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.)