If you see it, say it!

If the cases of Brexit, Trump, the Italian situation and the long-range weather forecast tell us anything it tells us that no matter how intelligent, prominent, famous, studious, or erudite you are, the rarest human attribute seems to be common sense. Show me an expert who argues with confidence for the economics of either staying in or leaving the EU and I will show you somebody who has learned nothing from history. And now I come to think of it, history itself is not always the most solid basis on which to predict the future.

Why would you lay on the line a hard-won reputation for retrospectively making the right moves by wading into waters you have no control over and trying to change the tides? It’s one thing to predict the likely numerical outcomes of a widely welcomed economic policy in a stable environment, or to forecast the balance of power in a two-party state when a popular – or unpopular – government is incumbent. But to pretend you can see the outcome of the worldwide clusterfuck that is the twenty-first century socio-political landscape is vainglorious folly indeed.

I can only imagine the pundits are pressed men, cornered into making pronouncements as their employers demand. Because the alternative is ugly. Is it simple, uncritical arrogance; a belief in your own omniscience? Or is it because your adoring acolytes have convinced you that you alone have the answers denied mere mortals. Or is it – and this is worse – a cynical understanding of the power of propaganda and the knowledge that to hold firm to a stance is somehow to help bring that position about?

It is little wonder that the wider public are turning away from their supposed leaders. The motes have been cast from their eyes and they see the true impotence of potentates; straws bending in the wind. Maybe – and it is a maybe; more of a hope than a prediction – more people will begin to realise that if you want something doing you should do it yourself if you possibly can. Politicians aren’t going to fill your potholes, rear your children and police your streets. Economists aren’t going to feed your pension funds and control your rents. And the Met Office isn't going to keep the rain away from your parade.

I see... murky balls.

If there is such a thing as common sense it is the collective wisdom of common individuals taking responsibility for their actions. And if there are such things as common experiences they are the disappointment that follows failure and the pride imbued by a job well done. It strikes me that the sooner people grasp the personal responsibility nettle, the sooner their reliance on the little man behind the megaphone will wane. Am I forecasting that this will come about? Well, I’m no expert...

Rough Men

Much unrest afoot and abroad; the Chinese curse has been realised and we live in interesting times indeed. The population votes for Brexit and is decried as uncivilised, racist, ignorant and in a spectacular inversion of the definition, unpatriotic. (Support for an independent nation state is now the opposite of patriotism, apparently) Meanwhile, over in Italy, the EU demonstrates – yet again – that this institution is the antitheses of democracy, while simultaneously rewriting the general understanding of democracy to fit their actions. There is a pattern.

Here is another pattern. In the movie A Few Good Men, Colonel Jessop says, “I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it.” This is but a variation of a sentiment often, if erroneously, attributed to Churchill, that "We sleep safely in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would harm us." And linked to this is the idea that you are only free to express dissent because people of whom you may disapprove have fought and continue to fight for that right.

I confess, I have never taken to the streets in protest. I have had no need. I have often argued that there is no ‘far right’ to worry about, as the bedwetters of the huddled leftist masses imagine because those they fear wish them no harm; we generally pay them no heed at all. But let me explain: Left and right originally was used to describe the sides in the French revolution; commoners on the left, aristocrats on the right. Now the aristos are few, but the peasants have formed two broadly distinct classes – ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ – and a whole class war has evolved around it.

The nominal rich have no need of association; they wield power and influence commensurate with the depth of their pockets and willingness to intervene. Often, despite all the propaganda to the contrary, the well-off have deep social consciences and are a far greater force for good than the rabble rousers of the ‘lower orders’ will admit. (See how easily the language of class conflict floats to the surface.) So it is to we lower orders that the real duties of society fall. On the one side are those of us who work hard, earn well and pay taxes so that the rest may supplement their perceived penury. For which playing the game we are called ‘right wing’; we shrug and shoulder our burden.

