Westminster – the Motion Picture

We’ve all seen the movie and it is the same every time. Eventually, somebody makes an offer that can’t be refused. The hapless victim turns to others for help, only to find that the friend, the tutor, the mentor, the governor... the president, even, is in cahoots with the mob. The corruption runs both deep and wide and eventually our man has only one choice – confront the issue head-on and employ extreme violence. Shit or bust.

Reason didn’t work. Pragmatic acceptance of the situation fared no better because once the capitulation was acknowledged the demands merely increased; if he’ll put up with this, why not also insist on this? Negotiation never even got started because whatever bargaining chip the protagonist thought he held was utterly defeated by the counter threats. Do as we demand or the kid gets it. Pay up or lose the dog. We pull the strings, you dance, sucker.

Oh, it all started so innocently. What do you want? They asked. We can make your wishes come true. But what seemed like a perfectly simple and amicable agreement soon accrued compound political interest and with each passing day the stakes grew bigger and the stories of what would happen became wilder and more extreme. Everywhere he turned those who he thought were his allies presented their backs. Warm off-the-record words and private promises turned sour as they publicly reneged on commitments vaguely mumbled behind closed doors.

Who profits? Who knows? The murky currents of this malicious crime organisation run deep and strong, but they cannot be completely invulnerable; they must have a weak spot. They think not. Even the miserable henchman senses ultimate triumph: “...with their backs against the wall, the abyss in front of their eyes and a knife on their throat. We are nearly there. If some time is needed after the end of March then that will not be a problem for the 27.” Oh really, Weasel Van Rompuy? Let’s see about that.

Is this what you want? Well, you asked for it...

Act Three: Redemption. Beaten, bloodied, but unbowed, it is finally clear that any deal the mob might make will be worse than the last. Down that route lies utter subjugation and defeat. The thugs will never back down and the intimidation will continue unless something changes. Enter the reluctant hero. And the nuclear option. Never say never. Hasta la vista muchachos. Yippee ki-yay motherfuckers. Our hero pilots the atomic bomb toward the Death Star... mutually assured destruction, our last card...roll the credits.

Chuka's Chicks Cluck Away

I’ll leave it to others to comment at length, as they have, on how the Independent Group (now joined by Soubry and the Sourpusses) epitomise irony. But in case you missed it, they think independence is a good thing for them, yet a bad thing for the UK  and secondly that despite them all backing a second referendum with remain as an option (but won’t say it out loud) none are willing to give their own constituents a vote... now they know all the facts. The irony horse has bolted from the stable.

Instead I’m taking a shot at the language, the bile and invective sprayed all around like a rampant muck-spreader on crack by Soubry about the imagined ‘far- right’. So determined is she to see the fingers of the far-right in every expression of disagreement she may as well morph into James O’Brien and get it all over and done with. She still manages to both oppose Brexit yet believe she is supporting the referendum vote by ignoring it; the level of cognitive dissonance she suffers must be like tinnitus.

Supporting Brexit does not make you far-right. Wanting an independent – oh look, there’s that lovely word again – Britain does not make you some kind of jack-booted fascist. Not wanting to be ruled from afar is as British as you can get and you might wish to recall the British have a bloody good track record at fighting fascism. Look it up, while history still reports it thus. Soubry’s hyperbole is as ridiculous as Owen Jones’s ‘Winston Churchill was worse than Hitler’ trope he was flogging last week. I mean what is wrong with you people?

Soubry, Allen and Wollaston are claiming to be real Conservatives, trying to save the Party from what has been described as far-right infiltration from top to bottom, when all we see is New-Labour-Lite. Heidi Allen even went so far as to say that the big parties “...want to crush the birth of democracy." This is the same Heidi Allen who has left one of those big parties in order to thwart the outcome of the biggest democratic vote this country has ever held.

Newspeak, is of course the inevitable result of doublethink and the Independent Group are displaying all the glorious traits of Orwell’s IngSoc as they whip up extremism of their own. In fact, breaking away and forming your own group is the very essence of revolution; how very Trotsky of them. And inciting the kind of anti-Brexit rhetoric they do, is so redolent of the two minute hate... except that it isn’t confined to two minutes; it is non-stop.

