Cry Racist!

I don’t know about you, but there are few things I enjoy more than being roundly castigated for my racist recent past. I ought to be thoroughly ashamed for the part I played in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and trust me I have worked on this, but try as I might I just can’t remember what I was doing on the night I question. I know with a little help I could be assisted to recall my evil wrongdoing and obviously I am grateful for the daily input of David Lammy who, as the young child of a captive slave from the Ivory Coast had to grow up on poverty on a Jamaican sugar plantation, beaten daily for the simple crime of having the wrong skin colour.

Apparently, every single one of my ancestors owned slaves and every single ancestor of people like David _{[property-of]} Lammy were themselves slaves. I know this because I have been educated, as must we all, to be thoroughly ashamed of our direct involvement in this crime against humanity. Some of you disgusting white people may try to claim that slavery was rife amongst the darker-hued races long before your forebears muscled in on the act, but we now know this to be fake history. All crimes against liberty have only ever been committed by pale-faced invaders. If only my memory hadn’t been ‘whitewashed’ by evil, specifically English, indoctrinators.

So it is just as well – and not before time – that the saintly Jeremy Corbyn intends (when he is Prime Minister by Christmas, which will also be banned) to introduce a comprehensive programme of education for the very young. He wants to catch them while their minds are at the pinnacle of incisive reasoning, so that he can imbue then with the truth. And the truth is that white skin is shameful… and that it is wrong to judge people by the colour of their skin. Oh and that massive reparations must be made to all the billions of current and past slaves, who, in the spirit of the age will simply have to self-declare their ownership to be eligible.

For the record and to claim my place as first in the queue for the coming show trials, I wish to unburden myself. If you want evidence of my crimes I confess I possess the full set – old, male, pale and getting staler by the day – so I have no excuse; bang to rights, guv. Every sin that ever there was may be laid at my door and I have no remedy in law for I have white privilege, a privilege which, even if I fail to recognise it, future generations will line up to condemn.

This is, of course, utter tosh. In the woke world there is no sin other than white sin and no virtue other than what the noble non-whites bring. In the bubbles of academe, the media and government, diversity is only ever a force for good. But ask those on whom it is imposed, because in the formerly white inner city estates diversity only ever means the replacement of the indigenous by a dominant new monoculture, which tolerates no others.

Naturally, should anybody ever point this out, the instant accusation is that they must be racists. Your kids are being beaten by black gangs? You racist pig. You’re not allowed to walk your dog past the mosque? Then even your dog is racist. The ‘R’ word has been weaponised but it has also been overused to the point of ridicule. So, racists of the world unite; you have nothing to fear but the misinterpretation of your  fear. And in the end it may well be that racism is the one instinct that saves the world's white minority. No wonder they are so keen to drum it out of us.

An Act of Faith

Who remembers the Ronco advertisements from the nineteen seventies and beyond? Miracle gadgets at giveway prices that invariably didn’t work anything like as claimed and were quickly relegated to the shed or the loft, icons of an age of innocence and naivety. You can almost imagine future archaeologists trying to decode these symbols from a time of false hope, just as they have done with the totems of ancient religious beliefs.

If Ronco were to return today the denizens of the internet would be taken for rides every bit as precarious as those of yesteryear. Social media would be awash with tales of disaster visited on the gullible, swiftly followed by merciless mockery. “Who would fall for that?” would go the cry, only to fall silent when the mocker was, in turn, taken in by another, different-yet-still-the-same scam. YouTube would have a ball.

Even when you knew that the chances were your Ronco all-in-one jar-opener, dishwasher and personal groomer was bound to fail you still parted with your hard-earned in an act of faith that this time it would be different. And much like the holy church of Ronco, religions require the wilful abandonment of rational thought; logic and learned experience go out of the window as, with beatific smiles, we open the packaging to reveal the next disappointment, yet keep the fixed smile beaming as we vigorously defend our choice against all the evidence.

