Trust in me?

2020 was the year in which you discovered how little you knew people from whom you might previously have sought counsel. It was a year of conflict, aggressive at times, and a year in which many revealed the reason why communism and fascism and religion has ensnared millions via the medium of repeating obvious lies until they become self-evident truths. And I have never known such a relentless onslaught of lies as waged by the Black Lives Matter ‘movement’ and its willing white slaves.

Eminent institutions which have never taken a political stance suddenly discovered slaver skeletons in their closets and prostrated themselves at the feet of the black militias. One influencer after another vied with each other to see who could abase themselves the most in a competition to signal their deep shame at having the wrong colour skin. The only lasting effect, however, will be to ingrain a deeper sense of mistrust of each other, a situation which will most deeply and negatively affect those it pretends to champion.

But another source of mistrust has overwhelmed the national discourse for three-quarters of this year and at least another quarter of the year to come. Ordinarily, people clamour for their governments to protect their health, but this particular pandemic has been seized upon by peddlers of the most outlandish portents of doom. Piecing together the parts of different jigsaws, some of them hundreds of years old, they have terrified people into believing they are to become the robotic slaves of an evil empire.

The disjointed logic of the Great Reset theorists and Covid-deniers is never doubted by the eager acolytes of global conspiracists, even when the stark contrasts of fact and fantasy are laid bare. Every effort of reason to allay fears is glibly subsumed into the evil plot – that’s just what they want you to think! It’s hard enough to keep a surprise party secret, let alone a half-century old plan to turn human beings into batteries for the matrix. Good grief, some of these people are going to need serious long-term care after the apocalypse fails to materialise.

It is impossible to summarise in one place all the threads that have been woven together in a dot-joining exercise worthy of Bletchley Park, or the decoding of the Rosetta Stone, but my god, it’s as if each conspiracy sect is determined to outdo all the others – and no side trusts any other side… with anything. For a species which relies so heavily on cooperation to achieve great things this is a major blow to our credibility. I only hope the aliens will still want to probe us after it’s all died down.

And talking of dying down, one would imagine that the opponents of Brexit, in the face of all the hostility shown towards the UK during the final countdown to our independence (and I still find it hard to believe that they don’t grasp the importance of self-determination) would finally be accepting reality. But no, they’ll have none of it. Here we are on the actual final day of Brexit and some of them are still refusing to accept their multiple losses and be gracious in defeat. Mistrust between Remain and Leave will last a generation.

So what great truth did 2020 reveal to us? That we can all pull together in a crisis to find a way through? That we can put aside our differences to find common cause? That the character of a person is more important than the colour of their skin? That the much admired Blitz Spirit is alive and well and living in London? Not a bit of it. If 2020 is going to be remembered for anything it will be the year when the ugly truth of humanity prevailed over the myths of our compassion, ingenuity and godlike omnipotence.

We all want our heads banging together. Here’s hoping for a better 2021 in every way.

Arise!

The Yanks – well some of them – do like to fawn over a Sir, or a Dame, a Duchess, or a Lord. Despite being decoupled from the British honours system for two and a half centuries and, as a republic, being avowedly anti-monarchy, a title conferred by royalty nevertheless holds a certain cachet. The Oscars ceremony alone attracts knights of their former realm like wasps round a jam sandwich and which hostess doesn’t glow when introducing a Sir of stage and screen at an exclusive gathering?

But that is them. Over here, where all the ermine is bestowed and the honours dubbed by Her Maj herself, or her direct delegates the honours system has become a joke of long standing. Fifty years ago, we scoffed as knighthoods were handed out like confetti in the New Year’s list; why, we would ask, would you confer what was once a recognition for a lifetime of fealty and honourable service to a kid who kicked a football, or a hoofer from the stage?

People who have earned great fame and wealth through their talents and good fortune could maybe earn such a slap on the back had they spent a great deal of their personal fortune and dedicated much of their life to helping others. But bitching about how hard it was making it in Formula One because you were black, when nobody had even noticed save for yourself, hardly qualifies. Does it, Lewis?

Similarly, using a public platform to pressure the government you don’t like into doing what your own preferred flavour of government had never even considered should be no basis for such an honour. Yes, an act of bravery in saving the monarch’s life in the face of grave danger, or giving your life in battle, defending the realm, would justify recognition for one so young. But kicking a football, having been generously sponsored from the age of 8 doesn’t come close to the test most people would deem appropriate, does it Marcus?

Treading the boards for half a century, supporting charities, generously giving of your personal time to carry out good deeds? Yes, absolutely. On retirement after a lifetime serving the royal household without ever giving an interview to the prying press? Why not. Honourably and honestly representing the country as an ambassador over several decades? Seems fair enough. Beginning as an infantryman and rising through the ranks to command a branch of the armed forces? Well, of course.

But many honours are conveyed through nothing other than cronyism. The House of Lords is stuffed by every serving Prime Minister with people who know where the bodies are buried. Minor celebrities whose entire oeuvre amounts to a couple of sitcoms and the regular turning up to the opening of envelopes are recognised, but lifelong philanthropists are side-lined. And far too many complete, impotent nonentities manage to get blinged up; dare I mention Adonis, here?

With all of this in mind it has been a source of considerable pleasure to note that the scheming, lying dirtbag Blair has been (aptly) honour free since he left office as Prime Minister in 2007. The rumour has always been that The Queen herself did not give her consent, but now an inside source is suggesting she will have to relent, in order that subsequent Prime Ministers and others can receive honours they may, or may not truly deserve.

Pretty clear, no?

But why? Why can she not simply pass him over and honour the others as she sees fit? She is Her Majesty, The Queen, after all. And if Blair really is blocking the conferring of knighthoods on others, who might some of these others be? Maybe it is time to democratise the honours system, perhaps by way of Twitter polls. If the example shown above, along with the inventive comments which accompanied it, is indicative, Blair may be waiting some time. And if he does eventually get to take the knee, please let it be a discredited worm like Harry who does the honours. 

On Greasy Poles

In a rare moment of collusion, several colleagues and I chatted this morning about the state of our industry. Structure, people, education and other resources came into play as we swiftly put the world to rights; standard Friday morning fare, really. Without needing to know which industry it is you will nevertheless recognise the symptoms:

Massive waste as projects are embarked on with no chance of success (everybody on the ground floor knows this.) A complete failure to consult the people who eventually must carry out these grand designs, which are inevitably abandoned at some late stage in proceedings. (Everybody on the ground floor could have told them this) Apprentice schemes that completely fail to meet the needs of the industry, which is more, and better quality people on the ground floor.

Enormous salaries are paid to consultants and industry bigwigs who have abandoned honour and contact with the grass roots to climb the greasy pole to self-aggrandisement. Theirs is a world of meetings and self-congratulatory conferences and award ceremonies as they slap each other on the back even as they burn £100 notes. Like most forms of governance the bureaucracy itself soon displaces the original purpose. Once that promotional ladder has been ascended, they live as if in the halls of Valhalla, glibly making pronouncements which affect the daily lives of millions.