The only way this rabble can claim to be centrist is that they blend together the extremist tendencies of both left and right, speaking about democracy while opposing it, demanding action against hate while promoting it. Were it not for the voracious appetite of 24-7 news their disjointed message would have already been lost. Instead (much like the Labour Party of late) they are all popping up in interviews to renounce their earlier affirmed stances and to contradict each other in their aims.

If you see any of these lost souls, please inform their carers

If only they would decide to tell the truth and come out as the Anti-Brexit Party. But even the frothing Soubry, the remainer zealots’ zealot, for all her talk of ‘Bluekip’ and ‘Purple Momentum’ still cannot admit to herself that she may not be an actual Conservative. Also she may have been on the Sherry. Anyway, Independents, you were the ones who chose to leave a situation you couldn’t reform from within. Should you put yourselves up for re-election you really haven’t a leg to stand on, which is just as well, as you have no intention of standing.

Seven Deadly Sinners

The newly formed Independent Group of ex-Labour MPs say they want a new politics, not driven by ideology. But wait, what is politics, after all, if it doesn’t pursue a vision? Mere governance need not cleave to left or right, but simply acts in the best interests of the majority, surely? Yes, look after the helpless, but otherwise act for all. Ideologies on the other hand seek more, well, ideological outcomes. And Labour comes from the soak the rich, kill the rich, tax the rich, banish the rich (but still tax them), hate the rich, harry the rich end of the spectrum. Where does this put the band of seven?

There were said to be seven capital vices, otherwise known as the seven deadly sins: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth. Just for a bit of fun, let’s look at the sinners a little more closely.

Pride, they say, goes before a fall and Chuka Umunna simply can’t help himself. As a closeted gay Tory in real life, he clearly chose the Labour Party as one in which his dusky skin tones gave him more of a leg up than his natural parliamentary home. Alas his bid for leadership fell at the first hurdle and consigned him forever to be the bridesmaid and never the bride. No doubt he sees himself as leader of this new group... watch out for that tumble!

Chris Leslie, who supports a deeply unpopular soft Brexit with a customs union and single market membership, has criticised Labour for not demanding a second referendum, with Remain an option. He claims his Constituency Labour Party has been infiltrated by the intolerant hard left which seeks to deselect him. It doesn’t look as he has much to lose by quitting. Oh how he must envy Chuka’s suave, Tory presence and winning ways with the, er, laydeez.

Gavin Shuker (who he?) at only 37, is the whippersnapper of the gang of seven. But greedy for power he has founded a secretive company  ‘Gemini A Ltd’ who are said to be the backers behind The Independent Group. As the sole director, wee Gavin clearly hopes his grip on the purse strings will deliver him the attention he craves. And as for Mike Gapes carrying, as he does a few extra pounds, are we to detect a touch of the glutton?

Then we come to the ladies and who would wish to feel the wrath of a woman scorned? Still less the incandescent fury of Luciana Berger – the anti-anti-Semite’s anti-anti-Semite. Or indeed Angela Smith whose slip of the tongue over ‘funny-tinge-gate’ betrays, maybe, an obsession with the dusky. Methinks, however, her lust will go unanswered by the chhekily mocha Chuka. As for Ann Coffey, in a vox-pop from her ward a constituent claimed she had never done a thing for the area, so a sloth in sheep’s clothing, or simply the left, ever quick to turn on their own?

Still waters don't always run so deep

Of course, Ms Coffey has form in backing losers. She nominated Liz Kendall for the Labour leadership in 2015 and endorsed Owen Smith in same failed endeavour in 2016. Whatever the truth behind it all, what seems by now abundantly clear is how few ripples this has really caused in the political talent pool. If you are going to start a breakaway movement you really need some bigger headline acts than this. Maybe seven deadly sinners was too big a label; they are more like the seven dwarves, which begs the question: which one is the most Dopey?