Perhaps a moment of quiet reflection before hitting the ‘buy’ button would be prudent, a short examination of reality. Why do I want this, and will it really do what it says it will do? Much better in the long run to stick with what you know, but the promise of something better, more miraculous, more satisfying urges you to suspend your critical thinking skills and buy yet another potato peeler that just doesn’t peel potatoes.

So, what makes more sense; a belief that government should have as little impact on your everyday life as possible, should leave you to make your own decisions while protecting you from the worst excesses of egregious humanity, or a government which will intervene in every nook and cranny of your existence in return for fanciful promises of riches in the afterlife? Because to believe in capitalism requires only to accept that the world does not owe you a living, while to believe in socialism requires an enormous act of blind faith.

Just as with all religions, with all cults, with all outlandish fictions, in order to accept socialism as a viable system you have to suspend disbelief and reject the evidence to embrace a narrative so convoluted, so contradictory, so hypocritical that it would require the abandonment of all reason to adopt. Were the current Labour Party a Netflix box set most viewers would have ditched it after season one.  Those who continued to watch, who bought the tee shirts, who dressed up to attend conventions would be labelled as dangerous extremists and placed on various lists.

What seems most likely?

Once again, William of Ockham comes to the rescue. Ask yourself what seems most likely; that government is powerless to oversee every aspect of your life and it is up to you to make the best of it. Or that there is an all-seeing, omnipotent, Magic Granddad in the sky who can make the heavens rain money and bring freedom and happiness and prosperity to all… if only you will bend your knee at his altar. Marx said that religion was the opiate of the people. Between you and me, I reckon he was on drugs.

Pocket Full of Kryptonite

The spin doctors are weaving their webs everywhere. As fast as one side of the political contest magics up some miracle offering the other (for there are, really, only two) hauls out the green kryptonite to render it powerless. More money for the NHS? Pah, this barely goes to redress the balance following years of Tory cuts! Making society work for everybody? Yes, but it works best for Labour officials. Raising the National Insurance threshold to help the poorest? How will that help those who are too poor to even pay it?

Like every election before it we are – now the manifesti are finally published – engaged in a battle for supremacy between a motley collection of sub-heroes whose powers are nullified when the searing searchlight of truth is shone on them. Every utterance, every pledge, every ‘ambition’ withers under the light of inquiry, to be revealed as yet another false promise. Why do they do it? They can no more resist it than Superman can decline to save the planet. And everywhere the opposition’s Lex Luthers lie in wait ready to humiliate them.

Ian Lavery was banging on this morning, in ‘that’ accent, about re-ordering society to benefit the workers, but every such endeavour has previously failed because Labour believe in a zero sum game where in order to enrich poor people we have to ‘enpoor’ rich people. The trouble is the rich have their own personal supplies of kryptonite and deploy it at will to render impotent the powers of Taxman. Meanwhile the workers, who formerly gravitated towards Labour instinctively realise that their natural ally is any administration which will just let them work.

Let’s get the nation back to prosperity without the negative influence of the morass of confected workers’ rights which, once you have dealt with sick pay, holidays, a bit of maternity allowance and the right not to be exploited are as comprehensive as they need to be. Let’s ditch the ever-expanding suite of legislation that seeks to govern how we think and let’s stop giving every tiny voice a megaphone. Let’s recognise difference, accept it, accommodate it, work with it, but reserve the right to mock it, not endow it with super powers that prevent all criticism.

Let’s stop spinning every drawback as an opportunity and every entrepreneur as an evil exploiter of human capital. Let’s, usher in an age of honesty where the ordinary voter has a real choice between candidates who have been genuinely clear (not a politician’s ‘I have been clear’) about what they stand for and would be mortified if found out in a lie. Let’s, um, call a spade a spade and elect representatives who will do likewise. And let them stand on their honour or fall on their swords.

There are no super heroes here...

As it is, the disgraceful, dishonourable architects of Britain’s crooked, broken society are busily concocting illusions of smoke and mirrors to entice, but also to obfuscate and deceive. The artifice of representative democracy has been shown to be a villain’s charter, allowing MPs to be elected on one agenda, but serve another, to be of the people but for another people entirely. This festival of duplicity, this fête of fraud is not the open democracy which was so hard fought for. Under Westminster a humming noise is heard. it is Cromwell spinning in his unmarked grave.