A classic symptom of this kind of thinking is the new boss who wants the entire workforce to do things they have been doing for years, but differently. And I’m not talking about paradigm shifts in client-contractor relationships, or customer-facing skills. Nor am I talking about the introduction of new and better technologies, systems or approaches. It could be as simple and pointless as making everybody fill in a form which achieves nothing and is simply filed away forever, to be shredded at some far distant date. You’ve all been there.

Of course, nobody is suggesting that all industries become collectives, seeking shop-floor approval at every turn – we don’t want to go back to the sixties and seventies, now, do we? But at some tipping point the move away from consultation and cooperation will have dire consequences. It really can’t carry on like this forever; please say it can’t.

Globalised business operates on the Ponzi-like system that more and more lower-paid operatives, churning out more and more product achieves profits based solely on economies of scale. But the recipients of those slim pay packets can’t afford the product and the displaced workers the products are aimed at are no longer employed. Ultimately the companies are not valued at what they are worth in any material sense, but merely as what they – and their handful of grossly overpaid figureheads - are perceived to be worth. Today.

Tomorrow, the market sentiment changes and the whole lot crumbles. Market leaders disappear into financial statistics and the same old money men - the people selling blankets and shovels to the globalist gold rush - become that little bit richer. And those who used to be the bedrock of industry, the skilled workers, are back on their arses again. Little wonder then, that those who can, move into positions of influence, and away from positions of productivity. By those who can, I definitely do not mean the best of the workforce, because it seems a dreary predictability that those with the least amount of utility at the bench are destined for stardom on the board.

The old adage: those who can, do; those who can’t teach is all too often augmented nowadays by the knowing punchline “…and those who can’t teach, manage”. The world will not be shaped anew by the Elon Musks and the Jeff Bezoses, nor by the lofty forums involved in world economics. The answers aren’t with the demagogues but with those of us who do… and those of us who teach how to do. Most of us already see the greasy pole climbers for the vainglorious popinjays they are and reject their abstract indulgences. One day, maybe, we all will.

Tis the season to be generous

I have to say I am disappointed, but not surprised that people are making such a fuss over the Christmas precautions. Yes, there are families for whom this will be the absolute last Yuletide for some elders, but most individual households are not in this position. In any situation there will be exceptions deserving of more sensitive treatment, but surely people who have spent their year engaged in avoiding exposure to the virus cannot seriously have been planning Christmas as usual?

Is it really true that the majority of Britons cannot scale down their festive plans for this very abnormal time? The vox pops sound like the same people who railed against the foreign travel restrictions, as if they couldn’t just hold off until next year. I wonder how people who can’t afford holidays and have spent the last 20 Christmases alone must think. Because, although selfishness is a very human trait, it is also widely regarded as a weakness.

Human weakness is manna to the marketing industry; buy this because he’s got one; do you want to be the only one who hasn’t got this? Surely children are still taught the virtues of abstinence, and if not, why not? For my generation thrift was integral to managing expectations; save for a rainy day, look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves; don’t want what you can’t have. Are these simple, honest principles really beyond the ken of today’s people

Christmas is the very epitome of shallow, frivolous consumption and has been for many years; locked down in the middle of winter it was a welcome blowout as the nights began to slowly recede. As a child we put up decorations on Christmas Eve and took them down less than a fortnight later. Yes, for weeks beforehand there was excitement and anticipation, but it was contained. Those putting up lights in November were scorned, but come the twelve days peace and goodwill reigned, too much rich food was scoffed then, afterwards, life returned to parsimonious normality.

But these days Roy Wood’s dream has come true and for some people it really is as if it can be Christmas every day. Compared to 50 years ago, abundance is everywhere, thrift has been abandoned and although families do get together at this time of year, most people have the ability to do that whenever they wish, in ordinary years. You’ve still got the trees, the lights are up everywhere and almost everybody has access to Skype, Facetime, Zoom or any one of the dozens of apps that allow you safe face-to-face communication; you can still have Christmas, only smaller.

Just stop bitching about it and make the best of what you’re allowed. What, you made plans? People have their homes swept away in floods and mudslides. Lives are cancelled in the milliseconds it takes to reduce your car to a shredded mess on the hard shoulder. Shit happens. You don’t get to hug grandma? Boo hoo, you ignored her the rest of the year, you hypocrites. In the greater scheme of things what is one long weekend of indulgence that you could recreate at any time in the future when circumstances allow?

Look on the bright side!

You may not agree with the government’s attempts to tackle the crisis. You may not even believe there is a crisis, although you might want to discuss this with the bereaved. But isn’t this the time of year to pull together and work for the common good? I guarantee that the one thing the government really wants from Santa is for everything to go back to normal, and they will allow this as soon as possible. But that time is not yet here. Why would you want to be part of the problem? As the appeal slogan might have gone; This Christmas, whatever your personal misgivings, give the gift of life.

Fully Conscious

The government has come to its senses. Not about Covid measures, not about Brexit negotiations, but regarding so-called “unconscious bias training". In a most welcome move UBT is to be scrapped for civil servants in England; ministers quite rightly say it does not work, giving it black marks all round. With this reversal of policy it is to be hoped that many other employers heed the call and ditch this needlessly divisive practice.

Naturally, supporters of UBT, or bleeding-heart race warriors, as they may more correctly be called, are moaning on about how this is ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’ and blaming a failure to inculcate full white guilt in every workplace in the land as a backward step. They say that the total lack of evidence that every white Briton is a dyed-in-the-wool racist does not prove that every white Briton isn’t a dyed-in-the-wool racist. The indoctrination must be stepped up if we are to uncover racism in every crack of the pavement, every nook, every cranny and yes, deep in your guilty white hearts.

The ‘training’, whose stated aim is to tackle patterns of discrimination and prejudice, is used in many workplaces, but the government says there is no evidence it changes attitudes. I say otherwise; along with hate groups like Black Lives Matter and Tell Mama, such movements actively do change attitudes… for the worse. Millwall fans were not booing an anti-racist gesture; they were booing a black power gesture. The deeply woke may be offended, but let’s be fair, when are they not?

No thank you I need no black-ops kind of enterprise to bring me back from the dark side. Am I afraid that unconscious bias training will make me ashamed of my skin, my language, my culture? My thoughts? Far from it, I am quite conscious of my biases and so what if I prefer to make my home among people who look more like me than otherwise? Am I aware that casual racism is in the very air I breathe? Who cares; I mean, play the white man here.

Black looks, black books, being blackballed… look on the bright side, the white side of life. Just because we notice that some are dusky, tinted, other-hued with a touch of the tar brush why would that be a cause for shame? The black/white ciphers for good and evil have been around long before the dark continent was even known about. Night and day, folks, night and day; why is that conclusion never arrived at? Well, because there is no money where there is no grievance.

But I’ll do my bit for the black economy, which is pretty white of me, I know. Oh yes, I will keep on being most consciously biased and thus provide plenty of opportunities for whole new offshoots of the black misery industry to thrive. Misery does love company after all, so it would be selfish of me to simply surrender to the woke agenda and give them nothing to complain about. And of course, while they’re marching at least they’re not looting. Unconscious? Not in the slightest.

