There doesn't seem a lot of point in trying to continue this blog.
That is all.
Ever wanted to be in charge? Well, in my own little world I will be, one day. Just not quite yet. I'm a bit tired at the moment... maybe I'll take over after I've had my little nap. (Sign up to get updates direct to email or follow @IamBattsby on Twitter)
There doesn't seem a lot of point in trying to continue this blog.
That is all.
Surprise surprise, the closest thing to actual evil on the planet, the conglomeration of fanatical islamists who collectively referred to themselves as Taliban, al-Qaeda, ISIS, et al, are converging on Kabul. Who could have possibly predicted the consequence of the US pulling out, and Britain following closely on their heels?
The UK long ago lost the ability and political stomach to
defend its own shores – see the dinghy denizens – so what on earth possessed
the then government to send troops out to be slaughtered in the Kush? The
region is decades away from safe self-governance, a fact which has been
abundantly evident to people who live and work there, and to all but the
experts who watch from afar.
Experts again. Actually it is no such thing, I am sure
there are genuine experts tearing their hair out at what they are seeing. It is
gesture politics, vanity politics, politics as popularity contest and a
politics which suits Boris Johnson down to the ground. A lot of arm waving, a
lot of hot air, bingo-bongo, by jingo and in the end… nothing. Pomposity and
posturing; Parliament is little more than a chimps’ tea party now; a show to
dazzle the little people.
While despotic regimes slaughter their dissenters and run
roughshod over international treaties, baring their teeth at anybody who dares
to intervene, western Governments are powerless to do a single thing unless
others let them. The UK administration will do whatever it takes to kow-tow to
the US, The EU, the oil companies, big pharma… Let’s just get it out in the
open – declare yourselves impotent and then we can declare you all redundant
and do the jobs ourselves.
Vigilantism is what happens in the absence of strength.
Hatred flourishes when order is abandoned. Hope vanishes with the loss of
integrity. And all three of these essential regularities are conspicuous by
their lack. An 80-seat majority should allow any government with the will to do
so, to restore order and integrity and stand strong against transgressors.
Instead we have governance which appears to care far more about how they appear
to outside agencies, than what the people of this country think.
The Labour Party has been engaged in a 20-year struggle –
often amusing - to alienate their core voters; now the conservatives are doing
the same. So think now about defending yourselves because the government, the
courts, the police and the armed forces can’t or won’t do what we think we pay
them to do. This is not a criticism of those on the front line; everybody knows
it is a failure of direction, of leadership, of honest guardianship.
Sooner or later – sooner by all appearances – the islamist cells in Afghan caves are going to take advantage of our chaos and inaction and dinghies will begin to arrive containing armed jihadis. They will eagerly arrive on our pebbly beaches and start mowing down innocent civilians, and fearing nobody, they will keep on shooting until they are taken down. How many will die before our government dares to act?
The Victorians had it right; children should be seen but
not heard. In fact they should only even be seen when they are doing something amusing
or amazing. If they’re not falling over, bumping into things, or recalling Pi
to a thousand decimal places, silently, children are a bloody liability. Parents should
nurture them, teachers should fill them with curiosity and various mentors
should inspire and encourage them. But for Pete’s sake, shut them the fuck up.
While watching something last night, on a streaming channel which doesn’t allow you to fast-forward through commercials, I had the misfortune to endure the excruciating Amazon climate change pledge excrescence. One after another, whiny brats from around the world admonished me for threatening their future, blamed me for ignoring what was so clear to their all-prescient sensibilities and charged me with fixing it all. For them, presumably.
Well, that can sod off; I am not going to be blackmailed by a bunch of snotty sprogs. My generation grew up in a world where recycling was normal. We didn’t throw things away when they broke; we fixed them, or salvaged what we could for parts. Food was rarely, if ever, thrown away, and we didn’t expect it to come in bomb-proof plastic enclosures with no alternative use, and – I’m talking to you, Amazon – we would have been embarrassed about sending somebody a toothbrush in a box big enough to house a small yak.
We didn’t roam the streets clutching yet another coffee-to-go,
or a single-use plastic bottle on every mission into the deepest, darkest high street.
Fizzy drinks were a treat, not a necessity. We didn’t expect our every demand
to be met, and deferred gratification was the norm. Before credit cards we knew
we had to save up for something we wanted. And when the time came to part with
that money we often realised the original desire had waned, and we had a better use for the cash.
Parsimony was normal, choices had to be made and
compromises reached. Yes, air travel and yes, personal transport; for many
these were the rewards of middle and older age when, after a lifetime of toil
we had finally made our nests comfortable. And just as we had endured relative
hardship in earlier years, we have the necessary stoicism to set aside our
luxuries with few complaints. We are products of our age, as are the next
generation. But just look how the next lot is turning out.
Remember that children know nothing but what they have been
told. Children didn’t make that maudlin Amazon tripe. They didn’t write the words;
they didn’t research their thesis. They just regurgitated what others dictated to them. Who are these others? They are the influencers; a shadowy and ever-present
horde of mostly millennials who have decided that their parents and their
grandparents are to blame. For everything. In other words, just older children who have
depended on real adults all their life, but imagine in their immaturity that
they are the grown-ups now.
These complainants are not the solution – in fact it
appears they are taking no responsibility at all, insisting that the people they
blame must do all the heavy lifting; they are like the BLM crowd, with no sense
that they are participants, but insist on being the recipients of reparation. Be
the change? They have no intention of being the change; they think that
berating others is the same thing as actually doing something. Like think-tank politicians, they believe slogans are the same as action.