Suffer the children

I remember, back in the sixties, our next door neighbours were proud to have marched in the Ban the Bomb demonstrations. It had no effect on either government policy or their own lives and when I got to know them a little I realised it was for them just a jolly day out with a bunch of other young people, making a noise for the sake of it and justifying it by pretending to themselves that they cared. They didn’t. Even back then there were families who could survive on a combination of the dole, cash in hand work and the black market. Far from being good little socialists and humanists they were on the take, allowing others to take the strain.

The world faces many challenges and most responsible governments – including our own, believe it or not – are taking steps to meet them. On climate change, for instance, since 2010, the UK has reduced its CO₂ emissions by a quarter: 50% more than any other G20 country. And in 2017 the UK cut more CO₂ than the rest of the EU27 put together. That was under Theresa May and the Conservatives. Yes, the very same Theresa May the striking children were calling to be fucked. Charmers, aren’t they?

In fact the real thrust of the Socialist Worker assisted kiddy-strike was laid bare in their chants ‘Fuck Theresa May’ and ‘Tories out’ oh and ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn’. And many banners read ‘System Change not Climate Change’. The news media delighted in broadcasting lisping infants reading out emotive copied-out essays, but this was no cuddly attempt to bring people together and heal the planet; it was a naked and blatant manipulation of malleable minds.

The left have long argued for children to be given the vote and the far left have absolutely no compunction over weaponising the gullible. They do it with old people, with poor people, with black people, with muslims; they lie to them and tell them how badly they are done by under the hated Tories and then promise to magically tax the country to a standstill to somehow make it all better. The truth of course, is that the UK government record is exemplary in comparison to most of the rest of the world, but the truth has no traction here.

And the truth behind this irresponsible action is that kids were used as a political human shield for the only real aim of the hard left, which is to hold power. Forever. In their warped thinking the great socialist revolutions of the past only failed because of the frailty of corrupt leadership. In their new Utopia without the threat of ever being deposed by the demos, they will finally shape the world in their version of Marx’s image. Religions hold sway over people by telling them comforting tales and damning warnings; extreme socialism does the same.

Socialist worker? Biggest oxymoron in politics.

For my generation it was the threat of nuclear Armageddon. Today it seems climate change is the preferred cover. In either case the inconvenient truth is that children, who have only recently discovered the truth about the Tooth Fairy and Father Christmas, are too easily manipulated by the shiny baubles and gewgaws of Socialist Santa and his demonic elves and Friday's so-called strike was a prime example of how easily emotions can defeat facts. Still think we should let children vote?

Jihadi-Waddy

“Let's go for a little walk” sang 70s pop combo Showaddywaddy, “Under the moon of love”. So off went the so-called ISIS brides for a little walk into Syria, except they went under a blood moon, for reasons that were the opposite of love. Today there is much misnomeric talk of ‘hate crime’ for expressing opinions. Whether out of ignorance or antipathy, hate is an inappropriately intense adjective, but to those who went to wage war against the world true hatred was at the heart of their devotions.

Now poor, duped Shamima Begum wants to come ‘home’. Home, to the country she left in order to support an ideology for which the utter destruction of the west was front and foremost on the wish list. Home, where the hated kuffar live, where one day her religious cult seeks to establish supremacy over all. “She was only a child when she went” say her supporters and white-guilt-ridden apologists. Yet she is reported to have said she wasn’t fazed by the sight of severed heads; they were the severed heads of those whose only ‘crime’ was not to submit to islam.

In her ‘community’ a white British girl who had multiple pregnancies in her teens would have been held as an exemplar of the worthlessness of the non-believer. Such supposed trash were exploited in their thousands. They were raped and traded for sex by Begum’s muslim brothers and nobody cared. The agencies which should have protected them shamefully turned their back for fear of offending muslims. Offending. Not raping, beating, maiming or beheading muslims. Not driving them out and rendering them homeless and stateless and utterly dependent on charity. Simply to avoid offending them.