Little Europeans

It’s happening. They are doing it all over again. Remoaners everywhere are still, it seems, telling themselves that Brexit can be stopped, time be turned back and we can all get return to being happy Europeans again. They are lying to themselves that we were comfortable in the creamy bosom of the über Frau and that but for the EU we would not have enjoyed an entire millennium of blissful peace, as if the EU began with Hastings.

Remember, they say, when we were a force in the world? Remember the happy shining faces of the children as they skipped from kindergarten to baccalaureate to Erasmus exchange scholarship where they met their future wives and raised gurgling multilingual children in their Tuscan villas, their Spanish haciendas, their pieds-à-terre, their gîtes and their idyllic Black Sea dachas. How glorious that flag and how awe-filled their minds and that of their droogs when listening to the stirring strains of good old Ludwig Van.

While these heroic upper-middle class New Europeans dandled their Eurobébés on their pan-European knees they would look out over the glistening waters of Lake Europond and recall how their ancestors had built this unified paean to peace and harmony and glorious multiculturalism, against the opposition of angry, gammony Little Englanders and their odious Mr Hitler.  How grateful those uncivilised dogs were that the most famous European of all, a Frenchman named Churchill, had intervened to save them, yet again.

The Eurocrats lived high on the hog as, unseen, the low-skilled human robots happily carried out all the ‘Manuel’ labour, licked the streets clean and served up glorious international cuisine for them to consume in their bistros and bodegas and chi-chi cafés, as they chattered in a glorious Babel of harmonious diversity. Such food was unheard of in the cold, damp island of Great Britain, whose inhabitants had never left their shores and were unable to see beyond the fog banks which forever hovered just outside Dover.

Oh glorious past, they mourn, when all things were possible and all dreams within reach; when they didn’t need troublesome episodes like democracy and elections because their betters ruled – and ruled wisely - by divine right. Under that beautiful starry emblem in a beautiful blue satin sky they had their own, highly regulated (and therefore indisputably correct) customs, their own official, internationally recognised language (English) and everybody knew everybody else. It was a privilege for people to say they had become European.

How Remainers and Leavers alike view it...

The folklore they tell themselves, the misty memories they share, as they look back on a thousand-year Euro-Reich that never existed. Pity the poor Little Strasburgers, imagining they ever wielded power and influence over large swathes of the world. But sadly the days of the EU empire are gone, never to be seen again and now, finally, they must face up to the lies, the chicanery, the false prophets of doom and the fact they didn’t know what they were voting for.

Money for Nothing?

In this mini-series I claim to have no panacea, no road map of the way out of the mess we’re in; I merely suggest that if what we have doesn’t work – and for so many it clearly doesn’t – we need other ways. New ways. In short, we need to turn society off and then turn it back on again in the hope that factory settings are restored and the machine functions again. We need to disable the pointless apps hogging our processing capacity and get rid of the clutter so that we can access the important stuff.

The socialists are obsessed with pursuing every faddish minority distraction with vigour while ignoring the day-to-day realities of people who don’t need special attention or a new lexicon; they just need to be let back into participation into society. Not fashionable enough to warrant campaigns they fall off the social map and drift into debt, homelessness, drug addiction and crime and are then dealt with inadequately when they fall foul of the law.

But now it’s not just the ne’er-do-wells who are falling through society’s cracks, because many formerly self-reliant working people have been forced into penury during the lockdowns. The government has not really had much of a choice and I continue to believe – indeed, I have to believe – that they are doing ‘whatever it takes’ to protect the population from a clear and present danger. Who would want to take up the poisoned chalice of power right now?

And if this presents an opportunity to ‘build back better’, why should those words be interpreted as ‘build back worse’? Given the previous form of western governments you can be forgiven for being cynical, but think about it; what better starting point could we have, given that, in the view of a great many thinkers, society needed to be brought to its knees before it would listen? Forget about the fantasist Schwab and his futurology for fools. Who needs a great global reset when we can put on the show right here, kids!

It’s a big conversation, to be sure, and it will last for years, but right here, right now we need to consider where we start from. And I respectfully suggest that if we simply start talking over one another nothing will change. So let’s get everybody aboard the bus. First scoop up the desperate and regardless of how they got there, cover their debts, make them secure. In the grand scheme of things it would cost little to lift those burdens. Pay off the loan sharks and put the genuinely desperate back on an even keel.

Then let’s get people off the streets, fed and warm, and focus on what we need to do to bring these excluded people back into the fold. Because, the way we are now, the them and us divide has never looked so stark in my lifetime. We have allowed genuine underclasses to form and fester and let them know they are despised. I have been entirely guilty of thinking of them that way and I know it doesn’t work. We will probably need a vast army of care workers, social workers, outreach workers and the like, but we will have possibly millions of newly unemployed to draw on, and some will have hidden talents to connect.

Yes it will cost £billions, but what’s the alternative? Leaving the Covid crisis to find the denizens of the underworld have spilled out everywhere? Mass looting and violence as desperate people indulge in desperate acts? Private security installed to further separate and insulate only those who can afford it? In other words, South Africa; is that what we really want?

Despite the apparent charity, it’s not money for nothing. In return for dragging people back from the cellar up to the ground floor we need to demand they keep up their end of the bargain and perform as integral members of society. We need to go further than the mission priest exchanging a meal for an insecure attendance at a sermon. When the backsliding begins – and it inevitably will – we have to be ready to step in and prevent it. Come and re-join society and do it properly.

We’ve heard ‘all in this together’ far too many times for there to be much hope that this time it might happen. But we are all stakeholders now, and as the cynics’ cynic I harbour but faint hope it might actually work. But maybe it could, simply because of the sheer scale of the problem and the number of formerly immune who will suddenly experience a helplessness they have never felt before. If we don’t take what may be the only avenue of enlightenment open to us, who knows what alternative looms? How we pay for it isn’t the question we should be asking; that question is what are the costs of not paying for it?

Not today...

 Seriously, I'm way too busy today.

Wait for it! 

The Little Reset

This is a follow-up post to Part One...

Laurence Fox has joined the ranks of uneasy demagogues touting one line or another on the lines of ‘freedom’, asserting that the government – for no verifiable reason given – is intent on removing our ‘human right’ to freedoms. That is one hell of a claim; actually it is two claims in a sense, for what is freedom? Those on the breadline, losing their businesses, houses, savings, etc, would probably trade this nebulous ‘freedom’ for some form of certainty in a heartbeat.

You can be free to starve, to be homeless, to freeze to death, or you can sign this here social contract… and be free of those concerns, as long as you play the game. Of course there are some people, often at the arse end of society, who will never opt to join the rest of the human race but they are few in number and if the will exists they can be contained, restrained and prevented from spoiling it for the rest of us; this is what the penal system is for.

But what of the rest? If society is going to work at all it has to work for [almost] everybody, but it is natural that those who need no assistance often look down on those who do. It is equally natural for those who are struggling to get by to gaze up with envy and not a little hatred for those whose apparently gilded lives give them immunity from compassion. There is the right-left paradigm in a nutshell; neither side seeing the whole picture. One narrative pits the valiant socialist freedom fighters against the greedy rich, while the other sees idle grifters forever demanding handouts from honest tax-paying.