It’s as if the lessons of the last few years have never
sunk in. Instead of asking why people voted for Brexit and Trump they just
label them as stupid. Instead of asking how the various groups can collaborate
to tackle the issues of the day, they act, childishly, as if the fault is
always that of the others. The up-and-coming generation have no knowledge of
their own, but they just don’t realise it. Children are the future? My arse. But
in a sense they may have a point. Adults did this, so adults need to fix this.
No, not the climate, the bloody kids.
A week ago, I read an article in the magazine for the American Association for the Advancement of Science which suggested that the warnings of future high temperatures are implausible, based on flawed modelling. In advance of the release of yesterday’s deliberately emotive and alarming ‘CodeRed’ report, the writer is, basically, trashing the science. A bit, at least.
But here’s the thing; who do we trust? The world of scientists who make a living from predicting gloom, or the more moderate voices advising caution? Do we listen, even, to the outright sceptics, who have their own science which tells them what they want to hear? While I am perfectly capable of listening to an argument and, indeed, of being swayed by it, I simply do not have the depth of knowledge to decide whether it is true or not.
Almost whoever you are, you require a leap of faith in
forming your opinion because we are talking about the future and literally
nobody knows the future. No matter how hard you try to persuade me of ‘the
facts’, ‘the science’ or the credentials of those whose homework you are copying,
you still don’t know. They don’t know. Your opinion, as much as you believe it
to be founded on absolute truths is just that, your opinion. As is mine. We may both be wrong.
When it comes to climate change, I’m not going to even
attempt to either dispute, or support, the veracity of the warnings. What I am far
more concerned about is what is really likely to happen as a result. Announce a possibility of
toilet roll shortages and people will flock to the supermarkets to create a
toilet roll shortage. Announce a climate emergency and watch as humanity does
its absolute best to make damned sure it comes about.
Not being able to buy your favourite pesto because of ‘bloody
Brexit’ is one thing. Being denied the use of your actual country because of an
overwhelming deluge of climate refugees is, I might suggest, a calamity on a
slightly more serious level. Tell the teeming masses of the medieval continents
that they will suffer drought, floods and starvation because of the industrial actions
of the West and you can pretty much see what comes next. (See also, slavery…)
Forget your electric cars and your hydrogen boilers; no amount
of technology is going to crack this nut. In order to make their point the IPCC
report has gone full apocalypse and all but admitted that nothing can really be
done, even if all the world’s governments sign up and then actually keep their promises (and this is far from likely).
So what? Not reaching unreachable targets isn’t a big stretch for the
imagination. But introducing measures which
restrict people’s access to resources is like inviting them to raid the stores
before the shelves are empty.
“If we don’t act now, it could become irreversible” is an
invitation for all to conclude that it is just too late. They may as well have
yelled “Last orders!” in a crowded English pub. Meanwhile, those who are really affected
by climate change (clue; it is not the developed west) will seek to abandon
their desiccated land and head for greener pastures, just as those who tend
the pastures are crippling themselves with debt.
The big deal is not whether or not we can arrest or even reverse climate change – a great many in the know think we can’t, or that it will be too little, too late – the big deal is how we cope with what’s to come. Were it just Little Britain we could probably manage fine, but just watch as the trickle of climate refugees becomes a flood and it floods our way. Sod your electric cars, go and buy weapons; in a few years it will be every man for himself
The announcement of the continuance and expansion of the Stormzy
Scholarship – a bursary scheme for black applicants to Cambridge University
has, predictably, aroused questions over whether such a scheme for exclusively
white applicants would be even legal. When Prof. Bryan Thwaites offered a scholarship
in 2019, to give white boys from deprived backgrounds a chance to gain a better education in elite schools, he was turned away. The excuse was that his offer was not inclusive; well
neither is this.
Mr Michael Ebenezer Kwadjo Omari Owuo Junior might
believe he is solving a problem. But, in reality, he is exacerbating one that a certain
sector of society has been fuelling for decades now. The proliferation of
schemes exclusively for the benefit of ‘ethnic minority’ applicants has been
clearly visible for some years. So-called diversity hires are not about
equality, nor inclusion, nor proportionate representation. Just as the hard
left successfully infiltrated the institutions, this new and disturbing variation
will implant anti-ethnic-British thinking throughout the organs of state.
Ever since Britain practically bankrupted itself to
abolish slavery, certain parts of our ‘intellectual’ ruling class have wrung
their hands in angst, the sense of white guilt pervading all and eventually permeating
throughout society. Now we have a broadly appeasing national sentiment where,
for many years now, white people in authority have gone out of their way to ensure
ever more opportunities for non-whites to fully participate in British society.
The whip hand, to use Enoch Powell’s term, has been stayed and open palms
presented in supplication instead.
Year on year, generation on generation, Britain has become
possibly the least racist nation on Earth. We have been open and welcoming and
in the determination to further the life chances of black and brown skinned people
have neglected our own. Progressive education has left the white boy behind, a
conscious decision by those who think they know so much and understand so well.
Ours has been a mission of sharing. But just look how it has been received.
I’m not sure we expected thanks, or any particular expression
of gratitude, but the response to – and I’m not afraid to say this - our generosity
has been far from that. The old expression “give them an inch and they’ll take
a yard” could not be more apposite. Not good enough, they insist, as they form
into their own societies and exclude whites. The multicultural experiment has
ended up where many said it would; monocultural ghettoes and the exclusion and
disadvantaging of the indigenous.
Many will argue that this is merely a redressing of the
balance, but that is simply incorrect; those who are now disadvantaged played no part in historic oppression. The Trojan horse has been brought inside
the walls and now its occupants are set on sacking Troy. I look with dismay at the
glee on non-Conservative faces as they look forward to our first black or brown
Prime Minister, and celebrate every instance of the blackwashing of our history
and institutions.
