path in life. In these communities, which take a much higher than normal toll on our public services – the NHS, the police, social services – inbreeding is common, as they blindly condemn the very society that provides for them. And all the while they have been stealthily infiltrating local councils; wolves in sheep’s clothing.

The threat of violence is ever present and these people, this anti-modernist cult, frequently rallies its soldiers to bring their twisted and contradictory belief system to the streets. Ordinary, decent people are too cowed by political correctness to dare name the threat, but I name it today. Look after yourselves as you go to your polling stations. Report any suspicious behaviour to the authorities. But most of all protect your homes, your family, your businesses, from the very real threat of The Left.

Expect riots tomorrow, when the results come in and their false god remains outside the corridors of power. Be on guard against looting for equality and bottle-lobbing for fairness. Jeremy Corbyn has uncorked the bottle and released the evil genie; his tub-thumping, rabble-rousing war cries have echoed across the lands of the idle hands and now they are crawling out from under their stones once more to bring militancy back to the streets.

If you ever wanted proof of the Marxist leanings of the Labour Party, the quick propensity of their disciples to violence and brute force is right up there with the Bolsheviks, the Trotskyites and the grand wizard of leftist bully boys, Hitler himself. The brownshirts have spoken out on Facebook and called on leftists everywhere to riot, to disobey, to revolt. 'Twas ever thus. From spitting at candidates, calling out for the death of Tory politicians, to the physical intimidation of voters at the polling booths; the police have their jobs cut out today.

Labour Youth? Back to the future...

For decent people everywhere this should serve as a reminder of what we are fighting against. Don’t let the nasty party – Labour and their thugs – gain a single extra seat. And if you think giving in would make for an easier life, think again. If they are so ungracious in defeat as they have shown themselves to be, over and over again, just think how much more emboldened they would be with real power in their hands. So much for Corbyn’s ‘kinder, gentler politics’; you think he would be able to control them, a meek devotee of Karl Marx? Groucho Marx, more like...

Ho, ho, ho, it’s magic!

The desperate search for a killer cause to swing the election in favour of the Party of No Personal Responsibility is now working the “Boo hoo, Tories cut police funding” line. Hey, you can have as many police officers as you like, so long as you can pay them. Of course, if the Conservatives increased the numbers of officres on the thin blue line, Labour would accuse them of presiding over a police state. The purpose of opposition is, after all, to oppose, no matter how ridiculous it makes you look. But whatever you propose you have to be able to afford it.

A penny on income tax, said one twitter moron, the argument being that low earners would pay nothing, as they already do, high earners would hardly notice and everybody would be happy to pay up. But, of course, the extra this might raise (ignoring that prices would rise to compensate, consumption would fall, the cost of living would increase and then the lowest paid will be negatively impacted) might theoretically pay for one of Labour’s pledges. But what of the others; another penny here, another penny there? Before we know it we’d be back with the traditional inflationary spiral with interest rates headed for ‘Oh-my-good-God!’ and never-ending pay battles with newly emboldened unions.

The centrist line has always been ‘there is no magic money tree’ but as is the modern way, the left are attempting to use this as an argument against common sense by suggesting that yes, there is. This disingenuous article in The Guardian says we can pay nurses, policemen, teachers, etc, all we want, after all, we magicked-up the money for the ‘evil’ bankers back in 2008, so we can do it again... and again. It’s a tempting theory, but it is simply wrong; it is as wrong as Gordon Brown selling off the gold reserves and pretending this was clever economics. No more boom and what, Gordon?

And just as with all the other new-world-order, illuminati, Bilderberg conspiracies and the rest it feeds neatly into the ‘unfair’ narrative peddled by the left. It’s not your fault you earn less, it’s because those nasty Tories, in cahoots with the bankers want to keep you down. But surely it takes only a second of rational thought to reason that, if people are kept poor, consumption is kept low and profits suffer. If it was as easy as fairy-tale believing left wingers seem to think, why doesn’t evil capitalism indulge in ‘trickle-up’ economics? After all, a comfortably off population is a contented population, everybody would be happy and everybody would be richer; a socialist wet dream!