Now, despite Sajid Javid’s bold words of defiance we know there is every chance that she could be quietly returned to the UK where she will be afforded, even as a war criminal, a dignity and sympathy denied the many victims of the doctrine for which she advocates. Yes she will be questioned, possibly she will be jailed, but with such a high profile there will be human rights vultures watching the authorities’ every move for signs of abuse. She has said she doesn’t regret what she did; she should be begging for mercy, not assuming she has any right to return. But if she returns the story won’t stop there.

Moors murderer Myra Hindley was arguably the same, caught up by a romantic dalliance with a psychotic lover; a mere follower of evil, not evil herself but misled. Lord Longford advocated for years that she had changed her ways and no matter that she was locked away, she has still not left the public consciousness. What’s to say a repatriated Begum won’t become some kind of high profile martyr to the cause? Some argue that mercy is what separates ‘us’ from ‘them’, that forgiving and showing compassion is more powerful than punishing.

But what do we gain from being the bigger man here if she brings her haughty arrogance and disdain for the non-islamic world back to the world’s recruiting ground for jihad? Far better, surely, that she is forgotten. Let the world she travelled to absorb her and bury her. Showaddywaddy also reprised ‘Three Steps to Heaven’, but there is really only one. Let’s leave her where she is and let her complete her jihad by taking that first step.

Texas

The other day, I tweeted, in reply to another tweet about humans and climate change : “A smaller and more cohesive population, better using resources, with increased productivity could enjoy great prosperity and actively SHRINK its economy and thus its impact.” After all, if we are the cause, fewer of us can only be a good thing. On the same basis if the cause of wars, as it so often is, is dispute over territory, then fewer challengers must, logically, reduce the pressure to compete for space.

From a mass migration perspective, too, the invaded indigenous people of advanced nations are justifiably worried by what they see as an invasive horde with disparate beliefs, disrupting the balance of society and sparking off more conflict. Wherever you look, more people than a landscape can comfortably support leads to strife, which is why people of means often move out to less densely populated areas to de-stress, recover their sanity and, well, just breathe more easily.

No matter how you assess the Earth’s resources, they are undeniably finite and so there must come a time, unless you somehow curb the proliferation of humanity, when there simply isn’t enough. Unfortunately, there are some who will repeat the old trope that the whole world population will fit into Texas/Wales/Isle of Wight, etc. Sure, yeah, right... if they stand quietly and don’t move around too much. It’s a stupid argument, trotted out by the sort of person who believes that the world will end the day after Brexit; repeated by the sort of mind which accepts without question something they overheard in the pub.

When I suggested that this notion was a crock, ignoring as it does, the need for roads and fields and schools and businesses and houses and ... the simple sanity of being able to get away from the throng, the response was: “Rubbish....do the maths...the whole world easily fits into Texas...stop believing the lies and propaganda...it’s all designed to control us and have us infighting.” Wow, that level of tinfoil-hattery needs a response. So, I did the maths:

The area of Texas is 695,662 km² and a square kilometre contains a million square metres, so we have 695,662,000000 m² to share among 7.7 billion people as of the end of 2018 (and that number is growing daily). That gives us 90 m² per person, which equates to a square of side 9.5 metres for us each to stand in, or about the floor area of a small three-bedroomed British town house. Of course, at least half of Texas is desert, so that’s an issue. And deserts are notoriously short of water and fertile soil, but I’m sure all of this can be solved by exploiting all of the rest of the planet to support us. (Although it is going to be one hell of an ambitious engineering project to shift all that water.)

Is 90 m² enough? Well, it turns out that studies by organisations like the Global Footprint Network estimate that, globally, it takes 2.7 hectares to support the average world citizen. That is 27,000 m² or 300 times the space you’ll get in Texas. And that is a global average. If you look at western lifestyles, we need twice or three times that to live as we do. A lot of people have concluded that we are already consuming more than the planet can reasonably provide and this can only be obtained by further reducing the life chances of the majority.

Where's Wally? In Texas... with everybody else.

Of course, this raises all sorts of issues about how we intend to carry on in the future. We should certainly get better at food production, but there are already fears that soil fertility is decreasing. We could maybe shift away from meat eating. And as robotics and artificial intelligence improves we can probably do more with less space. But the voracious appetite of humans for, well, stuff, means that demand for land is unlikely to reduce significantly.