Of course, I am a hideous racist for saying this. But I know I am not in a tiny reprehensible minority; many people fear for what comes next. Future generations of white children are almost certainly going to learn what racism really is. And if, as the black activists and scholars insist today, only those in power can exercise racism, tomorrow is looking very bleak indeed for anybody with any skin colour which identifies them as ethnically British.
If a lorry driver fails to show up for work a consignment
doesn’t get delivered, shops fall short of stock, people are disappointed, inconvenienced
and possibly, put in peril; what if the load was medical supplies? A small army
of logistics personnel seeks to make sure this never happens, or to mitigate
the damage if it can’t be averted. In contrast, should a professor of race grievances
take a whole year of sabbatical, not one person on the planet will suffer. The
sum total of human existence will not be affected in the slightest
Likewise, economic forecasters, who only exist to give
astrology a veneer of credibility. Then there is the emerging field of gender studies
– if every person in the country who genuinely suffers from gender dysphoria were
to be publicly funded to research it, there would probably be fewer than there
are now engaged in actively promoting it. And what of those committees engaged in renaming
streets, demounting statues and placing tributes to unknown people of colour
whose actual significance pales in comparison with the fabricated legends
written about them? All utterly pointless.
Please feel free to add worthless occupations of your own,
because, across the western world – those parts of the world not struggling
with the basics of survival - there are hundreds of thousands (if not millions)
of people who are handsomely rewarded for 'work' which adds nothing useful to
society. If we lost them all tomorrow, nobody would notice. Nobody, of course,
except the benefits office.
Contrast the value of these non-jobs, every single one no
doubt requiring a degree (degree requirements may be waived for applicant with the
correct ethnic credentials) with the really vital jobs without which our
society could not survive. Those thankless jobs the highly educated may look
down upon but could not get by without. These are the jobs that society should
value and reward.
Who stacks the shelves? Those faceless, busy beavers who
pack and pick stock and keep supermarkets and ‘fulfilment centres’ operating. I can
just see the dismay on the faces of the commentariat when they can’t find their
favourite brand of organic pesto foot balm where they expect to find it. And,
checking out, cashless and automated is fine until you need the human with the cardkey to validate your purchases.
And who makes the products those shelves are filled with?
Machines are still a long way away from being able to do everything. Until that
day – which will be beyond most of your lifetimes – those clothes, that food,
those gadgets have required the input of human labour, paid far less than the children who
writes articles for the Guardian about the nobility of toil and the struggle of
the masses, yet have never picked up a tool in their lives.
Then there are all the trades. Those grubby little people
in vans whose sole purpose in life is to keep your world up and running. They
build your houses, they fix your central heating, they install, for you, gadgetry
they could never afford for themselves. So what, your paper on free expression
in the age of Trump can wait forever; nobody will miss it. But how long will
you survive without your dishwasher?
And have you ever noticed that those who ‘suffer with
mental health’ as the phrase now seems to put it, are rarely those who actually
work for a living, in the conventional sense. Mental health issues are far more
prevalent among those who have the luxury and the time for such indulgences. So
it seems clear to me that there is a way of making the world a better place.
It is not by writing about it, by pontificating on the cerebral, by espousing ignoble causes, or by going on perpetual marches in support of one grievance or another, but by putting aside the chatter and getting on with it. Education, education, education, Tony Blair famously spouted, but look where it has led. The same advice is true now as it was a hundred years ago; if you want your kids to have a secure future, turn them on to honest work, and tell them to be good at it.
So, the loonies are right and just before Christmas the hands
on the levers of power tinker with the 5G signal and across the world (5G
coverage allowing, so not much of the world, then) we, the vaccinated begin to
drop dead in droves. What happens then? I mean, let’s say everybody with the
jabs within a half mile radius of a 5G mast just tumbles, poleaxed in the
street; who collects the bodies?
The answer, just staying with the premise a while longer,
is nobody. Mostly, I expect because by then those who currently seem to know
anything will have convinced themselves that the vaccine itself is transmissible
by contact. And given that the vaxxed outnumber the anti-vaxxed considerably,
what an impossible task it would be. The streets will be blocked by corpses and
the Tesco and Amazon deliveries will be halted (it is likely all their drivers
have been jabbed anyway). Everybody will starve.
Then the scavengers will come, the deadly disease will
pass into the crows (family corvidae) and mutate to form a new threat to civilisation
and Greta’s dreams will all come true. The majority of those spared will be
young, dumb and full of dogma and dreams and incapable of running a society. All
those isms competing for attention, all that tech collapsing for want of
electricity, economies crumbling before your eyes. How does any of that benefit
‘the elite’ in any way?
Putting aside the veracity of the pandemic for now, how does removing at one go the repository of the majority of
human experience and knowledge, help? At the vaccination stations were there special
batches of placebo to be administered to chosen volunteers? Did your local GP
surgery scrutinise your CVs for evidence of your usefulness in the new world order?
Surely such a well-planned, long-planned worldwide control event
would not have left to chance who lived and who didn’t? That would be madness.
Ah, but, no, say the placard wavers. See, the vaccine
makes you infertile and population reduction is achieved that way. So, not the
5G then? No, the 5G conspiracy theory was just a bunch of lunatics with
their own agenda. Which was? Well, they're just mad. And how are they different from any other group
with fixed ideas and an agenda? That’s not important right now; infertility,
that’s the thing. The majority of the vaccinated are well beyond peak
fecundity. Well, all we know is we’re not having any of it.