It's Debatable

I didn’t watch the leaders’ ‘debate’ last night because I’ve already seen far more than I want to see of spin-doctored, spruced-up talking heads spouting garbage written by party apparatchiks and tutored by image consultants in how to avoid the pitfalls of the hit-and-miss pseudoscience of body language. A dismal platoon of ‘experts’ will be on parade during the day to earn their fees by regurgitating sixth form psychology about gestures, smiles, turns to camera and handshakes. None of it is at all relevant to the everyday politics that actually affects us.

I want to hear far more from candidates such as Lee Anderson, a former Labour councillor now standing for the Conservatives in Ashfield. I want to hear how Momentum so repulsed this former miner that he switched from tribal Labour to the hated Tories. I also want to hear more about his outspoken views on dealing with nuisance tenants. And I want to know how his views go down, not among the cognoscenti in Parliament, but among the beleaguered people who have to live alongside those tenants.

Because these issues, real issues that intrude on people’s actual lives, are repeatedly ducked by governments. Or, if solutions are proposed, they are attacked by the soft-bellied opposition parties banging on about human-bloody-rights. Already, Mr Anderson’s remarks have been condemned as ‘targeting the vulnerable’, entrenching division and showing a lack of empathy towards those he seeks to represent. Really? Has anybody asked them? I would suggest that were the voices of those he wants to represent ever heard they would be raised in a cheer for common sense.

There are some very real, very pressing issues driving a wedge through what I hesitate to call our society. We have violent crime, rampant disorder, a disrespect for the law and an arrogance in some that borders on insurrection. We have become uncivil, suspicious, cynical and angry at the toothless measures deployed. Ordinary working people, the vast majority of the population, don’t want to ‘reach out’ or understand, or show empathy for those who refuse to fit in. We want correction and punishment, swift and effective justice.

Instead we are lectured by amateur sociologists and social philosophers about what a wonderful, vibrant country we live in and if only we could all just embrace diversity and rejoice in difference, we would somehow evolve into the egalitarian society the chattering classes imagine we all want. Well, we all don’t. Unlike the indoctrinated drones of the parliamentary echo chamber we don’t hear reassuring voices about how throwing money at ‘studies’ will somehow reveal solutions. We simply experience the misery those 'solutions' inevitably create,

He lies? Don't they all?

The people already know the remedies, but the politician don’t have the guts for them. The people know that equality is a crock, but it is a holy grail to western leaders, hungry for the adoration of their own kind. The people want leadership, not a cosy consensus for yet more pandering to difference. The people know that diversity is often a weakness, not a strength as touted by those with the most to gain from the non-jobs it produces. The people want some honest, down-and-dirty, get-it-done politics. Not pretend fucking debates which just make us hate politicians even more.

Politics as usual

Even as the poll ratings tumble, supporters of the Brexit Party are bravely clinging to the flotsam of their mantra: ‘change politics for good’. It’s a great idea, it is sorely needed. And it is never going to happen. The contest, such as it is, is between the two parties which have alternately held power throughout my lifetime. Two parties which currently seem to be trying their best to not get elected. Every manifesto announcement is palpably false; every pledge, every commitment undeliverable.

This is because politics as it has become is a centrist mêlée in which neither side can gain the upper hand and the country always loses. The pundits are saying different, that we have a choice between quite-right and extreme-left, but the reality is that all parties are courting a populist mandate and fighting for the votes of a people long cowed by the spectre of political correctness and afraid of offending. The few dissenting votes cast will go the likes of the Brexit Party and under the first-past-the-post system are likely to fall on fallow ground.

In years gone by we genuinely did have a choice between a socialist, Labour administration whose authoritarian ideals meant they would provide so long as we behaved ourselves and paid our taxes and a more laisse faire Conservatism where we would provide and the government would behave itself.. as long as we paid our taxes. The Liberals, later to morph into the Liberal Democrats would, as is their lot, be the natural repository for the lost votes of those without such strong tribal convictions.