On the other side are the aggrieved, the disenchanted who feel the world has not bestowed its riches upon them, the disenfranchised who feel their voice is unheard and unheeded. The young, the ignorant, the unlucky and sometimes – let’s not be coy – the plain idle, who, no matter the real reasons for their lack of the success they feel is theirs by right, are easily persuaded by meddlesome minds that they have been wronged. This is the flock, the constituency, of the left and everybody who disapproves of their cajoling and bullying ways is labelled ‘far right’ and dismissed as bigots.

The fictional hero James Bond is a killer, a cold-blooded killer at that, but he’s okay; he’s cool, even. The much-admired SAS has a high proportion of actual psychopaths in its ranks, but you are happy for them to mete out summary justice, especially when you don’t have to witness it, or when you can dress it up in glory. But Tommy Robinson? He may be the very definition of an ‘Inglourious Basterd’[sic] but your world is a safer place with him in it. Call him ‘far right, call him a Nazi, call him a thug. But just realise that you are allowed to call him all this, allowed to openly despise him, precisely because people like him have stood up to be counted.

Some rough men, doing what they had to do...

And while you are busy spitting your righteous hatred in his direction, you may want to take a moment to consider that Anjem Choudary is being released. So while one rough man, who has practised vocal, often clumsy, but peaceful opposition, is placed in mortal danger by the state (and I don’t give a toss about the legal technicalities involved, I really don’t) the state (you and I) will spend millions to protect a man who is directly implicated in the brutal killing of Lee Rigby and others and who has effectively declared islamic war against all of us. Are you still sleeping safely in your beds?

Old news

The NHS: Pseudo religion to many; iconic socialist success story (with its shortcomings brushed under a carpet heaped high with uncritical praise); inviolable national treasure and the big stick regularly used to cow dissenters into a hands-off stalemate about its future. Suggest the NHS could be reformed and you will bring down opprobrium and lightning about your head and a plague upon your house. This is a tail which very much wags the dog.

In the British press you are only ever a day away from a big story about the NHS, which itself is only ever days away from total collapse; it has struggled on in this manner since 1948. At seventy it should be pensioned off but no, like those of us who have paid for it all our lives we will be expected to keep on going. Once again – as with Brexit, the immigration debate, the anger of the young, throwing around accusations of ‘having their future thrown away’ – it is all the fault of the old.

Old people have selfishly pushed up house prices. Old people have exhausted the resources of our boom years and left the young destitute. Old people blame it all on the EU and immigration, when ‘everybody knows’ we are a nation of mongrels and we need – positively need – immigrants to do the jobs the lazy Brits won’t do. Old people don’t care about the future, they won’t have to live through it. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah-bloody-blah... The gutless misery of these mantras is not only boringly predictable, it is wrong. So wrong.

For a start it is not old people who push up house prices it is simple supply and demand; it is the sheer number of people. And it is the tax-payer who pays for everything the state provides; who has paid the most tax of all? Why, those who have paid in for the longest. Who earns the most and therefore pays a disproportionately higher percentage of their income as tax? Those who have acquired the skills and knowledge and experience to be worth more to the economy, to generate more surplus wealth. Oh yes, that would be the older workers in the population.

And who disproportionately uses the resources of the NHS? Why that would be the old I mean sick people. Sick people come in all guises, but those who work through their entire lifetime tend to consume far fewer of any public resources than those who have taken the cradle-to-grave mantra of the welfare state as an invitation to plunder its overly generous coffers. This includes children, especially babies – bloody babies; it’s all just take, take, take with them – and all those who eagerly grasp at any medical straw to excuse their lifelong indolence. (It also includes those beloved, minimum-wage, zero tax-paying, net-welfare recipient immigrants who displace many younger Brits who would pick those crops, pack those boxes and stack those shelves if they had to.)

And now it is older people, those who in earlier decades might have expected to retire after a lifetime of paying for the NHS and everything else, who are opting to stay in work into their seventies to continue paying for it. You might think the vibrant, multicultural, progressive young people – who are the future, remember – would be grateful that the despised older generations are willing to carry on funding that future, but no... Kids, the older generation is not the problem; it is, in large part, the solution.