And that appears to be where we are. A world-wide plot by
shadowy ‘elites’ to crash their own parties and reduce their mansions to hovels?
Without thriving economies the next generation of the powerful will not be the
woolly-headed, liberal, social media billionaires, it will be warlords. It will
be those who can seize power the old-fashioned way. In acquiring great
material means you have to climb to the top of a pyramid of wealth. In acquiring simple
power over others, you just have to hack your way to the top of a pyramid of bodies.
The elites don’t benefit from any of this, and neither do governments. Nobody in current positions of power and influence will benefit in any way from a dissatisfied population of the unemployed and disenfranchised. So, if it isn’t the currently powerful who are manipulating the world, who is it? Follow the money, says the freedom crowd. I have. It leads nowhere.
It’s everywhere you look. The handy labelling of anything
you like as anything you want it to sound like. Tips are now reframed,
gloriously, as ‘life hacks’, imbuing them with a vitality they rarely deserve;
all those click-bait pages telling you how you can’t live without them. Since
the word ‘essential’ was attached to entirely unnecessary things back in the
80s, ancient artisan lore has been repackaged as if it were newly discovered intelligence
from a distant galaxy.
The knowledge that was once handed down in the family now
appears as revealed texts from the lost books of ancient cultures, otherwise
known as the Internet; the place where everybody goes to slap each other on the
back, form cult-like echo chambers and invent ever more ridiculous shorthand
for perfectly normal things. Stick an ‘i’ or an ‘e’ in front of a perfectly
ordinary doohickie and watch it become an overnight sensation of new-age awesomeness.
Likewise, in social discourse, there has always been an
inter-generational disconnect, the young necessarily wanting to confound and
conceal from their elders the exciting [perfectly normal] things they are
getting up to. The invention of new words, or the recycling of very old ones is
nothing new. And thus ‘chillin’ makes idleness sound productive, just as some have convinced themselves that ‘social media influencer’ is a worthwhile way of
avoiding a real job.
Words are also used as weapons and an annoying interlocutor
can be dismissed as a racist, a fascist, or even go for the jugular with a 'literally Hitler'. One of the interesting ways in which the demented left is currently
tackling their cognitive dissonance over the embracing of islam – an ideology entirely
at odds with everything they think they believe in – is to pretend that the
biggest threat to society right now is far right extremism.
They label everything they can’t comprehend as ‘far right’
without the slightest consideration of what they believe the far right to be.
(If you examine the ‘far right’ you’ll find it is,
essentially, communism with more tattoos.) This would be absolutely fine, if
everybody possessed the intellect to rise above it and see it for the hollow
and insubstantial branding it really is. We all do it, by the way, left and
right, old and young alike.
Governments do it too, and then it gets problematic. In an
effort to communicate with the hoi polloi, government spokesmen and women alter
their speech patterns and use words in ways that perfectly illustrate how unfamiliar
they are with them. Politicians never look less in control of their brief than
when they try to adopt the accents and idiom of ‘the youth’ with whom
they are trying to connect. When Tony Blair took off his tie, it was meant to
signal ‘look at me; I’m just like you!’, but when he compounded this with his
adoption of the glottal stop he just came over as yet another plank trying to con
the masses.
And of course we’re doing it all over again with the
pandemic. Already today I have seen doctors trying to persuade people to have
the vaccination being described as Nazis. Terms like ‘clotshot’ and ‘killer
vaccine’ only serve to over-simplify everything while revealing your
credentials to all who read. On the other side, it transpires, shorthand such
as 'anti-vaxxer' and 'rabid conspiracy theorist' enrages many who may have perfectly legitimate grounds for
their caution.
The truth doesn’t seem to matter in any of this, and the adoption of the right collection of phrases identifies you as being on one side or the other just as readily as does a badge or a placard. It seems to be a default setting for Human Mk 1, to coin a phrase, but I’m not convinced it is all that helpful. I’m even suspicious that some people take up a side based on which has the cooler language, the slicker patois, rather than what that side actually stands for. There’s nowt so queer as folk.
There has always been an uneasy relationship between
dreams and reality. What we want and what we can achieve are not – as the
inspirational speakers suggest – one and the same. “All you have to do is to
believe in yourself and you can be whatever you want to be.” That’ the mantra, but
it is as flawed as flawed can be. Yes, if you are a gifted and enthusiastic
athlete, with the right musculature, nervous system, drive and training, you
might get to compete in the Olympics. And then get beaten by a man in a
dress.
The multicultural dream must have seemed like an ideal
solution to everything, to the twonks who dreamed it up. Just imagine an
incredible blend of all the talents, all the flair, all the vibrant cultural
contributions; all mixed up to add zest to our national ambitions. But while academic professionals, experts in their fields, with a secular attitude to life and a
hunger for knowledge might mingle well, the reality for many is sheer misery.
Unmanaged immigration has brought squalor, graft, modern slavery and terror to
our shores.
The Covid affair was a golden opportunity for Boris
Johnson’s government to unite the country against a common enemy. Surely, if we
all clap for the NHS, mask up, sanitise and socially distance for a few weeks,
we can not only beat this thing, but beat it together. But, after a dismal
series of confusing advice, U-turns, clarifications followed by reverse
clarifications, well look where we are. When it had a chance to show strong
leadership, Project Boris turned an opportunity into a disaster.
And then there is the dash for Net-Zero. Oh my. Forget
Covid, immigration, transactivism and all the rest. This is the Daddy of unworkable
ambition. The ending of the sale of gas boilers by 2035 has been pushed to
2040. As I recall, they were intending to ban them over a decade ago. Why the shifted
goalpost? Because the date, plucked no doubt from thin air by a pimply pre-pubescent
government advisor, was unrealistic from the start.