Yes, the money tree is real, dear, it is just as real as human equality. I’m guessing that when the flaws in the print-more-money theories are pointed out, along with the failures of socialist states to bring about the wished for prosperity, the response will be that the magic money tree has never been tried properly! Take out your Occam’s Razor and slice; if it was this easy, if the left had an answer on the lines of what this columnist is proposing, don’t you think they would have applied it, somewhere in the world? Or is the failure to conjure something from nothing yet another conspiracy against the workers?

A vote for Labour?

By all means, dream. Imagine winning the lottery, or coming up big on the gee-gees, or inheriting from a forgotten millionaire uncle, or even – cross fingers – imagine a government waving a magic wand and making you rich at a stroke. Dream of unlimited resources for every public service imaginable; nobody can stop you dreaming. But when you wake up, for heaven’s sake, sober up before you consider voting for what, in the cold light of day, is revealed to be a simple lie.

Leader Board

Golf is not the oddest of games, but it inspires passion and derision like few other activities. From the relentless golf bore in the club bar who almost, nearly, mighta claimed a course record except for the double bogey on the seventeenth, to the quiet unassuming up and coming youngster, diligently bringing down his score, round by round. On the professional circuits the stakes are high and there is nowhere to hide; the vicar might get away with kicking his ball from the rough into the fairway when nobody is looking but the pro is followed by the cameras everywhere he goes.

Another game that scores high on the passion and derision stakes is, of course, politics and never more so than when a major prize is up for grabs. Like golf it rewards the steady hands, those who can stick to their technique and keep on chipping away at every hole. And like golf, politics does not deal kindly with the ingénues, brashly sporting their tartan plus-fours and pink tam o’shanters, hoping that the bling will divert attention from the divots. Prior preparation is a must; which is why even those golfers at the top of the game turn up hours before the match and practice their swing.

Both games are won and lost in the head as well as the hand. On Sunday Theresa May as Prime Minister, had no option but to make a speech decrying the terrorist attacks of Saturday night. She did so; she took one measured stroke, straight down the fairway and then respectfully retired from the scene as others sought to catch up. Jeremy Corbyn, seeing an opportunity, took a wild swing; he accused her of making political capital out of the situation, sliced his ball and then spent the rest of the day wildly flailing away in the rough, tweeting another twenty times on the same theme.

Calm heads, preparation, deep breaths and considered responses. Last night Diane Abbott, surely the least capable politician of recent years, but nonetheless still somehow clinging on to her job, came out from the woods to answer her critics and save the day for Labour. On Sky News she approached the ball, sitting high on a tee at an easy par three; trash the government record on national security, demonstrate how her steady hands would bring the Labour team back into contention, tap in for a par.

She took a practice swing and her club flew out of her hands, nearly taking out a bystander; on Monday, with the election on Thursday, unforced, in her opening statement, she declared that there were two days until the vote. With an apparent reference to the ‘village people’ instead of the British people she missed her first shot at the ball. Dermot Murnaghan then unfairly asked her about the recent Harris report on London’s safety and security. Diane flailed again at the ball, still sitting steadfastly on its tee and missed by a mile. Yes, she’d read it, of course she’d read it but mysteriously couldn’t remember a single thing about it.

As in golf, elections are generally won by those who have the most experience, have practised long and hard and are at the top of their game – as Gary Player said, the more I practise, the luckier I get – but even the best players go into decline. Diane Abbott may think of herself as Labour’s Tiger Woods in his prime. But in reality she has always been much more like Tiger Woods is today. It’s time to leave the field. So, with Labour in trouble and Jeremy Corbyn rolling up his trousers to paddle in the burn and take his tenth stroke at the eighteenth, all Theresa May needs is a straight and steady chip down the middle and two putts to win.