Of course, that is way too simple, we all know it. Yet, sooner or later most of us will fall into one of those two camps and we are never so unified as a social mass as when the likes of the repugnant, be-mulleted, Philip Green appear in the news. Rapacious capitalists, riding roughshod over the peasantry are always likely to stir the blood… and when they are obnoxious human beings to boot, well, fair game.

But they’re not all like that. Andrew Carnegie https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-22246173 wrote that a man who dies rich, dies disgraced and a number of latter day philanthropists seem to have taken him to heart. Contrary to what ‘The Internet’ wants you to believe, possibly Lozza Fox amongst them, Bill Gates appears to be a major force for good in the world. Hate me for saying it but I maintain it is true. And while we’re at the naming names stage, Klaus Schwab is just a post-Hitlerian fantasist with his grandiose Great Reset, which totally ignores the evidence of centuries that nation may speak peace unto nation, but they always do it with their fingers crossed.

But maybe he has a point about the opportunity offered by the pandemic, whether you believe it is real or not, in that what better time is there than right now to consider starting over? And I mean really start over; change the paradigm; turn the clock backwards to a time when industrialists might have earned twenty times their average employees’ wages, not five hundred times, as is often the case today. Of course people should be allowed the pursuit of excellence but once your personal fortune goes beyond the wildest dreams of the majority, maybe there really is such a thing as earning too much?

I can’t be alone in simply not believing that one man is ‘worth’ so much more than everybody else, or that when you get into the $billions surely you exhaust the worthwhile options for keeping it to yourself. Trickle down economics sometimes needs to open the flood gates. And no, I’m not saying soak the rich, I’m merely suggesting we have a serious conversation about right now; how we get everybody back on their feet.

The government has borrowed a fortune to get through the year, but so has every other government. Everybody is in this. So why not borrow a little more and send it gushing straight to the bottom? Get it to the people who need it, get it to those who feel excluded and have done for a long time. Why not go further and pay off all those debts; then put the loan sharks (including some mainstream lenders) out of business. Pay off the predators, get everybody fed and housed and warm. Not forever, but for now.

How long do we have to wait?

And then, immediately, once everybody’s belly is full, let’s get around a great big table and let everybody participate in what comes next. There won’t be any free rides but right now a lot of people need a lift and I refuse to be mean enough to deny it. “Yes, but I earned what I’ve got!” some will protest. Look around you at the broken businesses and shattered lives; consider for one moment that it could be you. Our society really is broken and it really needs fixing. And if not now, when?

PS: I have made a donation to the Salvation Army appeal, here. 

(The bigger, international charities can suck my dick.)

All Change!

Nobody knows the best way to run a country and, if we are honest, even governing a small town is beyond the competence of most of us. For the developed world, a form of representative, liberal democracy has long been accepted as the least-worst system. But maybe the Covid crisis has now demonstrated the hideous flaws in allowing the hoi polloi to decide who gets a hand on the tiller of the tramp steamer of state. This last year has also shone a sickly light on free-market capitalism, given that the far too biddable decisions of millions of morons can often influence policy.

It has glibly been assumed, without much question, by advocates of Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’, (which heretofore included me) that the free decisions, in their own self-interest, of the individuals of a population will ultimately regulate supply and demand far better than a centrally planned economy. And that even though inequalities arise, all boats are lifted by the rising tide of national wealth.

But it’s not fucking true, is it? Some boats, particularly the boats laden with the human detritus of our shipwrecked society, are pre-holed below the waterline, as if they have been supplied by people traffickers trying to squeeze one last trip out of a worm-ridden hulk. Popular democracy might sound like a great idea but sometimes the electorate actually does need saving from itself. There, I said it; some people’s instincts should be disregarded; some people should never be allowed to vote; and perhaps some people should never even have come into being.

But we are where we are, by whatever route we travelled and ‘here’ is a place that nobody voted for. Were the pandemic waved away tomorrow we would still be screwed. Those who have lost their livelihoods will need help and many who have retained theirs were already in too precarious a financial situation to be able to help. The wealthy, as ever, will probably suffer the least, but there will also be casualties among formerly higher rate taxpayers.

The eternal puzzle of how much should I be forced to pay from my surplus to meet your shortfall will exist regardless of whether the left or the right are in control. And in the UK it is often difficult to tell which is which, given that both sides continue to vie for popularity, rather than authority, governing not by conviction, but by opinion poll. (I wonder if an Opinion Poll Tax would help out?)

Admittedly a supposedly representative democracy is probably better than direct democracy, but only so far as the elected actually do represent the best interests of their constituents. But they don’t. People in Britain don’t really vote for representatives, they vote for a political government as a whole… and then watch, dismayed, as election promises are abandoned at what often seems like a capricious whim and the policies of the other side are adopted.

But it shouldn’t be about Labour or Conservative, left or right, it should be about right and wrong, and bringing about a world where, as far as is feasible, everybody takes part. Isn’t it time we actually had the long overdue conversation about how we tackle the real issues, the ones that actually damage people; how we let people realise their ambitions but not at the expense of others; about how we drag the underclasses kicking and screaming into society?

I don’t usually link blogs – if I’m honest it is the same three or four subjects re-hashed ad infinitum – but over the week I’m going to try and suggest a few changes we might want to consider, in order to bring about a better world, at least here, in the crucible of modern civilisation. I shall call my new system ‘socialism’ in the certain knowledge that it has never been tried, anywhere in the world. Not properly. More tomorrow… if I have the stomach for it.

Part Two...

Be Better

Baroness Sugg has quit her role at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office over the reduction in Britain’s foreign aid budget. So what? Nobody knew who she was or what she did (after Madness, obviously) but surely this petulant stomping off because the gravy tap is being backed off a tad is more an indication of a lack of moral fibre than of any true devotion to a cause. When the going gets tough…

But isn’t this posturing, public resignation business so typical of the current crop of politicos? All for it when the going gets tough; happy to lunch and dine and gladhand grateful dusky despots for the cameras; no problem at all in accepting the plaudits for ‘a job well done’, but running away from trouble at the first sign of difficulty.

If the worst that can happen is you get to spend more time in the garden on full salary, or you get a more favourable post in an easier department, where is the incentive to do better? Maybe trophy resignations should be banned, or denied publicity, so that – god forbid – you are put under pressure to come up with the goods. And I wonder if she is aware how few of her countrymen care one jot about foreign aid, especially when it goes to countries easily rich enough to solve their own problems?

But wait, aren’t WE ‘easily rich enough’ to solve OUR problems? If we are, why are we not doing it and if we aren’t why do we think that throwing cash at countries exclusively populated by brown-skinned people will somehow make anything better? Is it a white saviour complex, or a second reparation for slavery on top of the ruinously costly reparations we only recently finished paying? Is it really just white guilt that makes us fund despots who treat their people even worse than we do?

But we don’t treat OUR people badly, do we? Seriously, I think we do. They always used to say charity begins at home and right now I can think of no more worthy recipients of generous philanthropy than several million of our own citizens who desperately need help of some kind. Right now the Chancellor is busily cash-spreading; indiscriminately fertilising the field in the hope that some of it goes towards growth, but we need something more and, wait for it...