But if that seems like good news, the all-consuming
obsession with electric transport appears to be more rabid than ever. Why? After
all, we could reduce our actual man-made carbon output to actual zero if we
simply became extinct in some Jonestown-like national suicide pact, but it
would make not one jot of difference. The Chinese economy alone would probably
absorb any reduction we made within a week.
As an example of unrealistic ambition versus achievable
reality this has to be up there. When MPs voted for the 80% reduction by 2050
target demanded by the Climate Change Act, back in 2008 many probably assumed
that 40 years was enough time to develop the technology and change the
behaviours. More importantly, they judged that it was far enough ahead that
the fallout would be mopped up by their successors. But in 2019, like a loser
at the table, they doubled-down on their gamble and said, “80%? Pah! Let’s shed
the lot!”
Why do we live in this artificial world of hyperbole,
where every normal thing is amazing and everybody deserves to ‘live their truth’,
regardless of ability to achieve it? When people talk of ‘holding the
government to account’ they then do nothing whatsoever to actually achieve that
aim. Instead they reel off a few slogans, pat themselves on the back, promote each other way beyond
their competence and label it achievement. And then reward it further, by elevation to
the Lords.
With every illusory sleight of hand, by governments, by ‘influencers’, by wannabes like Femi Oluwole, who inflate their relevance and imagine themselves into a job, we are slowly losing our grip on the here and now, the cold, hard facts. Unreality TV, vacuous ‘slebs’, the endorsing of anti-heroes and vaunting ambition all serve to blur people’s understanding of their limits. Within your means, yes, you should strive to be all you can. But for fuck’s sake, let’s get real again and recognise when we just have to get on with it, recover our sanity, and make do with what we’ve got.
So much for The Great Reset. The hideously complex wish
list of the World Economic Forum never had a chance of getting off the ground.
It looks like nothing more than a tidied-up mind-map (another faddish nonsense)
resulting from a drug-fuelled weekend among idealists and crazies… and people
with far too great a regard for their own influence and power. As a unifying,
totalitarian plan for the future it was only ever pie in the sky.
Yes, influencers operate throughout society; from the shouty
bloke down the pub, through the fleeting fame of celebrities spouting new age drivel,
to the very heart of governments. Your offspring inform you of the imperatives
of the day – climate change, human rights, trans activism, socialism, and so
on, and you listen indulgently. Government spokespeople spout jargonistic new
initiatives to revolutionise society itself. But the ultimate success of change
agents has to be measured by results.
And the results are far from the overarching centralised
power so many warn against. And look at who is doing the warning: The clearly
deranged Kate Shemirani, the serial nutjob David Icke, and Jeremy Corbyn’s even
madder older brother. Yes, there are more credible dissenters out there –
scientists and doctors and even politicians – but, far from being silenced,
they are being heard. Over and over again. In fact, we her little else.
Boris Johnson’s lunatic advisors have come up with some barely
credible ideas to ‘save the planet’, but they have been rebuffed and ridiculed as
they should be, and nobody has yet been jailed for rinsing their dishes before putting
them in the dishwasher. Only today it has been announced that the date for replacing gas boilers has been
pushed back another five years. To my recollection this is the fourth or fifth time
that unrealistic ambition has been postponed.
All I am saying is what I have been saying – and seeing –
for years. As little as you think your vote matters, collectively we actually
do influence what governments do. They need to be re-elected at some point but
in between elections they float the wildest of ideas, possibly in the full
awareness that these are just pipe dreams, and I am sure that sometimes they
are surprised by what is accepted and what is rejected. We might not get what we think we voted for individually, but we do end up with what a collective voter base elects.
The plain truth is that we all have our ideas about how
we would rule the world, ideas that receive a big slap in the face should we
dare to air them. Try it for yourself; make a bold statement on social media of
the way forward and see the alacrity of those who leap in to tear down your
ideas. This is exactly what appears to be happening around every part of the
agenda for this proposed great reset. The bits that stand up will be accepted
and adopted. The rest will just be abandoned.
Governments, especially democracies, have a terrible
track record in enacting controlled change, no matter how benevolent their
intentions. (I really don’t subscribe to the biblical notion of ‘evil’, and
never have.) Of far greater efficacy are the movements started by charismatic
individuals, as incredible as they may be. I was reminded today of Joseph Smith,
who claimed to have been visited by God and as a result founded the Mormon
Church. Now, that is crazy, but today there are over 16 million of them, all
following a made-up religion. (For the avoidance of any doubt, all religions
are inventions of man.)
I’m not alarmed at all. I remain unconcerned about
all the clamour in the world today. People are rejecting perfectly good advice
and believing the outlandish. But at the same time, other people are listening
to alternative voices to the official channels, some of which are undoubtedly
sound, while some of the official advice has been shown to be unreliable. How do
you decide what is correct and what is not? I suspect we are are all driven more by apparent consensus than fact, no matter how much we tell ourselves otherwise.
On every subject of concern – climate change, Covid, communism, energy, population, social engineering, and so on and so on – there are as many opinions as there are individuals. An argument that appears to hold water today will be dismissed tomorrow and in a week you may be amazed you ever endorsed it. This will never change, but, as for the much-vaunted great reset, it’s already been reset. Well done, you freedom warriors, you!
There are a lot of screechy voices about at the moment,
stirring up unrest and unease and creating a climate of hysterical fear. “It’s
all about control. It’s about influencing behaviour! The elites want you
compliant and controlled!” Put like that it certainly seems sinister but wasn’t
it always thus? What government doesn’t want a population who generally behave responsibly,
pay their taxes and stay out of trouble? What employer doesn’t want a workforce
that turns up on time and does what is expected?