Get Mad

The newsreader dropped an octave and in a husky voice, on the point of breaking and punctuated by dry sobs, she intoned the news. “It is twenty-four hours now since Jasmine, the nation’s sweetheart, went missing. A candle-lit vigil was hastily convened last night after she didn’t respond to the usual entreaty, ‘puss puss puss’ to come in for her supper. By this morning, some three thousand tea lights were being watched over by a crowd which overwhelmed Trafalgar Square and the steps of the National Gallery were adorned with flowers and tributes from well-wishers.”*

She paused a moment, bowed her head and clasped her hands together as if to offer a silent prayer. A single tear slid down one cheek, captured in close-up and broadcast to the millions who were simultaneously planning how they would mark their loss. The regular public sharia beatings, the gassing of protesters and the jailing of free speech advocates went unreported save for the coded columns in subversive, minor, former news publications such as the underground Mail and Express pamphlets, secretively distributed and often only passed on by word of mouth among trusted friends.

When did we become such a nation of crybabies and religious appeasers? In the last week we have seen wall-to-wall wailing over the losses in the Grenfell fire and the Manchester Arena bombing, yet the fifth anniversary of Lee Rigby’s brutal murder has been treated gingerly, so as not to cause offence. The BBC in one news item even referred to the Manchester Arena event as ‘an accident’. And in recent weeks there has been a push for increased legal powers to police ‘hate speech’ and criticism of islam. Blasphemy laws, in secular Britain?

And yesterday, of course, Tommy Robinson was sent to prison where, no doubt his life will be under threat, for a breach of the peace. It appears he has breached the terms of his licence, but he was simply doing what he is cheered on by many of us for doing and highlighting the otherwise unreported monstrosities committed by the hidden community concealed behind the very visible massed aggression which the government insists on portraying as a persecuted minority.

What happened to the stiffness of our upper lips? The black-shrouded, grieving widow was an aberration, her strange, ethereal, inability to move on the antithesis of Britishness, yet tolerated in true British fashion. But now it’s as if we must all join in the tortured misery and self-flagellation in the pseudo-scientific notion of closure. This isn’t closure; it’s a perpetuation of a snivelling inability to grasp cold reality. When 96 year old war hero Jim Booth faced down an attacker armed with a claw hammer he shrugged off what the press has to call ‘an ordeal’ with the superbly British response that worse things happen at sea.

Nothing has changed...

It’s time to ‘man up’, surely? It’s time to take to the streets in protest, to rattle a few cages and to unseat a few so-called leaders who neither lead nor offer solutions. It’s time to stop getting maudlin, to give up the widow’s weeds and shout out ‘enough is enough.’ Standing proud? Standing together? All this vigil nonsense is neither; it is hollow words to cover up the reality that we are standing against nothing; we are giving in. Well enough. Don’t get sad, get mad. Then don’t’ get mad, get even,

(*No cats were harmed in the making of this blog.)

Because she is black?

The pomp, the pageantry, the pontification from the pulpit! But most of all the punditry, by all and sundry of the significance of the royal wedding on Saturday. Given the manner of the demise of the groom’s mother you would imagine that the oh-so-well-tuned sensitivities of the self-appointed kinder, gentler spokespersons for society might have curbed some of the more outlandish claims for the Duchess of Sussex’s future role.

The Telegraph reports that she will fight for feminism. You do know, Telegraph, that it is the British royal family she has married into? Apart from the not insignificant fact that it has often been headed up by a woman it is practically the epitome of the sort of patriarchal system that feminism deplores. But it doesn’t stop there; if the blanket coverage across every platform told me anything it told me that a world of expectations lies on the young lady’s shoulders, not least that she is now to be the focus and figurehead for the race industry.

Unless you had been told, repeatedly, you would not realise that Meghan is ‘black’. I beg your pardon; she’s black? Without that information you might imagine she was of Italian extraction, or Spanish perhaps; there are darker skinned products of the sunbed culture in the Anglo-Saxon gene pools of our former working classes. But like the tale of the emperor’s new clothes we are being trained to see what we are told we must see; get used to it - latte is the new black... at least until the gloss wears off and we get back to reality.