Nobody who is serious doubts that the size of the human population places huge demands on the planet and as our numbers increase those demands become more injurious. Yes, we can get better and yes we could impose limits on what people can expect from their lives, but isn’t this limitation exactly what drives third world migrants to seek the excesses of the first? I mean, you may wish to stand shoulder to shoulder with the whole world in Texas... but you would have to be mad to want to.

Bare

Madness takes many forms and many are taken by madness in their dotage, throwing off their clothes and wandering naked in the street, much to the anguish of all those who care about them. Rending garments is an oft-invoked cypher for distress. Wandering unclothed in the rain is how many deranged movie victims have been portrayed; it is practically a meme for madness. Naturism is something a few oddballs indulge in away from the prying eyes of voyeurs. Stripping for money has become almost respectable these days, so ubiquitous is it, but de-robing for protest loses its potency after the first mild-shock encounter.

So what do we make of the Naked Britain woman? The daft doctor Victoria Bateman (and what a name for a rabid feminist) is bating men by getting her kit off and ... well, what? In her own mind she thinks she has a worthwhile message but she intones her script like a robot preaching at rather slow children. She has meaningless graffiti scrawled on her flesh ‘Brexit leaves Britain naked’ it says, but the only naked thing here is her and her obsession... and she is clearly stark-staring mad.

Bateman’s muff has trended on Twitter, her tits are all over TV and her snatch is on snapchat

People click the links, or go to see her on stage out of a sense of voyeuristic horror – she is a freak show, the kind of crazy lady they used to stone and drive out of the village. Quite what she hopes to achieve, apart from frightening the children, is unclear. Yes, she’s against Brexit but so what; the entire establishment is against Brexit and they have made their point more forcibly while fully clothed. In fact you might even conclude that Sticky Vicky’s baring all actually detracts from the message.

She is a Cambridge economics ‘fellow’, which nomenclature almost certainly leaves her hopping mad, but nobody is interested in her economics. She may be in favour of the laissez faire free market or planned, centralised control, but who knows and frankly who cares? She just wants to wave her angry vagina at everybody. She stripped off during her interview with Jon Humphrys a couple of days ago – a perfect example of radio’s real value – and she has challenged Jacob Rees Mogg to debate sans ensemble, to what purpose is unclear, as all of her interviews invariably go much like this:

·         Why are you naked?

·         MEN OPPRESS WOMEN

·         Yes, but did you need to take your...

·         BREXIT LEAVES BRITAIN NAKED

·         Surely, though, you can make the same point fully clothe...

·         MEN ALWAYS CONTROL WOMEN’S BODIES

·         Well, not yours, it seems because

·         DON’T OPPRESS ME

·         Why do you think people will listen if you appear naked?

·         BREXIT LEAVES BRITAIN NAKED

Her body... not that WE get much choice.

Well, she wanted the attention and she’s got it, but for all the wrong reasons. Nobody is listening to a word she says, but she’s lucky, really. Corporal Klinger in M*A*S*H couldn’t get posted home because his catch 22 was the real deal – to feign madness was clearly sane. Cambridge University has enough nutters that they won’t bat an eyelid at batty Bateman’s body, but for many an employer, to go about flaunting your flabbies in public would be bringing them into disrepute. And that is the bare truth of it all.

Woe and thrice woe!

So, following a catastrophic, dead-end, crashing-out, cliff edge no-deal, Billy-no-mates Brexit... what then? Will bodies line the roads? Will rickety-legged children hobble on their crutches to sell matches in the dim-lit, cobbled streets of London? Will pestilence rise up and take the halt and the sick? And will dark predators roam the alleys looking to sell the last few healthy infants into slavery in Africa?

Under the listless, sickly sun of perpetual winter, the drizzle of acid rain will slowly erode the steel structures of modernity and revert Britain to a nation of medieval hovel-dwellers, preferably with pungent animal dung as the primary building material. After all, it’s what they deserve, those who dared to dream of freedom. They didn’t have a plan to leave. They didn’t know what voting for Brexit would mean. They have brought us down; they have killed Britannia.