I think we need a return to a bit more socialism. No, don’t click away, hear me out. We used to have world class public transport, housing, education, policing and access to justice. Our politicians used to be public servants, not celebrities and we had free libraries, museums, art galleries, sports facilities and so on. Admittedly we still have healthcare ‘free at the point of use’, but it is hideously and expensively encoiled by the serpents of equality and diversity and other woke superficialities, and where has everything else gone?

It simply isn’t true that the private sector does everything more efficiently; it may do things more profitably, but where does that profit go? In publicly funded private enterprises surely the purpose is to utilise the ruthless efficiency of the private sector in pursuit of the public good; where is the evidence that this has worked well in the last 30 years? When we need junior footballers to shame governments into doing the right thing, what the hell has happened to our collective sense of responsibility?

To use Boris’s (and many others’) favourite form of three-word government, when we ‘build back better’ we have to demand the principle is also applied to everybody in a position of influence. The great industries must create wealth; the great Parliament must regulate how it deals with the share of that wealth it collects in taxes. But it’s not just about money; it is primarily how we deal with each other. I have a modification to make to that slogan; when we regroup and start over, can’t we all just try to ‘Be Better’?

Jab Away!

I have to say it has been quite an education this past year, peeking into the mindset of Joe Average and realising that what lies between those average ears is malleable to an extraordinary degree. Beliefs that can flip on the toss of a coin are clearly not deeply held convictions, but the new vision of the converted is a force of nature to behold. People who were once healthy sceptics are now worshippers at the altar of one unifying dogma or another.

The anti-vaxxers have their religion but why should they impose it on others? This is especially invidious when you factor in that the anti-vax, anti-lockdown converts have a large Venn intersection with the free speech crowd. So what is it, freedom of speech but not if you say you are happy to comply with the government's attempts to save lives? Surely the right to disagree is embedded in the very core of freedom of speech. (If you don’t like that opinion, I have others.)

This duality pervades every debate; of course you have the right to disagree but you are wrong. Most debates are not simple dichotomies, though; people who believe the virus is a hoax have a different anti-vax stance from those who believe the virus is not only real but planned, developed and deliberately released. Those who object because they fear testing has or will not be comprehensive enough have a different view from those who have fallen down the 5G conspiracy rabbit hole.

And it’s not just Covid because, alongside all the conventional battle lines of disagreement have been added a whole regiment of new or revived challenges. Climate change, the plight of the third world, society as a whole and for some, the very future of humankind. But none of these topics stands alone and among your own ranks, fifth columnists muddy the waters and spread uncertainty and disinformation.

Trying to assess just one of the subjects of disagreement, the whole 'let's change our entire energy paradigm' conundrum is far too big, far too complex and far too interrelated to possibly solve without casualties. And as ever, the first casualty has been truth, leaving a gaping vacuum into which pours pure madness! The discussion on green transport rapidly descends into an argument about ending personal freedoms. Attempts to ensure energy security erupt into shouting matches about independent nation states… which inevitably tends towards ‘Hitler’.

As genuine experts and deep thinkers soberly ponder the options, Joe Average wades straight into the muddy puddle with some rant about exploding batteries putting lives at risk, or the fascinating conflation of Saharan dust with potato harvests in Chile. Every line of dissent seems to spiral down into hysteria about the freedom of the individual. This really is the end point; at the bottom of every movement, every cult, every new-age madness the freedom of the individual appears to be paramount.

It's just a little prick...

Yes, indeed. This necessarily includes the freedom to starve, to die of cold to be eaten by wolves to succumb to every invisible microbial, bacterial or viral agent out there. The freedom to go it alone against the might of the universe and damn the consequences. Because that is what ultimate freedom brings. The human race is a cooperative species and that is the secret to our success. Thus I have concluded that the freedom of the individual does not trump the needs of the herd and if my herd needs help to fend off disease I will willingly sacrifice any fancy lone hero nonsense and have the fucking jab, okay?  

Don't Panic - there's a Plan!

I was never a fan of Project Johnson, but the bungling, wild-haired buffoon appears now to have set out a ten-point plan to bring down his own government. Ed Miliband signed us up to some sort of nonsense years ago when he was something or other (who remembers?) in Brown’s cabinet but, not to be outdone, Boris has abandoned an already perfectly unachievable environmental target for one so ludicrous, that maybe the Lizard Overlord theories aren’t entirely unfounded. This is a plan of which Baldrick himself would be proud.

The last Labour government signed us up to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050. The Cameroons then arbitrarily rolled up their sleeves and said, right, we’ll do 100% by 2040 and now Johnson’s girlfriend has thought, fuck it, if we’re promising the impossible then why not go all in? If Michael Foot’s 1983 manifesto was the longest suicide note in history perhaps the current Tory aims comprise one of the shortest? A shame they couldn’t have got it down to three words; then it would be like all their other policies.

Yesterday the PM’s comedy machine put out the ten-point plan summarised below.

 Let’s look at them, briefly, in turn:

·       Offshore wind to be the only source of electricity for every home, thus ensuring for many homes that no electricity is provided at all. But the good news is that 60,000 consultancy jobs will be created… in London. Green Job is, of course, shorthand for “overpaid unaccountable ‘expert’ with zero credentials, sucking on the public teat.”

·       Develop the first town to go up in a fireball by 2030. Hydrogen I the answer, they all clamour, give us hydrogen! Tell that to the passengers of the Hindenberg.

·       Keep pretending to advance nuclear energy, but also keep on delaying funding, thus ensuring that we end up with too little, too late, too costly, and to the disapproval and existential alarm of many citizens.

·       Doing his level best to wreck the personal transport dream which lifted millions out poverty and gave opportunities to the masses, the unseemly dash for all-electric will land many in debt and net negative incomes.

·       But it’s okay because they can always walk or cycle to the wind-turbine blade factory on the edge of their sink estates. Has nobody noticed the weather for much of the year? Or that despite half a century of complaining about it, public transport has become more unreliable and less and less safe? No matter, get on those cattle trucks, plebs.

·       Supporting greener industries is just a soundbite – the government wouldn’t recognise a green initiative if it smashed them in the face and once again, why will nobody admit that there is no such thing as ‘zero emissions’, unless you simply ignore all the emissions? (In some areas, electricity production is already more polluting than modern diesel engines, mile for mile, so electric actually has higher emissions than your small runaround.)

·       Carbon capture is, of course, another one of those ways of brushing reality under the carpet and as for planting all those trees, has anybody noticed how the nation serially fails to meet ANY of its tree planting targets by a country mile? Of course, here we have learned well from the EU and the solution to a failed target is to declare another, more ambitious target, you know, just like a straw-clutching candidate on The Apprentice presenting a bunch of vague wishes as a supposed business plan.

·       And as for the Green Finance ambition, at least here we finally an achievable aim. If you want money laundered, because this is what this ultimately means, what better place than the home of corruption and government itself? You don't believe me? Ask the Russians.

Boris and Woko

Well, it’s school tomorrow for me – I’ve had a couple of very soggy weeks of annual leave – so I’m sharpening up my pencils and ironing my uniform, etc. Oh and, you know, filling out that risk assessment, as you do. Or, actually, as you don’t, unless you are in one of the few industries that have a genuine need for it, or your industry is actually creating the mountains of documentation that nobody ever reads.