But for now at least we are awash with the news that a ‘person of colour’ has broken down, infiltrated, multiculturalised [insert hyperbole of preference here] one of the last bastions of privilege and exclusivity that exist outside of EU politics and the Bilderbergers. Until she falls out of favour – for as sure as eggs is eggs she will – she will be lauded as an ambassador for every minority cause the grievance bandwagons can deliver. While most of us accept the match for what it is – just two people doing what millions of others before them have done – certain factions on the left are applauding this as a great victory for... for what, exactly?

Why is the left so obsessed with race? The British have traditionally taken people at face value and cultural markers have only been an issue when say, every stabber in London happens to be of Somalian origin, or pretty much every swept-under-the-carpet rape-gang exposé happens to centre around rapists of an identifiably Pakistani persuasion. And even then the colour of their skin is not the focus of prejudice, rather it is a handy marker of shared identity – the prejudice is in their actions, not ours.

The Firm is indefatigable...

The 'black duchess’ is identity politics writ large and it is at the heart of all that is wrong with Labour and the left. They accuse others of creating division but what could be more divisive than to perpetually plead the special causes of each of the segments of an ever more finely divided society. Rather than allow herself to be co-opted into the causes of the eternally aggrieved I hope Meghan assimilates seamlessly into the family she has joined and becomes a true royal. Let her stand up for everybody and let her rub the left’s nose in anything but diversity.

N.H.Yes?

I’ve started and abandoned a dozen blogs since the last I posted and simply not had the time to ride those thought buses to the terminus. It’s happening more and more just lately as deadlines for real work appear on the distant horizon then suddenly loom large before disappearing in the rear view mirror; forgotten ticked-off events that mark my passage towards my own ultimate deadline. This might sound a tad morbid and forlorn but it’s natural to wonder about how we prepare to meet the end.

Oh, I’m sure I have a couple of active decades left in me yet, but how active and more importantly, with what level of agency? Given the parlous state of, well, everything, will there be enough left in the pot – both mine and the state’s – to facilitate a dignified descent into comfortable docility, or will there simply be no pot left to even piss in? Even the most optimistic of us, even the luckiest, must surely entertain dark thoughts, on occasion, about what might lay ahead.

All of which is why, whether we believe in it or not, whether we worship at its altar or avoid it altogether, we really should be concerned about the state of the National Health Service. Once a ground-breaking and quite possibly world-beating system of keeping the labour force healthy and productive it has become a deified monolith of gargantuan proportions. It employs a ridiculous number of people – yet there are daily calls for more – and it consumes a huge amount of ever-more-thinly stretched national resources. And as its customer base expands exponentially this is a situation which can only worsen.

Those who paid for it all – the elderly who now rely on it and who also need social care, now that society has abrogated responsibility to government for every aspect of its wellbeing – are unsurprisingly disdainful of how its largesse is extended to all comers. The free-at-the-point-of-use model is no longer viable as fewer and fewer people now actually contribute to its funding, yet more and more funding is demanded. The whole thing is on a one-way journey to collapse unless something new happens.

The decades-long row between Conservatives and Labour over this supposed national treasure isn’t good enough. Labour must not be allowed to get away with demanding ever more money yet having no realistic method by which to raise it. And the Conservatives must stop throwing £billions into its gaping maw while kicking the can of unpopular reform further down the road to ruin; nobody is listening when they insist that they have spent more than Labour ever did, because all they see is their grandmother waiting months in agony for a hip replacement.

The Tories have got to stop trying to appear reasonable; they lost the insincere battle for popularity far too long ago. That is the Labour confidence trick and it’s wearing thin. We don’t need reasonable, we need backbone and a dose of effective medicine – a political emetic to vomit up the flux. Stop gingerly picking at the scab and prolonging the pain; steel yourself for the sting and rip the damned thing off. People will complain whatever is done, but until what is done is drastic and transformative, the only thing you will hear will be those complaints.

Nurse!

When a structure is crumbling, there is only so much you can do to shore it up. There comes a time when you need to cut your losses, tear it down and start over. The NHS is not a unique and inviolable, precious thing which cannot be touched. It is just another symptom of the loss of British backbone, identity and resolve. And part of that Britishness was not relying on others to fix our problems. We may have already lost the ability to deal with all this, but if we don’t heal ourselves, who else do we think is going to do it?