Those who saw themselves bold and different would pledge for the BNP, Cornish separatists or the Monster Raving Loony Party and other fringe rebellions in the certain knowledge that they would never form a government and never influence government policy. But then came UKIP. Nigel Farage, a political force of nature, took a protest movement and brought it national credibility against a barrage of pretty foul play from the establishment to a position where it promised to challenge ‘politics as usual’. And had one elected MP.

This is now, I believe, the fate of The Brexit Party. As much as I and millions of others want to change our politics, we have no model of what that change looks like. For every couch rebel there is also a tribal Labour voter who will return to the socialist fold under Jeremy Corbyn. For every disenfranchised ex-Tory, like me, there will be two who will breathe a sigh of relief that Boris gives them hope of getting their party back.

So, my prediction, for all that it is worth, is a workable Conservative majority under a single elected term Prime Minister, which will muddle through with a form of Brexit that satisfies nobody and then oversee a slow economic recovery just enough to steady the ship. Shortly thereafter, business as usual will see the long knives out again, the EU will come back to savage the Tories and a watered down, post-Corbyn opposition will be all set to let go of the purse strings once more. And so the circle of British political life turns.

Viva la Revolución!

Nigel Farage deserves a peerage, a knighthood at least; what he has done is the closest anybody has ever done in my lifetime to change things. But the disunited might of the entrenched order has done what it always does. The establishment does not tolerate outsiders and one of the ways it quietens their voice is to bring them inside. A Lord Farage would be rendered toothless and regarded as a sell-out, so such an honour would be a poisoned chalice. So what would YOU do? And as for that single Brexit Party MP, it’s going to a cold, lonely few years.

Free as a bird

The party manifestos which have been falling over each other to get airtime are, in the main, packs of unsubstantiated lies. Actually, scrub that; they are composed entirely of unsubstantiated lies. The best that can be said of most manifesto pledges is that they are fanciful and naïve wishful thinking and should be regarded in the light of the referendum, which asked if we wanted to remain in the EU or leave the EU without making it clear that only one choice would ever be acceptable to Parliament.

Political parties, for all their bluster, hate elections because they must knowingly trot out bigger and steamier piles of bullshit than their opponents as the truth is just not sexy enough. It is not sufficient to base claims on your track record in government because if you were a government of fiscal probity everybody hates you for not dishing out enough free stuff; and if you were a government of giveaways everybody hates you because you gave it all to the wrong people.

But who doesn’t like the promise of a better, cheaper tomorrow, even if you have a deep suspicion that tomorrow will never arrive? Labour’s free fibre broadband and internet offer may well be an elephant trap for the Tories – top that, Boris! – but it portends both horror and delight, depending on whether you have been watching the world for the last few decades or not. State-run access to everybody’s online interactions, round the clock, is a totalitarian administration’s wet dream, but, you know, free, right?

If that doesn’t conjure up dystopian visions of 1984 and every post-apocalyptic movie spawned since the dawn of cinema then look around at the world today. China and North Korea are great examples to study. But I’m sure Jeremy Corbyn’s magic free internet will be run on entirely kinder, gentler lines. For sure. Of course. No doubt. But wait, there’s more: Aaron Bastani yesterday opined that should Labour get into government and see a second term they also have ambitions for a publicly owned digital payments system. What could possibly go wrong there?

Then today we get free dentistry. I mean, what’s not to like? For what it’s worth I do believe the state has a role to play in protecting the public from the worst excesses of unrestrained capitalism, but we can’t just lurch from one extreme to the other. Everything has a price; everything has to be paid for somehow and we all know that the burden of payment falls hardest on those with the least. For those at the top it’s only money, but when you have no money the price is freedom. Every time.

People who are considering voting for ‘free stuff’ need to consider the value of choice. The Corbyn/McDonnell/Marx axis is offering a world where you can have any colour you like, as long as it is black. Where the state provides, shortages follow. So, for all their idle chatter about shoring up the rotting hulk of the NHS, waiting times would get longer, medicines would become scarcer and the bed count would shrink, as sure as night follows day. If the government was the only baker, every day we would run out of bread; not from any malign intent but through an ideological inability to allow independent enterprise to pick up the slack.