Nothing to see

Once again election campaigns were suspended temporarily so that certain people could signal their virtue by sending out their hearts (they’d die, surely?) to the victims of ‘terror attacks’ of unnamed provenance and motiveless end. What drives these mentally unstable, unhappy, lone wolves to carry out such totally random assaults for no ideology whatsoever? It’s a mystery; a mystery at least to all those charged with protecting populations from them. If only there was some common theme to these attacks?

Meanwhile, you don’t have to look far on social media to find certain ‘types’ screaming blue murder... literally. “Kill the Tories!” is considered a perfectly reasonable response to a concerned enquiry about the mental health of somebody who thinks that Conservatives are actually plotting to kill off the old, the sick, the lame and the thick. Oh, if only we could, but in the meantime we just pay to keep them angry, it seems. A large proportion of those who put a roof over your head, feed you, allow you to breed with contemptuous irresponsibility and then even try to educate your offspring are natural Conservative voters and are repaid with nothing but hatred.

It can’t be coincidence that the same people who demand that ‘the rich’ (anybody earning more than me) pay larger and larger chunks of cash also demand that we not name the terrorism threat. The islamists are actually killing us but we must not blame muslims, yet ‘cutting the throat of capitalism’ is somehow a noble cause. Ordinary muslims join marches to demand the institution of the sharia and death to the west and are protected by our police as they do so, yet daring to point the finger of suspicion at the followers of the koran is somehow inhuman. The ability to hold mutually incompatible positions is characteristic of both the left and of schizophrenia.

The left, collectively, is textbook insane to the point where anybody displaying signs of common sense is considered to be of the ‘far right’. The national conversation has, so far, gone like this: Multiculturalism is good for you. We don’t like it. That’s bigoted; try it, see how you get on. It doesn’t feel right. That’s just your prejudice speaking; here, have some more multiculturalism, it’ll grow on you. It hurts. No it doesn’t. But I don’t feel enriched, actually I feel impoverished and disadvantaged by it. That’s your white privilege. I don’t feel privileged, I feel threatened. Bigot. But... Bigot. But... Racist. But... Don’t blame islam.

Labour's experimental Tower Hamlets candidate.

Okay, so back on the campaign trail. Forget the weekend events, except where they can be used to bolster claims and counter claims to make the case for more politics. And while the brownshirts of the left bully and intimidate and stuff the polls and threaten violence against those who dare to fear violence, remember we have just three days to save the NHS... from Labour.

Nobody here but us chickens

So Donald Trump has pulled out of Paris; the climate change agreement, not Ms Hilton, although, you know, he has form. According to some the world will soon, literally, be engulfed in flames. The EU has stopped just short of branding the USA a pariah nation and imposing sanctions, but you can bet that has nothing to do with saving the planet and everything to do with continuing trade. Trump’s decision is, of course, also to do with money and while the world condemns him, governments are all going to watch keenly for signs of economic upturns at which point expect others to follow suit, if in less dramatic fashion.

You can guarantee, however, that grass roots protest will ensue with hippies making Washington DC look untidy, anti-frackers churning up rural areas as they hold ‘peace vigils’ and the like and in an echo of the self-destructive instincts of some of Britain’s high profile Remainers, signed-up climate change scientists will take to the skies to fly to fragile exotic ecosystems where they will generate enough hot air to melt the ice caps, just to show how wrong Trump is and how much they care.

And in the background, of course, conspiracy theorists will abound. Look out for increased chemtrail hysteria activity, every drop of rain, or lack of it, being claimed as a direct result of yesterday’s announcement, rapidly rising sea levels to be widely broadcast... only for those reports to be retracted as the tide goes back out again. And the Sun headline ‘Phew, what a scorcher!’ to be put on standby for every edition. The world will go mad for a while and then everybody will calm down and forget about it.

Of course, the largest stakes to play for are the vested interests of the numerous committees, councils, research grantees and paid consultants in what has become a global industry. Not so much save the planet as save the jobs of the professionally concerned. Many children are betting their future on being able to continue playing make-believe long into adulthood as they convince themselves and each other of the spiralling dangers in a positive feedback loop which makes survival-fear a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom and gloom. There is a serious danger of climate ‘scientist’ over-supply in the near future and some may be questioning the long-term viability of being a Climate Cassandra.