And don’t we all engage in influencing behaviour throughout
our lives? Most parents school their young to be good little humans, don’t
they? We alter our own behaviour in order to influence others when we want them
to like us, to buy from us, or when we perceive a threat to our safety. We seek
to influence political direction by using our votes – and political agents seek
to influence us to give our vote to one party or another.
It’s move and counter move – whenever ‘alternative’ ‘free
thinking’ movements spring up it isn’t long before the emblems of individuality
become mass produced and turn into uniforms. It happens all the time. In fact,
it would be extremely odd if governments weren’t trying to
influence our behaviour – to lead more productive lives, to be better educated,
to look after our health better, to be more resilient to changing circumstances.
Save more, exercise more, spend more, play more; for goodness sake, be happier!
And just because you want to believe you are being
coerced negatively doesn’t mean you are or you aren’t. Your dog spits out its medicine
and views you with suspicion. Your cat goes into hiding when it spies the
dreaded vet cage. Your kids ‘hate’ you when you deny them their ‘human rights’
to do whatever they want to do. And yet all you want is the best for them. Is it not
possible that governments are just behaving as you do yourself?
Humanity is possibly defined by its deliberate attempts
to engineer consensus – the lion just eats you, but the human persuades you to
eat yourself. A healthy dose of cynicism alerts us to the possibility of harm,
but it doesn’t take much for that to tip over into paranoia, especially when
you can go online and find others – plenty of others – who appear to think the
same. The weaponisation of what has been termed ‘motivated reasoning’ has been
well studied in recent years, especially since Trump’s conspiracy-fuelled presidency.
There is a natural human tendency to believe whatever
satisfies our preconceptions, regardless of its veracity, and the Internet is
awash with fodder for the hungry. It has been referred to as an ‘infodemic’, a
preponderance of information, misinformation and deliberate disinformation to satisfy
whatever validation you crave. And some succumb to the collective narcissism
that pervades groups with noble aims to restore ‘freedom’. Who doesn’t want to
be a freedom fighter, eh?
Long after the facts are laid bare, picked over,
interpreted and disseminated, there will be some, perhaps many, who will genuinely
believe that they resisted a sinister new world order attempt to shackle them
to the yoke. It wouldn’t surprise me if the weekend Freedom Marches continue
long after Covid has been forgotten, becoming a regular family day out
for the disaffected. We do, after all, seem to have become a nation of
protesters of late.
Believe whatever you wish, but just think about the smorgasbord of plate-ready theories out there for your perusal. Wherever you look, somebody is busy joining the dots, exposing the deceits, aligning the planets, waking up, or just plain making mischief. Why should you adopt just one theory when there are so many to choose from? And hey, with a bit of creativity, maybe you, too, can come up with a new twist? A customised madness, all to yourself.
The country has largely forgotten about ‘Tommy Robinson’,
the controversial but undoubtedly brave man who spoke up against muslim provocation and violence and paid a heavy price for it. You may – irrationally – hate the man
(hatred is an irrational and emotional response which benefits nobody) but he
was emblematic of the need to stand up against a tide of frightening change, a
change evidently unchallenged by those whose role it is to keep us all safe.
Naturally, the powers that be were, and remain, horrified
by his very existence. In the complete absence of action on their part, how
dare this upstart be capable of galvanising others into forming a resistance?
How dare somebody – a low, uncouth somebody at that – say the things that must
not be said? How dare an unelected figurehead do the things the elected dare not do?
Whatever you think of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon he did
command the floor at the Oxford Union, having been invited there to be made a
figure of ridicule. He engaged with a number of muslim groups, mostly hostile
to him, in order to better understand what was happening. He was set up, time
after time, and he was provoked far too often, as he later recognised himself, to
physically fight back. But he learned from this.
He was very publicly vilified, long after he denounced the
English Defence League, which he acknowledged had attracted the wrong type of
people and had the wrong type of approach. If you wish to meet violence with
violence you need the forces of state on your side, something he never had. Indeed,
there was a prolonged period when it seemed that the police were under orders
to prevent him from having anything approaching a normal life.
As a result of concerted actions by the police
themselves, various disturbing muslim activist groups such as Tell Mama and
Hate not Hope he was harangued and harassed wherever he went. He was denied
platforms, as one by one his social media accounts were shut down. He was
jailed several times, often on grounds which seemed tenuous at best, and
appeared to be handed down sentences far in excess, one imagines, of those that
would be dealt to a muslim transgressor. Hell, there is no doubt about it; he
was targeted by agents of the state.
Not to defend him, because he did do some stupid,
vainglorious things, but for what it is worth I tend to be on his side. What he
is against is something we should all be against. How he went about it might not seem
wise, but how many of us would have carried on, as he has, in pursuit of something
he believes in? He has had his family life wrecked, been made bankrupt and had
his ability to earn an honest living effectively taken away.
Why am I writing this now, when everybody has quietly
forgotten all about him? He is in the news again because he has been landed with ridiculously
high costs in his latest unequal brush with the law. Ask yourself whether a
single penny would have been demanded had the adversaries in this case been the
other way round. Or, you know, don’t bother; you have probably already adopted
a position on the man you hate as Yaxley-Lennon.
Was he seeking a place in history? Maybe, I think part of
him is driven by the modern obsession with fame. Is he a far-right terrorist,
as many will claim? I don’t think so; the term terrorist is applied far too
readily by security forces determined to pretend there is a balanced threat to
society. Is he really just a nasty thuggish piece of work? Quite possibly, at
the start of this crusade, but I think he has become thoughtful and genuinely
concerned and has grown into somebody with real, useful insights into this
struggle, who ought to at least be listened to.