Being in the Health and Safety Bureaucratic Complex must be a lot like being a supporter of Richard Burgon; nobody knows what your purpose is and fewer even care. The company I work for has done what so many small-to-medium firms do, they have outsourced H&S. This means we have all signed to say that we have received and read the official company Health and Safety Policy booklet, but of course, only one part of that affirmation is actually true.

I am reminded of all this because in my email inbox sits a week-old injunction to complete my annual online Fire Marshall training. Last year I clicked on the link, found a button on the page which said ‘completed’, clicked on that and watched my status change from pending to sorted… which was nice. Naturally, I passed on this software glitch to others and now we are officially competent Fire Marshalls. I wonder how much the company pays to have this useless procedural box ticked? I’m guessing it’s not pennies.

Up and down the land, hundreds, thousands, of other companies must do the same. When you add in the pointless social engineering of HR, the Equality & Diversity practitioners, along with Human Rights Lawyers and Environmental Impact Assessors (guessers), there are possibly millions of people involved in these bogus trades, sucking the productivity out of the land. Not to mention the partisan think tanks and polling companies and the commentariat.

All of which is why I have little faith that the Green funding announcement from Boris and Yoko will amount to anything of any use to anybody, let alone assist in ‘saving the planet’. All of it will be hoovered up by the vultures in the Climate Change business, much of it by serial polluters who pretend to have environmentally friendly credentials. Meetings will be had and debates conducted and the conclusion will be that they need yet more funding for more such fruitless time-wasting. I don’t expect to see a penny spent on doing any good.

Just as the cure for the ills of the EU is always more EU, the panacea for a welfare crisis is to throw yet more taxpayers' cash at idlers and cheats, the challenge to the rise of racism is to create yet more ways in which white people are racist and the solution to the immigration invasion is to declare open borders and de-criminalise illegal immigration, the way to tackle climate change is always to spend a fortune studying climate change.

Sod the leaves - fill me with money!

And you know how it always ends up? Ordinary working people who wish no harm to anybody and dutifully pay their taxes, budget for their needs and generally keep their heads below the parapet are berated for their ignorance and their bigotry, and are told what they must not do, or say, or even think. I expect Boris Johnson is experiencing a little of what that feels like right now.

Who Cares?

Dominic Cummings has gone, get over it. We have, and by ‘we’ I mean natural Conservatives, both big and small ‘c’ who care far more for the country and its wellbeing than by whom it is governed. Many lent their votes to Tony Blair when it looked like New Labour might be the fresh new politics. And many lent their vote to Boris when it looked like he might deliver what a majority of forgotten voters had asked for. All have been disappointed.

Now, of course, speculation has exploded. The media has been utterly obsessed with Dominic Cummings as a Svengali figure on whom they can blame all their failings. Their failure to accurately predict election and referendum outcomes. Their failure to accurately portray ordinary working people as thinking beings. Their to-a-man adherence to the dopey and ill-considered social justice doctrines of the last few years. So now they have to carry on being led, not by objective reporting, but by the bias they cannot shake off.

But I don’t think it is all the press’s fault, rather it is the lack of leadership shown by most modern governments. Desperate to be liked and desperate to garner the votes of people who wouldn’t pledge for them if their very lives depended on it, successive party heads have bent like straws in the wind and lapped up every last faddish theory as if it were fact. Appease the Greens, appease the gender-fluid, appease whatever is that ‘the woke’ think they have awoken to.

There isn’t a leader in the civilised world that isn’t prey to dither and in thrall to the polls, when it is the proles they should be looking to, because the silent majority will always be there, no matter how their grandchildren seek to ‘educate’ them. And what the majority want is law and order, a manageable welfare system for those who need it, not those who demand it. They want border controls and they want to believe the government actually has the means – legal, financial and if necessary military – to deal with it decisively.

They want all of this at a price – taxes – that will not break the bank, nor the backs of those who labour to pay it. But governments, instead of reading the runes, are moving further to the clamorous and increasingly splintered left and ignoring the less-oft expressed but far more homogenous and reasonable views of ‘the man on the Clapham omnibus’.

The government should be doing what the majority want, balanced with what is reasonable; they shouldn’t be trying to stomp on the little sparks that are the ultra-minority demands. Those sparks, as bright as they might briefly flare, as loudly as they might crackle, have limited fuel and will die out on their own. They are ideas, not the real needs of the majority; that is the smouldering hot heap of unspent ash at the heart of the fire. Throw fuel on that and watch it blaze. This is the fire that needs tending.

We may have got the wrong dictator

Ultimately it comes down to the fact that the governed are content enough as long as their bellies are full, and they are clothed and housed and kept busy. All the fripperies of progressive idealism will only enrich the juvenile and simplistic theorists who egg on the agitators while doing nothing to meet the basic needs. We must have governance that both recognises this and isn’t afraid to challenge the noisy minority. It is time to bloody some noses. If that sounds like a dictatorship, who cares? Despots can be toppled, unsound ideology not so much.

The Politics of Despair

David Lammy tweeted out in glee about Dominic Cummings’s plan to leave Downing Street by Christmas. He referred to him as a rat, which is par for the course for the party which thinks ‘scum’ is a suitable tag to refer to all who disagree with them. Never was this Thomas Sowell quote so apposite: “It is amazing how many people think that they can answer an argument by attributing bad motives to those who disagree with them. Using this kind of reasoning, you can believe or not believe anything about anything, without having to bother to deal with facts or logic.”

If it were only Lammy it would be bad enough but listen to the language from those who imagine they occupy loftier moral heights. While Conservatives often go painfully out of their way to use the right words, to sound reasonable, logical and sound, the left seem to think they have grounds for more embittered attacks. In the USA the ‘Democrats’ (who, ironically, actually have the word rat in their name) regularly invoke the Devil himself when referring to Republicans (who pleasingly have the word pub in theirs).

In the name of saviouristic socialism, people like Dawn Butler liberally sow racist division and enlists the likes of Lenny Henry – a man we want to like, but who makes it so difficult at times – to the cause. Their loathing for white people even extends to calling non-white Conservatives, ordinary working people at that, coconuts, or Bounties. Had a white commentator used an equivalent phrase to describe white people who act black the clamour would not cease until that person had been ‘cancelled’.

But the rub is this; in all the years of social programmes, welfare initiatives, the drive for diversity before excellence and the refusal to accept the necessary duality of success and failure in endeavour, the supposed problems have only got worse. Give people a handout and all you get in return is more hands out. Once they may have said ‘please, sir’, but now it is a demand, often with menaces.

Rather than accept this simple observed truth, that the politics of envy simply creates more envy, they double down and tell the less well-off that the rich are only rich because of greed, connections and some bizarre desire to keep the poor, poor. And like religious acolytes they follow the script at all times until the liturgy becomes embedded. Confronting the clear truth that what makes rich people richer is the masses being able to spend, and spend willingly, would be like effecting an exorcism to cast out what has possessed them

Irony is never far away when doctrinal politics (or religion, for that matter) abounds and the great irony is that once people gain a little wealth they no longer want socialism so it is  a self-defeating dogma, unless… Unless it fails, in which case you blame the failure on the great Satan of capitalism, indeed you make a name for yourself by doing exactly that and then you call yourself Owen Jones, set up a Patreon account and attempt to enrich yourself by banging the drum of despair.