This is the remainers’ wet dream, a world of ruin and defeat, of squalor and hopelessness and all because of Brexit. They repeatedly told us we voted to destroy our children’s future, and come April they are damn well determined to be proven right. So instead of accepting the reality, which is that Brexit will touch few lives with any great significance and some lives in minor ways, for most people it will be no worse than changing jobs, moving house, going through puberty, getting married, or simply having to accept a new form for submitting your expenses.

The everyday lives of probably over 95% of the population will not change at all. But there will be some significant changes. Those who dared – despite the beatings – to vote to leave will be more determined than ever to make a go of it. Some will really prosper, but all will feel a sense of pride, of belonging, of ownership of the country once again. Brexit isn’t a setback, it’s an opportunity. The EU doesn’t want to play? We’ll change the game; it’s our ball, after all and we can put our goalposts down wherever we wish.

No deal is pretty much assured...

Remainers will watch, miserable, from the side-lines, as plucky little Britons do what we have always done – mustn’t grumble, make the best of it and crack on. In time the majority will convert, or at least shrug and realise there is no point in their futile rejection of facts – actual facts, not the imagined facts they tout today. And in the end those who will not accept the democratic will of the majority will wither away, leave or retreat into obscurity. Do this right and we will leave the EU, we will also leave behind the whiny bitches of Remain.

Donald and Guy

Let’s be clear, there are some first class pricks on the side of Brexit. At times I cringe when I read their ungrammatical, misspelled, guttural rants in AllCaps on social media. I don’t really want them on the same side as me, validating as they so often do, the absolute conviction of Remainers that only far-right, uneducated racist thugs voted to leave their precious European Union. Swastika facial tattoos, skin-headed, vest-wearing bigots with IQs lower than their single digit number of teeth are no help to the cause.

But then out come the big guns and gargantuan gobs of the enemy. Yes, the enemy; what else do you call those who would deny the right of a supposed democracy to enact a democratic decision? How else can you possibly label those who are determined that this country must not have the freedom to make its own choices? Against a majority of those who dared vote to leave despite the fierce condemnation, personal abuse and shrieking hostility Remainers still insist that they alone had the knowledge and intellect to participate.

There are those on the right, of course, who voted to remain, but overall the in/out division seems to be broadly on left/right ideological lines. It appears to be a moral high ground issue; in order to join a leftist cause – green causes, global warming, anti-Trump trumpeting, Antifa, anti-Zionism, open borders, etc – you must first render yourself incapable of grasping nuanced argument. Don the cloak of moral superiority and your confirmation bias becomes unassailable. You lack any empathy with those who disagree and refuse to accept the consistent replies to your insistent, repeated, questioning howls of ‘but why?’

Even when the wolf you keep crying about fails to appear you keep on crying and look ever harder to see proof for your cause even in the most damning evidence against. Brexit is a fine example. Many Labour supporters who voted to leave have never been of the left, espousing views on family, nationhood and personal wealth which run directly contrary to the manifesto of the party they vote for... but that just proves what ignorant bigots they must be, doesn’t it? We tell you the EU is not the close friend you wish to believe and then, when EU leaders demonstrate their contempt for Brexit voters, you cheer them on.

If anybody missed yesterday’s proclamations from the dynamic duo of Donald Tusk and Guy Verhofstadt it went like this:

Donald: I've been wondering what that special place in hell looks like, for those who promoted #Brexit, without even a sketch of a plan how to carry it out safely.

Guy: Well, I doubt Lucifer would welcome them, as after what they did to Britain, they would even manage to divide hell *smiley face*

Meet your masters...

The arrogant bastards. We weren’t cajoled, coerced or conned into voting to leave; we did it in the full certainty that, whatever the cost, an independent Britain was better than being chained to and following the lead of the EU political project. Tusk’s derision illustrated perfectly what we voted against. For my part I’m glad we're all going to hell. Can you imagine the collective misery of the alternative if that's where all the self-righteous Remainers are ending up?