It's all free, I tell you! 

Likewise, the apparent gift of free access to the all the world’s information will inevitably become free access to some information; information which is deemed suitable and information which does not threaten the government. ‘Approved information’. Because free is not the same as freedom. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln: You can have it all or you can have it for free, but you can’t have it all for free.

Machine Politics

You may have noticed that the political parties (although they are all behaving more like children’s parties; expect jelly and balloons) have launched their manifestos and lo and behold, bribes. Back us and we will spend your children’s future taxes. No, back us and we will mortgage your grandchildren. Ah, but WE will spend so much it will make historians wince. It’s not ‘spending’, as such, it’s ‘investing’. What’s the use of money when there is no planet left to buy? And so on and so forth; it’s going to go for a few weeks.

Education, education and policing and justice and social justice and rights and righting wrongs; it’s the economy, stupid. Oh and Brexit; we will deal with it once and for all. Promise. Trust us; we will deliver. It always amuses me how every party promises to deliver on promises they made before and failed to make good on, often multiple times. The Tories have failed to control immigration, establish order and build a mighty economy. Labour has similarly failed – every time it has tried – to conjure up a land of milk and honey.

I forget quite what the LimpDems stand for, other than not what the country voted for. The Greens just seem to hate humanity in its entirety and if they are brutally honest they would probably start with a cull. (And if I’m honest I think they are onto something there) But in reality, if they can’t slaughter half the population they can at least promise to make all of us thoroughly miserable. Despite all of them we still have just six days to save the NHS, a situation which seems to have endured throughout my sentient life.

Northern Powerhouse, HS2, Bobbies on the beat, a free owl for every child… the cacophony of false hope echoes around the land and probably less than 5% of the electorate even hear it, let alone give a toss. The net result of the steady post-war decline in standards, expectations and trust in power is that nobody with the gift of independent thought believes a single word of what any politician says. They may as well set up stalls and tout for business selling miracle cures. Snake oil salesmen, the lot of them and some of them don’t even realise it, so much like brainwashed automatons have party apparatchiks become.

We need to face up to a simple, inescapable truth, which is that politics as we knew it is a busted flush. The people we vote for are powerless to effect change against the whims of the party machine and if the party abandons the very policies on which they were elected it renders the notion of a free vote equally invalid. If I vote for one party because of their stance on a particular pressing issue, but then that party chooses not to pursue the agenda which got them into power what is the point of democracy? A recurring Soviet joke about the stagnant state was that “they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work”.

Place your 'X' against the candidate of your choice...

When it comes to it, we are just voting machines for equally robotic vote machines which obey the directions of higher authorities. The decisions are not made from the ground up. We pretend to vote and they pretend to represent us. As a result more and more members of the population are detached from the levers of power and rely instead on their real friends and allies – the little people who live in their phones. So why don’t we cut out the middle men, the pointless mounds of quivering flesh who pose as politicians. They say we are entering the age of machines; I say bring on the robots!

Open Season

It’s an election, so it is Farage-bashing season once again. Like others I have had my doubts about the former leader of Ukip, now boss of The Brexit Party but despite part-time pretenders to the title, he is undoubtedly, indisputably Mister Brexit. Without his tenacity and courage we would never have had the binary in/out referendum in 2016. And yes, courage; ask yourself if you could even come close to putting up with the inestimable amounts of sheer bile directed at him.

He has been the butt of the entire leftist canon of comedy for well over a decade. He has been portrayed as a Nazi, a bigot, an islamophobe, a con-man, a fraud and a philanderer among many more equally slanderous and unfounded charges. He has been spat at, egged, milkshaked and threatened with far, far worse. His rallies have been disrupted by violent troublemakers – the knuckle-dragging thugs of Momentum and Antifa and others all too ready to jump to their leftist masters’ commands. His personal integrity has been impugned at every turn and still the man is there, backing what he believes.