Thus the primary tool of socialism is failure, repeated failure. And what better way to span the generations than to have entire sectors of society who serially fail to improve their lot and pass their misery down to their offspring, then blame it on those who actually pay for their subsistence? It is of little surprise that some of the fiercest advocates of capitalism are former socialists who have made something of their lives. Or as most of us know them, adults.

Partly Political

I would have a lot more time for socialism if those making a living from peddling it were instead actually practising what they preach and doing something about the lives of those they claim need to be rescued by it. As far as I can see, socialism for all of its 170-year history has signally failed to improve the lives of those who vote for it. Meantime capitalism, the system by which pretty much all trade exists, has increased material wealth for all, but generated some, on-the-face-of-it grotesque, imbalances.

Maybe it is a simple fact that humans are not very good at making impartial decisions and equitably sharing out what we have amassed. In true ‘more equal than others’ fashion, socialist politicos are notorious for jumping housing queues, getting planning permission for favoured religious buildings and creating nepotistic dynasties throughout the public sector. Meantime, more than a few Tory MPs have been mired in scandals involving huge financial privileges granted to friends, family and powerful benefactors.

Politicians of all stripes are less trusted now than they have been for many years and yet all of this still carries on. MPs who have been imprisoned for fraud, perjury and the like should not even dare to show up again in public, yet they retake their seats on release from jail as if butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths. They are caught out in newspaper stings in such embarrassing circumstances that most of us would change our names and flee the country, yet continue chairing select committees on Standards in Public Life. Or they appear in their underpants cruising for gay sex, but then imagine they can adopt moral stances without criticism.

Whatever you think of the Orange Man he was dead right on one thing; the swamp needs draining; as true an ambition over here as it ever was in the US of A. Forget your big global conspiracies, your New World Orders, the Great Reset and all of that guff. Change at that level is nigh-on impossible for we mere mortals. Much as I hate the term, co-opted as it has been by the Labour Party, change needs to happen at grass roots level.

Every person in public office, from the school board up to the House of Lords, should come under close and highly intrusive scrutiny. It should not be possible to award a contract to anybody with whom you have any connection, or by which somebody you are connected to may profit, without full disclosure, and pending approval from people outside your closed circle of colleagues and friends. And if it is unavoidable that a policy you have championed enriches your nearest and dearest the very least you should do it to retire from public office.

As a start to this swamp-draining, anybody seeking office should be assumed to have nefarious reason and be under such detailed scrutiny that only the whitest of white (and I make no apology for the use of that phrase, you all know what it means an if you are offended then you are also unfit for office) could ever make it through to nomination. And all voting for MPs should be via personal attendance, identity proven, apart for those in exceptional circumstances, for whom ballots should be collected directly by at least two, sworn-in officials of at least two different political allegiances.

Two cheeks of the same political arse

The shenanigans over the pond over the last week should leave us in no doubt that western politics is broken. And the insertion of predominantly Pakistani muslims into so many political seats from which they seem unassailably capable of practising politics in a less than, shall we say, a western democratic manner, should be cause for concern for all. Politicians like to talk about fighting for things; isn’t it time we fought back?

Sincerely yours?

Can there be anything more sick-making, for level-headed, stiff upper-lipped Brits, than the sight of emotionally insecure people spontaneously breaking into tears as they sob their soundbites into recorded history. Wall to wall wailing has been breaking out across the formerly civilised world in response to a charisma-free septuagenarian being declared the 46^th President of the United States.

There is something embarrassing about mass outpourings of emotion. Those huge funereal crowds, rending their garments and gurning for the cameras. We used to be amused by the ululating natives, the quaint piccaninnies with their emotive ways, but now the piccaninnies are us; at least, they are some of you. And while those of us who eschew such public frailty still look on bemused, we fear we are a dying breed.

Politics and power used to be the preserve of sober men and women. Pragmatism used to be the guiding principle of governance, with the rousing of passions reserved for tub-thumping occasions. A speech in the house, a hustings, a public debate, a call to arms and so forth, these were the rare times the lip might tremble and character be revealed.

We need character – and characters – in public life, but we need consistency more. We also need backbone and tenacity and leaders who are unafraid to be unpopular when they need to be. In this respect Boris Johnson is no Donald Trump, being master of the emotive u-turn. And although Trump inspired some dangerous passions, in people you wouldn’t necessarily want to be neighbours, I don’t recall a flag parade of sopping wet handkerchiefs on his 2016 victory.

Trump’s message, for all his faults, was America for Americans. Biden’s appears to be America for whoever wants it. And people are weeping for this? As Biden himself might say. “come on, man!” Yet even here, where a Biden victory may spell some difficulty for us as a country, people on the left are blubbing on air like they just received an all-clear from a cancer scare.

But sober and pragmatic and realistic and reasonable are boring, while joy and anger and fear bring a rush of blood to the brain. Reason rarely wins over emotion and this is the power of the left. Forget trying to explain – everything is far too complicated – instead, seize on a single smouldering nugget of fury and apply the bellows. Fan that flame until the anger it engenders is impossible to resist, then set the mob alight.

Maybe I am being unfair, but it does seem to me that leftist politics is emotionally driven and appeals to people who are dreamers, rather than doers. This is possibly why we don’t see very much of notionally right-wing mobs. The right wing, such as it is, is busy running things, putting food on the table and actually paying for all the things the leftists demand but can never provide for themselves.

They won - why cry over it?

If immature passion was what drove the world, what made it function, then the left, having once been elected, would never be out of office. But they always run out of steam. People realise they can’t eat emotion; they can’t keep warm by really wishing to be warm and they can’t build structures with sentiment. These are campaign tools which attract a certain sort; the sort who often lack the ability to realise their dreams. I have no doubt that leftists are sincere, but like leftism itself, sincerity never built anything.

Don't Get Too Excited

It’s been a while since I published a blog. It’s not that I have been out of ideas, rather that by the time I get the draft in my head, circumstances have changed, the public mood has shifted and others have already blasted their thoughts into the blogosphere. But I sense a brief lull as the world holds its breath and gazes at the USA, and here in the UK people enter a Covid stupor, unsure what to believe.

Well that’s not something I’m going to help you with; you make up you own minds. But here’s the crux of the matter – how? The government tells you one thing, your mate tells you another. Extensively researched papers are published and reach a reasoned conclusion, but then some reality television ‘star’ begs to differ. And just when you think you have a handle on an issue a cleverly argued debate spins you 180 degrees.

With statistically very few exceptions, none of us are experts, so we rely on experts – or rather the people who interpret the experts – to inform us. But when the experts – or those who interpret them - disagree we fall back on preferences. Once, we relied on the impeccably neutral ethos of the news media, on meticulously impartial documentary makers. But who now believes that any reporting comes without bias?