The Colour of Racism

It’s been a busy old week at Battsby Towers and while I’ve accumulated lots of notes about topics to cover, I’ve also been flat out writing technical stuff for work. Still, we’re here now so what do you want to chat about? I’m hearing we’ve become more racist since the referendum; ‘UN Expert’ E Tendayi Achiume says so. Who, you may ask? Her role is – and you’ll love this: ‘Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance’. So the real headline should be more like: ‘truffle hound finds truffles’. 

It’s a curious concept, racism. What does it really mean? The first definition the interwebs offered up was: ‘prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior’. Seems fair enough; mind you, I’d feel quite antagonistic if somebody here for just a few days quizzed me about whether or not I felt less, about the same, or more racist since somebody started quizzing me about my racism. This is all bollocks of course, isn’t it?

I can certainly see how some who identify as victims of racism feel they have the licence to announce that it’s got worse since everybody started banging on about it. Reported cases have increased dramatically of late, but of course they will when the system demands we self-identify as racists and dob ourselves in; when the definition of hate crime allows anybody who imagines they have been snubbed to turn their perception into a crime statistic.

But have we really become ‘more racist’, or do we just exhibit the same amount of preference and disdain we always did? You see, for most British people it isn’t about race, it’s about culture. The shameful examples of white trash, covered in menacing tattoos and yobbishly marching about like they own the council estate are despised. The ennobled parliamentarians, who parade their privilege and sneer at the common herd who voted for Brexit disgust us. And we fear the moped muggers and knife-wielding thugs of the stabby capital of Europe.

And by ‘race’ does this expert really mean ‘colour’? Because, you know, being repeatedly told not only that all white people are racist, but that only white people can be racist will tend to piss us off a bit. If we discriminate in favour of what we now clumsily have to call ‘the BAME community’ we are tarred with employing ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations’. If you go looking for racism it is pretty well certain you will find it because, whatever we do, the jury of your peers already returned the verdict of guilty. (And yes, I did use ‘tarred’ deliberately – may as well be hung for a sheep and all that.)

The law of unintended consequence is always lurking in the shadows ready to do its dirty work. Are you a small business which can’t afford to pay two people to do one job? Then don’t employ women of child-bearing age. Worried about the gender pay gap? Suggest men work less. Do you need more qualified people? Dumb down education. Are you afraid of being called racist? Avoid mixing with, employing, or having any form of association with anybody who doesn’t look like you. How much racial segregation will we need, Ms Achiume, before you will be able to declare we have eradicated our hateful, racist ways? I won’t hold my breath.

Boomers

At a time when western societies are in turmoil - wracked by liberal white guilt over the plight of third-world shitholes, even when some of their denizens come here illegally, with an avowed intent to subjugate suppress and destroy us; shoring up crumbling physical infrastructures built in an earlier age when honest toil was valued and common values really were common; hysterically rending garments about the fate of the planet and telling ourselves horror stories about apocalyptic climate events to follow – what better time could there possibly be to stoke up the generation wars?

Positing a yawning chasm between the baby boomers and millennials, the Resolution Foundation – an organisation which appears to exist purely to stoke up such perceptions – is suggesting reparation. In similar vein to proposals such as a Citizen’s Basic Income they are floating the idea of a ‘Citizen’s Inheritance’: yes, more free stuff. I’m guessing that somebody at Resolution must have been listening to the Corbyn/McDonnell circus because it will be funded from - you guessed it - inheritance tax. Yes, well, of course, inheritance tax is a moral tax, right? I mean, you’re dead so, hey, your stuff should be up for grabs.

But what do you actually want, millennials? We boomers had prospects based on the mores of our own day. We went to school and then to work and became part of the machine pushing Britain towards the current century. Many jobs were a drudge, but if you didn’t put in it was widely recognised that you couldn’t take out. Now though, you demand your somewhat nebulous ‘rights’ as well; long before you have done anything to earn them. There are jobs today which never existed back when we valued each other, rather than valuing whispy notions of equality and diversity and ‘social justice’. (Have you any idea how silly that all sounds to us?)