The political and media world has been far too ready to take at face value the charges against his motives. He has rich backers; he is a tool of the global elite; he is a vainglorious attention-seeker. The latter may be true, after all a recent study shows narcissism on the increase, but in the absence of any leader with half his following he has some vindication for a certain level of self-validation. But that only makes him exactly the same as the majority of those who have sought office and probably puts him a long way behind Boris Johnson if narcissism were a contest.

Now Nigel has done the apparently unthinkable and has announced that he will not contest a seat in this election. Very wise, I’d say, given the opprobrium that would be heaped upon him, but this isn’t enough to deflect the critical flak. Some are even calling him a coward, saying he wants to wreck Brexit, saying that a vote for his party is a vote for Corbyn. This is the dark work election strategists do – frame your opponent as anything but what he really is. If he says it’s red, concoct a reason why that is in some way a condemnation of his very soul, even if, when you actually look, it really is red.

Use whatever fits your own narrative; attack the man, not the ball. It seems that nobody who is against him has the intellectual capacity to entertain for even a second that he is sincere, dedicated and true to his mission. Damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. If he stands he will be charged as pursuing personal ambition, not standing he is portrayed as running away. The big noise right now is that he is in some way acting against Brexit and some fantasists have suggested that this was the plan all along; that he has been bought off by shadowy forces.

Theories abound and dark conspiracies are being dreamed up and promulgated. The Russians, naturally have a hand in it, as do all the people accused of backing Farage over the years. Clandestine alliances have been formed, broken and reformed in a matter of hours. Every political pundit has an opinion and none of them are favourable. This election is about more than just Brexit, say the parties, but it isn’t. It isn’t at all.

Give the man some credit

It isn’t about the economy, nor the environment as Andrew Marr insisted yesterday. It isn’t about immigration, education or any of the things governments usually interfere in. This election is about one thing and one thing only and on this one issue, no matter what you think of the man himself, you have to, surely, give Farage credit for understanding the EU. If he wants to torpedo the PM’s withdrawal agreement, imagine for a second that he has good reason. And if you can’t bring yourself to see one honest thing in his actions; if you are so bound to your ideological programming, just ask yourself, would you trust Boris Johnson?

Literarily Wordless

I have been struck over the last week with how an inability to express oneself can hamper you, not only in the pursuit of higher ambition, but in ordinary, everyday life. Some - many, perhaps - are content to exist in a state of ignorant bliss, but plenty are frustrated when they know what they want to say but are not equipped with a suitable armoury of literary sidearms with which to engage the enemy. Literacy is truly the cornerstone of personal development.

My trainee electrician candidates have just taken a relatively simple examination. Some questions are numbers related, which is disadvantageous enough for anybody blighted by a standard British state education, but the majority require candidates to explain principles which, for some, presents a near-insurmountable obstacle. I find that students for whom English is a second language manage where the British born struggle. How did we get to such a parlous, precarious state?

The where-we’re-were and their-there-they’re conundrum is just the tip of an iceberg of incompetence where_[were?] the correct form is the exception rather than the rule. Punctuation is either non-existent or entirely random, following generations of teaching that spelling, punctuation and grammar can be brushed aside because the context will yield comprehension. But what can you make of the following, where the question asks “Explain how the split-phase effect is achieved in an induction start single-phase motor”?

“The induction start single phase motor uses an induction affect_[sic] to course_[sic] a split phase effect when starting in a single phase motor starting to make the make_[sic] the split phase motor run as an induction motor when it starts in star but uses the split to make induction turn the motor when it starts”

It goes on, but at no point does it begin to answer the question and it is not entirely clear that the writer realises this. Maybe it’s a bluff in the hope that a marker will see some key words and award some credit, but it is sadly not atypical. But why is it happening at all? It cannot be that, as a former leading world nation, we are unable to educate our young sufficiently to be capable of understanding the issues and making valuable contributions to our society beyond being grunt economic units.