You don’t know the reality around either the pandemic or the US election. Neither do I. Nobody does and nobody ever will because, even with the benefit of hindsight, much will remain unclear or deliberately obscured. Historians will be overwhelmed by data and will find it impossible to discern fact from fiction, truth from lie. The outcome of their endeavours will be as much determined by what they want to see as what is actually in front of them. Will history in the future consist of multiple competing accounts from which to choose? What will be taught in school?

The focus is further blurred by credible bloggers, people with their own devoted following, who pursue particular threads: climate change, green technologies, politics, conspiracies, medicine, economics, etc, etc, etc. The world is awash with opinion peddled as indisputable fact, with conjecture posing as informed conclusion. The partially sighted leading the blind.

What of ‘Citizen Journalists’, you ask? Those on-the-spotters who film events in real time and thus generate accurate records of indisputable reality? I often watch such clips and fail to agree with the version of events which the publisher claims is being revealed. And then I have to ask how it was that they were right there, phone at the ready, to film just that segment. Not the minute before, not the resolution after, but just that bit which they believe supports their case.

Who knows what to believe any more? There are some who say that there is the proof, that the presentation of many facets of every story is a deliberate, deep state tactic to prevent us from knowing the truth. I think you know my views on that; isn’t a much more rational explanation that it is what it is, a multiplicity of different viewpoints randomly informed by experience and only occasionally having the appearance of collusion?

Relatively speaking, he knows no more than you...

How do we navigate through all this fog? Well, mostly, I try not to get too excited, try not to invest too much time worrying about things that don’t really affect me and concentrate instead on what I can do to further my personal aims. I’m more parochial than global in outlook and I still have faith in the silent majority… which is perhaps why I haven’t blogged for a while.

Diversity built Britain?

Hard on the heels of yet another barbaric muslim atrocity and the insistence by the close muslim community that these devout followers of islam are not real muslims, the Chancellor announces with some degree of pride a new 50p coin bearing the words ‘Diversity Built Britain’. Not content with that simple lie, he then states in a tweet: “I have seen first-hand the contribution made by ethnic minority communities to Britain’s history.” That would be all the fantastic ethnic historical figures of the last 40 years, then?

This is what propaganda looks like and it is bolstered by the continued presence in the broadcast schedules of the likes of Ash Sarkar and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and the grotesque Kehinde Andrews and Shola Mugabe Umbongo from SOAS, banging the race drum for all they are worth. Yes, they may be making black British history now, but none of it is helpful; it is just a non-stop demand for special treatment and unearned reparations. There can be no statues to celebrate their divisive actions.

It seems there is no position so extreme that the BBC will not give it oxygen, unless that position represents a white viewpoint. Whatever the topic, time should not be devoted to giving the majority view. Where is the balance? Where is the platform given to people who espouse personal responsibility and don’t forever demand that the government bows down before them? Important debates are not being had; important voices are not being heard.

I haven’t watched BBC Question Time in an age and not just because it airs a mere five hours before I get up to go to work. I have also tuned out of the weekend politics and discussion shows because they demand I spend far too much of my time listening to people with whom I profoundly disagree. Now, you may say, one ought to give ear-time to those with whom you disagree, the better to understand their argument and perhaps to empathise with their world view.

Fine, but why is the same tolerant patient demeanour not expected of them? It is okay for them to call me a Nazi, to insist that I live a life of hate, that I am a racist who despises all people of a different skin colour. But where is the condemnation of them when they blast me for the colour of MY skin? Hypocrisy is too weak a word; we need a new one to describe this prolonged attack on ordinary, decent, working people. This has been going on for decades now and every time somebody gets close to having a platform to air a contrary but no less valid viewpoint, they are screamed down.

Katie Hopkins, Darren Grimes, Roger Scruton, Douglas Murray and plenty of others have been de-platformed. Hell, even Germaine Greer was deemed insufficiently acquiescent to woke mobsters. What Alibhai-Brown said to Laurence Fox on Jeremy Vine’s show the other day would have had a nominal right-winger exposed to the might of the Crown Prosecution Service. What Darren Grimes said in exasperation some years ago, in the face of the extreme remain faction trying to overturn a democratic vote, has been held up by Femi Oluwole – yes a-fucking-nother one – as tantamount to inciting violence.

As I said, hypocrisy doesn’t begin to explain how some people get away with what would be a crime if aimed at them. The organised left, then, actually get to engage in violence and vandalism, with their never-ending assault on public decency. They get to exercise their right to protest with police protection while the police are deployed to whip up and then suppress those who exercise the same rights to different ends.

There is something sick about a society in which the majority view is regularly held to be the wrong view and those espousing it are regularly demeaned as bigots and fascists. And now, of course, Brexit is back on the menu. This means that the overworked insult ‘gammon’ is enjoying a whole new resurgence. That’s right, a term based on skin colour and used blanket-style to cast a majority sector of society as pantomime villains in jackboots. This is what diversity has built; and it has built little else.

Metaphors are Easy - the Truth is Hard

I’m planning on committing a hate crime. D’oh, what am I saying? I am thinking, therefore I am automatically committing a hate crime. It is only a matter of time before the pre-crime units throughout the land will be equipped with the necessary pre-cogs and intuits to read my mind. D’oh again, my mind is already being read as I type; as you read. You know what I’m going to think even before I think it myself. Bastards! (But you knew that, didn’t you?)

The trouble with facts is that that there are too damned many of them. Bloody facts, coming over here, raping our beliefs, taking advantage of our tolerance. Millions of facts are flooding into Europe; you can’t move for them. Sometimes I wonder if there is any space left for the truth, as the truth gets pushed out of our public lives and facts appear on our screens as if if fact lives are the only lives which matter.

Respected historian, David Starkey, paid a price for dabbling with the politics of facts and Darren Grimes in his turn is being made to suffer. There is no justice for truth these days, but threaten a fact and the Old Bill will turn up in a dawn raid to take your liberty in a heartbeat. The truth of the matter doesn’t, er, matter, when facts turn up en masse, demanding attention in far greater proportion to their numbers.

A very recent study even demonstrated that facts are over-represented in all visual broadcast media. What room is there, these days, for the truth, for all our truths… for our truths’ truths? I fear for the future of the young truths of today; they even want to be fact, as if somehow a raw fact has the same value as the honest truth. Truth is the bedrock of a civil society, whereas facts have a habit of multiplying without reason and imagining they have the same value without putting in the hard miles.

Yesterday, in response to a tweet about yet more rapefugee asylum seekers being represented by what are referred to by government voices as ‘lefty lawyers’ the Dorset Eye (me neither) challenged me to produce evidence to back up my re-assertion that they are, indeed, lefty lawyers. That is the truth of the matter; they are defending left wing ideals in regard to these invaders. But lawyers don’t deal in the truth, do they? They deal in facts. And facts, like statistics, if tortured long enough, will tell you whatever to wish to hear.

Where this leads...

The rule of law is devalued when it deals in facts and ignores the truth. The fact of the matter may be a rash word, issued under duress. Gather enough of these inconvenient facts and the truth of a good life lived in tolerant harmony with others is buried and forgotten. Only the fabricated facts of the ‘hate’ remains. This is important because the truth is being denied on a daily basis. I’m not just defending David Starkey here; I’m speaking out for all of us.