I’m of the later baby boomer generation, but I have no second house, no ‘gold-plated’ pension, etc. I am frugal and fair and I know the value of what I have worked to acquire. It’s not much but I earned every penny, and far from slowing down I’m working longer hours now than ever before – and this from a past of working a seven-day-week, ten-weeks-on cycle for years. But in doing that I reckon I’ve learned a few things. I know, for instance, that you can’t buy friendship. That charity doesn’t engender respect. And that there really is no substitute for doing the hard miles. I don’t begrudge anybody what they have, still less do I want to take it from them.

Every generation has its own challenges and opportunities and it is human nature to value less the challenges of others. If we want to use what we have accumulated through our graft to help upcoming generations it strikes me that the most valuable gift we have to bestow is knowledge. We should be preparing young people for the world of productive work, not the world of entitlement; what does a £10k gift teach in comparison to the real education of making choices and learning for yourself?

One day, son... one day.

So, for me at least, this headline grabbing soundbite is just that. A faintly ridiculous, virtue-signalling expression of yet more liberal guilt which, if it did anything at all would just objectify older people as piggy banks and deepen the divide. There’s nothing wrong with pondering the situation of young people, but why damn them with the soft bigotry of low expectations? Instead of teaching them to hold out their hands out we should be saying: “You want what I have? Good... off you go and work for it.”

Damp squibs and victory parades

Now the last embers have died on the damp squib that was the  local election circus, and it is clear the results are spectacularly underwhelming, the media can get back to discussing Donald Trump. The man is a blunt instrument it’s true, but sometimes the only tool you need is a great, big, fuck-off hammer. But back to those elections: the best bit for me was learning that Saint Jeremy had a victory cavalcade all ready to process through Barnet. Instead he had to settle for Plymouth for his little display of personality politics – you know, the very sort of thing this deep conviction politician is steadfastly against.

On polling day great wails rang out in those areas which were trialling the requirement to produce personal identification. But this wasn’t some draconian imposition, sprung on the day; it had been extensively broadcast - and challenged – for weeks beforehand. Nobody with any interest or understanding of politics could have been unaware, so to screech that they had somehow been disenfranchised by a de-facto fascist state was ludicrous; if you were thus unaware, on what basis, what understanding, were you voting at all?

It was notable, of course, that all the clamour came from would- be Labour supporters. The poor, they cried, the disabled, the disadvantaged and (wait for it) the-most-vulnerable-in-society were once again put upon to be the exemplars of people who couldn’t prove who they were. Except, these people are often the most documented and therefore the most easily verifiable; benefits claims, records of interviews, doctors’ appointments, blue badges, etc, etc, etc. If you are on benefits of any kind, we know who you are, surely? Maybe Labour’s failure to break through was down, partly, to this spannering of their dodgy vote machine.

Be that as it may, all eligible voters in the UK should have a National Insurance number, of which they will have been notified. It isn’t rocket science that if this handy nine-digit reference number can be used to trace your contributions and pay your pensions it can be used to verify your eligibility to participate in deciding who runs the country, the county, the borough. But of course, this does disadvantage those who want to vote on behalf of the dead, the illegal alien and the 80 non-existent residents of Flat 17b Grenfell Tower...

But what would they really be voting for, this hidden army of loyal biddable mandate-givers? Why, they would be voting for poverty. After a hundred-plus years of socialist ‘progress’ in the west we still have poverty. More so, in fact, as they seem to insist on importing more exotic forms of human misery from cultures which don’t even know what liberty and self-expression are. I was berated yesterday by ‘a Labour’ (who hilariously described me as a Blairite!) who insisted that Tories are rich, Tories are greedy and Tories don’t care, as if these were disqualifiers from the right to have a say.