I caught a tiny bit of Nigel Farage on GB News,
interviewing a representative of Amnesty over the influx of migrants via the
dinghy flotilla which daily arrives on our shores. Naturally, Mr Amnesty had no
questions to ask regarding the legitimacy of theses arrivals, claiming that at
least two-thirds will be found to have legally defensible claims to asylum. The
rest, of course, he will leave to the inertia of our immigration system,
knowing they will be given leave to remain and then conveniently forgotten
about.
Local residents in Kent are appalled, with many feeling they are
under an invasion which is not being appropriately met by the British
government. But, if reports are to be believed, Boris Johnson himself regards
illegal immigrants as ‘future taxpayers’ if only they can be given the right to
reside here as British citizens. There are many wrongs in that statement alone,
but it feeds into a fundamentally false economic premise that we need mass
immigration. We don’t.
For every legitimate, cultured, educated refugee who
seeks asylum, integrates into British society and becomes a net contributor to
the nation’s wealth and wellbeing, there are untold thousands who bring us nothing.
Even a net-neutral taxpayer (somebody who pays just under £10k per year in tax
and national insurance - salary around £43k) only has to produce a single child to create a net cost
for the next 20 years. (And the children of a certain culture rarely go on to become high achievers.)
The Malthusians may well be right, and a far better way
of managing affairs might be to limit the population, concentrating on
bettering the skills of those who are capable of using their minds and better rewarding
those who are most suited to using their hands. I grew up in a Britain where an
average-wage worker with a nuclear family could afford to buy a house, but
Thatcher’s property-owning democracy seems further away than ever.
The country’s vision and ambitions from the 1980s have
been successively torn up, derided and ditched by a series of governments for
whom the sole purpose of the electorate is to elect them. And it does not look like getting any better, any time soon. The distractions of the covid affair, the
climate crisis, the desire to accuse every Caucasian of racism, and any number
of issues of interest only to vanishingly tiny minorities have not changed the
clear reality that Britain has fallen.
People like Mr Amnesty and all the other generally
leftist forces are engaged in a campaign to legitimise mass immigration from
unhelpful, backward cultures as some noble mission. Almost all of these
migrants are muslims, fleeing muslim regimes, but they bring the thinking of those
regimes with them. Rapists don’t care if the children they rape have
progressive parents; if the women they abuse campaigned to bring them here; if
the taxpayer they vow to subjugate pay more each year to feed their own enormous
broods. They don't care; we, their benefactors, are also the dirty infidels they despise.
At the same time as western leaders ignore the pleas of their people and bring in ever more sub-minimum wage, kebab-economy, unskilled ingrates in the name of a ‘skills shortage’, we are seeing other thinkers heralding the age of AI and automation making labour near obsolete. So, what will we do with the tens of millions of adherents of islam when there is no longer any work to keep their beheading hands occupied? We really need to think again.
As the heralded end to Covid restrictions has come and
gone and predictably under-delivered, the chatter turns to the carnage caused
by the continuance of test and trace. As an idea to prevent the spread of
infection it has laudable aims. But given the choice, many will refuse to use
it, or else ignore its advice. If you get paid by the hour and you can’t work
from home and you have mouths to pour food into, why would you respond to a
machine telling you to self-isolate when you are fit enough to put in a shift?
When it comes to doing your duty by your country you have
to be persuaded that your sacrifice is worth it. For a great many, protecting a
third party from a harm which seems slight and a probability which is small,
sacrificing your ability to make a living is too high a price to pay. Men who
would lay down their lives for their country are unconvinced that staying off
work to protect Janice in the office from getting a sniffle is a noble effort that
anybody will recognise or reward.
Underlying all the chaos is the burgeoning suspicion that
something is off. We couldn’t afford social care yet the government put half
the workforce on furlough for a year. We can’t build enough houses for our own people
but we continue to import hundreds of thousands of migrants, many of whom will breed
but never work. The wearing of Christian religious symbology is considered offensive
to muslims, but mass gang rape by muslims is excused as a mere cultural foible.
It goes on: the vanishingly small proportion who are
genuinely transgender are treated like royalty, but women who don’t want biological
men in their private spaces are vilified as hate campaigners. Statues of historical
benefactors are torn down and tributes to violent criminals installed in their
place. And everywhere across the left the madness of critical race theory has
driven white academics insane while black activists have become power-crazed.
The world is pretty mental right now, with the west
appearing to fight many battles on many ever-shifting fronts. So it is little wonder
that people, driven batty by lockdowns and masks and social distancing and unfathomable
‘bubbles’ are looking for reasons. And you don’t have to look very far; Twitter
appears to be operating as a machine to generate irrationality.
Every political event is imbued with meaning; every meeting
of leaders and every photocall open to alternative interpretations. Rumours are
treated as facts then fetishised as absolutes. And every possible distortion of
history is deployed to demonstrate how this is not only orchestrated, but has
been in play for decades if not centuries. I am frankly surprised that
Nostradamus isn’t credited with predicting it all, nay starting it all.
Social media has become an even more toxic environment
than before with any position open to challenge, including no position at all. Shoehorns
are being pressed into service to make the wackiest of intentions somehow fit
events as observed. And it all comes down to how you view the balance of power
and how it affects liberties most of us have never exercised. My life has
hardly been affected, but that isn’t good enough, it seems.
What is absolutely clear, however, is that the whole
truth will never be known, but even if it was, the myths will persist to
obscure it. Some people will grow old believing they have been victims of a global
plot to suppress their life chances and will likely hold such grudges to the
grave. But just look at it all. For a plot it is pretty aimless. For a tool for
control it is all pretty blunt. As a plan to depopulate it has proved hopelessly
inefficient.