It give credence to theories that it is deliberate – keep them dumb, stunt their ability to question and reason so they accept whatever bullshit they are fed. And if they ever try to be heard, render their arguments unintelligible. Then flood the country with under-paid foreign labour and call the locals racist if they object. Hammer home the message that it is we, the inbred itinerants who are the problem, even when it is clear we are not. When some try to rebel, say that ‘populism’ (democracy) is the same as Nazism, that the UK looks like 1930s Germany, that we are fomenting civil war…

But what of those who are educated and who have made successful careers for themselves; those who are beyond the influence of shameful labels? How do you render their voices impotent? Easy; frame success as unfairness. Label as millionaires those who have worked all their lives and spent their money wisely. Claim they conspire to back the forces of capitalism, which seeks to grind the poor into ever finer dust. Did anybody mention Corbyn?

In the war of words, you first have to disarm your enemy. Hell, it’s even more effective if you also disarm your own side. Then you can mobilise mobs of chanting goons who will endlessly repeat meaningless slogans, no matter how ridiculous they sound. And those who oppose you will be reduced to slinging back equally ill-founded arguments whose barbs will not stick to the tough hides of your illiterate army. And this is what passes for political debate these days? There are no words.

Things that go bump

If you have been wondering – I know you have – whatever happened to Dan Brown since the madcap Da Vinci Code days, fear not. He has apparently found work drafting Jeremy Corbyn’s election launch speech. Filled with foreboding and riddled with demons, witches, ghoulies and bogeymen, Hallowe’en was the most appropriate day of the year to attempt to fill biddable young minds with the spectre of world domination by shadowy cabals. If his plan is to scare kids into voting for lifelong servitude to the state he has wasted no time in entertaining even the tiniest glimmer of reality.

But it’s okay, everybody, since that desperate, elite-bashing frenzy the attention of the high priests of outrage has turned to their favourite Guy Fawkes figure of all. Donald Trump. People are entirely at liberty and quite within their rights to despise the orangutan-haired 45^th president; the most comical White House occcupant in history. But in their haste to condemn, how completely do they reveal their nastier side. Again, very Hallowe’en.

But, but, they insist, Brexiteers sneered at Barack Obama’s calculated, invited, deliberate intervention in the referendum campaign, so how can they defend Trump? I didn’t hear anybody defending Trump. The people we voted against at the referendum, the self-satisfied, smug, superior guardians of the apparent new world order are very quick to see a threat where none exists. Everybody sees Trump as a joke, but some of us understand why he was elected. His comments to Nigel Farage last night were nothing new and were probably far from calculated; just Trumping from the hip as usual.

Besides, Jeremy Corbyn’s vision is a true recipe for disaster and I happen to think that – possibly accidentally – The Donald is spot on. A new communist Britain, for that is exactly what JC is proposing, would be a horrible place to live. His fanciful tale of elites and secretive organisations colluding to keep people poor demonstrates a woeful ignorance of how capitalism works. Poor people can’t consume and without consumption the advanced world would be like… well it would be like Russia, pre-enlightenment. (Or some might just say ‘like Russia’.)

Rob the rich, Jezzer? You have to catch them first. As is pretty clear and as has been demonstrated, if you go after the people who - despite all his protestations – actually pay ALL the net tax, they will use their resources to put themselves out of your reach. If you penalise success which, however much he says otherwise, is exactly what a Labour government would do, you end up with mediocrity and rent-seeking. If you drive out those who can, you end up with those who can’t… and won’t.

But how nice this kind, caring, gentler politics sounds if all your life you have been told fairy tales about wicked old witches, goblins and rapacious, baby-eating giants, plucking the food from the mouths of downtrodden workers and building poisonous, polluting factories to enslave the masses and keep them down. How right it seems, if you are told that ‘the rich’ fear nothing more than they fear paying their taxes, that we should squeeze them until the pips squeak. How fair does it sound that children should be allowed to have a say on who governs their future?

Momentum – Labour’s brownshirts – have wasted no time in embarking on a mass assault on the consciousness of the young and the frail, the left-behind, the malcontents. If they get their way instead of the country being run by those best able to do it, it will be run by those with a track record of appealing to the least educated, able and industrious. If you want a story about things that go bump in the night, under Labour the economy would do just that.