But little could be further from the truth. If any Tories are rich it is because they care. They care about their kids, their future and the future of the country. They work hard to better themselves – education, hard graft, always striving for better; because only by doing the hard miles do you earn the rewards which socialists want to legislate as a right. Tories don’t have good jobs because they are Tories; they become Tories because as they pay more and more into the system and see less and less return, they realise the enormity and futility of the socialist project.

Have a happy bank holiday!

Socialism needs to persuade poor people to vote. So, if too few people feel poor, socialists put their efforts into persuading people that they are in abject and neglected straits. This is a pretty good working definition of a perverse incentive. Often attributed to Churchill, the sentiment that “If a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain” may be a cheap line, but truths don’t need to come with a price tag. Jeremy Corbyn is 69 in three weeks; what does that say about him?

Mayday!

The appointment of Sajid Javid as Home Secretary may have steadied the helm of Teflon Theresa’s leaky skiff for the moment, but choppy waters still lay ahead. The Lords seem determined to secure a Brexit reversal while dishonestly claiming this is not their intent. The government insist that they are serious about disentangling us from EU control yet seem to be terrified of doing anything which might look remotely like leaving the EU. And Labour will tell you whatever they think you want to hear if there is a possibility of a vote in it.

The one message they all signally fail to receive is the one we have been shouting at them for decades: Stop lying to us; do what we bid; govern. The Conservatives are already extinct; the last true Tory died in 2013 and those that have held the candle since she was shabbily ushered from office in 1990 are pale shadows. When the ‘wets’ took over they buried the party forever and although we currently have a nominal Tory government it really is in name only.

Desperate for power the Labour Party shamelessly aped the successful elements of Thatcherism and put up the stuffed doll, Tony Blair, to pretend they had changed and were worthy of office again. How did that turn out for you, fellas? Embarking on what is arguably one of the principle causes of all the current xenophobic unrest, Blair and his cronies stuffed the country full of low information, paid-for, block voters, snubbed the supporters who had elected them and gleefully promoted diversity over unity, creating a social upheaval from which we may never recover. How soon before we have separate islamic city states and does anybody sincerely believe this will not happen?

To criticise the government – any flavour – is to declare yourself a public enemy, even if you have massive public support. And to openly hold an opinion contrary to the orthodoxy is to invite a level of excoriation formerly reserved for serial mass murderers. Nigel Farage has many detractors and many flaws, but he doesn’t deny those flaws and he genuinely speaks for many millions of people disenfranchised by their former parties. Both Conservatives and Labour lined up to beat him down, but Nigel’s own New Model Army dusted off their standards, marched on Parliament and demanded change.

So, what’s the game now? Prevarication, procrastination, obfuscation, obstruction and at all costs delay, delay and delay the day on which we [may] part company with our masters in Brussels because, let there be no doubt, this is about securing freedom and independence. But freedom and independence are the last things our principal political movements appear to want. The outcome of Brexit relies not on negotiating skill, not on the strong will of determined reformers but on the short memories and fatigue of the electorate.

The only clear tactic seems to be to carry on lying, creating problems where none exist, seeking clarification where none is needed and eventually to plod along, as slowly as possible, to some form of deal which amounts to not leaving at all, but on very much reduced terms. It’s as if they hope we will all be too tired to protest as they sign away yet more independence and proclaim it as glorious, hard-won freedom. If you believe in conspiracy it isn’t hard to imagine them – Labour, Tories, Libdems, Greens, SNP and all the corrupt institutions of the EU itself – colluding to bring the Britons back into line.

Regardless of which way you voted on Brexit this is not the government we need. The Tories are too afraid to hold the line and Labour are all too ready to piss it all away. The people of this country – wherever your roots lie – deserve so much better than the mealy-mouthed, mantra munching morons to which we have become all too inured. Will Sajid Javid’s appointment change any of this? What do you think?

Never mind; you did all you could...

It really is time to clear the decks and toss the dross overboard. With local elections coming up you have one tiny chance to send a message. Reject the main parties altogether and vote for none-of-the-above. Elect the independents instead. And if you can’t bring yourself to do that, then stay away from the polling stations altogether; if they are going to ignore democracy let us ignore them in turn... let the Russians decide. Mayday, mayday, our government is missing.