Fortunately, forecasting disaster and then profiting from advising how to avoid it is a transferable skill these days; every industry is looking for the silver bullet to fix everything and will carry on paying for quack cures long after all reason has left the building. You can find the quackery of expert consultants in every walk of life. Too many low-paid migrant workers? Open the borders! Too much bureaucracy? Convene a select committee! Too many laws? Legislate! But what about the chicken problem, I hear you ask?

Farmer Brown’s chickens began to quarrel, Cooped up because of avian flu, they started to peck and wound each other, much like the uneasy internecine hostilities of the crazy coalition of the left. Many of them were dying, so the upset farmer hurried to a consultant, and asked for a solution to his problem. “Add baking-powder to their food,” said the consultant, “It will calm them down.”

After a week Farmer Brown was once more at the consultant’s office,explaining that nothing had changed and was there another way? The consultant said “Add apple juice to their drinking water. The attacks will stop, for sure.” But of course, no such change came about and a week later the farmer, now distraught, was back once again. “My chickens are still quarrelling. Do you have some more advice?” The consultant sat him down and answered “Of course I can give you as much advice as you can pay for, but the real question is whether you still have any chickens left to save.”

Debatable

Did you see the chimps’ tea party last night? The unedifying spectacle of seven party leaders and representatives squabbling over the sandwiches and general flinging their shit about? I believe it was billed as a debate, but as usual it was nothing more than Britain’s Not Got Talent for a bunch of deluded losers who all think they have something to offer. Hoot-panting as each spoke over the other, the IQ of the audience, already not the most gifted part of the ensemble, progressively lowered as the night went on.

Let’s talk about that audience. Balanced, the BBC said, rigorously selected to represent a true cross-section of the population. I assume then, that there were no more than a dozen deranged mentalists in there to mirror the support for Plaid Cymru, The Greens and  the SNP combined. Perhaps the same again for Ukip and the LimpDems, leaving the bulk to represent the Tories and Labour. Naturally the Conservative Party supporters would have sat back, listened and considered what was being said, while the others wore their colours more openly.

The repeated and often hysterical attacks launched at Amber Rudd and her calm response pretty much summed up the mood for me. It is hard to be in the government of such a benign realm as this. Notwithstanding Diane Abbott’s ridiculous assertion to the contrary this is one of the most tolerant countries in the world but the one part of society which is openly not tolerated by the baying mob for ‘social justice’, is the white, working, tax-paying, patriotic backbone of middle class England.

Welsh, Scottish and Irish accents seem to confer a sort of honorary BME status on even damned whitey, giving them a leeway not accorded the hated Tories. And herein lies the main curiosity of the whole shooting match; the quiet party, the getting-on-with-it, mustn’t-grumble, doing-our-bit party; the party which most represents the British national character, is constantly hectored and bullied by the ingrates they feed with their constant cries for more. The strident demands of those who do the least persistently drowns out the calls for a sober discussion of solutions.

Always with the problems, your leftists, always wagging the blame finger. Like arrogant teenagers, yet to make a meaningful contribution to family life they stamp their feet and clench their fists and spew out irrational hate for their parents and yet at the same time whine for more pocket money. The whole event was one of each in turn and often all together railing against the calm and reasoned voce of the only one there who has ever held high office. Amber Rudd stood up to her assailants with dignity.

The Coalition of Chaos convenes its first cabinet

But make no mistake, it was a mugging which Theresa May, for all the opprobrium she is getting for failing to show up, was wise to avoid. In any case, which other party could you possibly choose to run the country? The bullying communism of the Greens, the Charlie Drake party of Tim Farron with his knockabout quips about Bake Off, the insignificant Welsh and Scottish separatists, Paul ‘Hillsborough’ Nuttall, or the far left commissariat of the newly Marxist, not just old, but superannuated Labour Party? Give me Grey May any day.