Whatever you think is ‘really’ going on and for whatever reasons you can surmise, what is utterly lacking is a unifying theory which explains everything. Well, I think I have one, and it is this. While there are some pretty nasty people in the world and there are those who seek to exploit others, governments are neither as omnipotent nor competent as any of them would like to believe. Governments don’t so much act as react. And there’s been this bug going around.
As the foolish footballing farrago of imaginary hate
crime continues to dribble on, the conclusion held, it seems, by all politicians
and other bloviating commentators is that we are all racists now. It’s
official. And, of course, like every fad, once everybody has got one it ceases
to hold any allure. So it is that the rabid pursuit of offence in every single
thing has ended up at the only destination possible; Ladies and gentlemen we will shortly be arriving at Worthlessness.
And yet embedded, institutional, systemic, structural racism is on every
media tongue. It is touted by the newspapers, by the broadcasters and most
especially by social media. Once again, the commentariat misses the point. It’s
too late, it’s over, it is yesterday's grievance. Like I imagine a majority of
ordinary folk, I am less concerned about racism with every day that passes.
Leveraged to gain overtly political advantages, it has ceased to have any
relevance beyond the cringing, chattering classes who have boarded the guilt
train. No guilt here, and as far as I’m concerned BL simply don't M.
But the bandwagon still has a lingering momentum, as it lurches downhill and trundles towards the gutter of history. Just as with a cornered rat,
fighting for life, the struggles and screeches of the race justice warriors become
ever more frenzied, ever more strident, as they lose purchase. A few decades
ago racism was firmly on the retreat as most people accepted we had a mix of
ethnicities in our national make up, but that we were all people after all. But
a gradual slide into harmony wasn’t enough for some.
When racism has become a minority proclivity, what is the
point of ‘anti-racism’? All it does is create pretend victims in order to
foment outrage. But it has overplayed its hand and nobody believes it any
more. It is like hope-not-hate which clumsily tries to pour opprobrium over
anybody who dares to criticise islam – ersatz blasphemy law in action. Saying
you are an anti-racist is not saying you are not a racist; it is saying you
have signed up to that new religion of self-loathing, hair shirt wearing
anti-white activism.
As an overt ‘anti-racist’ you are literally judging people by the colour of their skin. You are judging those almost 100% non-racist white people to be the opposite of what they are. In fact, you are judging them to be just like you when in reality they are better than you. Not through any entitled, anti-racist, nonsense term such as ‘white privilege; they are better than you because they don’t judge you, they pity you your poverty of ambition. They pity you for your adopted victimhood.
Yesterday, somebody resurrected the text of Boris Johnson’s infamous Piccaninnies article, in which he was taking the piss out of Saint Tony Blair, casting him in the guise of the great white saviour of colonial times, bestriding the globe and bringing salvation to the dusky inhabitants of less enlightened continents. For those who are interested, this article is a handy read because it sets out quite simply why there is nothing to see here.
But the truth has no place in the discourse of racism. And the abandonment of historical racism is a truth which will not be acknowledged, no matter how long ago. Imagining that they have a superweapon against which the ‘far right’ have no defence, the term racist is used on every occasion to stifle debate. But you know what, fuck them; fuck them all. If the price for being the boy in the crowd is to be slagged off as a racist, bring it on. Marcus Wotsisname is... English. There, I said it, and I don’t care who knows.
The rebels failed to block the government's intention to
do something the electorate actually welcomes – slashing the foreign aid
budget. When I say ‘the electorate’ I, of course, refer to the majority of the
population, those people whose votes put governments into power but whose opinions
thereafter are unsolicited and routinely ignored. If governments could do away
with elections altogether they probably would.
But there are other people with votes. Many fewer people
but with more important votes – they think – than the lowly hoi polloi. These
far more worthy, far more moral people often hold views which are incompatible
with the masses they rule over. Every few years they court the power-giving
votes of the great unwashed; we’re listening, they say, but we won’t remember
what you said after we take charge.
And then they spend our collective money without asking
whether we want it spent. To justify foreign aid they talk of soft power. We
are buying influence, they say, we are standing tall on the world stage, we are
oiling the wheels of international trade. Well, if we have something worth
trading why do we need to offer bribes? Who are we trying to influence and why?
Have they never noticed that those despotic regimes they prop up in return for
arms sales actually hate us?
Foreign aid, they say, is a small price to pay to retain
our standing, and to assist the poorest people in the world. Well, how about
dealing with the poorest people in the UK first? Show us how buying gold-plated
Mercedes for corrupt dictators translates into roofs over the heads of our
homeless. Show us how, for every cruise missile B.O.G.O.F. token we send abroad
exactly how much is poured into UK social care.
Why not be open about it, instead of deciding that we mere voters will never understand how oh-so-clever you all are? You never know, a little bit of honesty could go a long, long way. But what am I saying? Despite all the talk of transparency over the last few decades the machinations of government are as opaque as ever. I get that there must be secrets; I don’t get why we often appear to reward those who despise us before we take care of our own.
If the politicians can’t see it, the electorate is all too aware of the
massive disconnect between power and the people, and foreign aid is just
another one of those policies which appears to be a one-way, wrong-way street. We open the door to invasive immigration, we create dependencies we can't afford. We are less safe, not more secure, as a result of some of our foreign policy.
Those worthies who wish to continue funding foreign despots can always throw their money at the innumerable charities founded to do exactly that. They can see the larger part of their personal donations pour into the greedy pockets of the directors, and maybe in doing so they will experience the dismay the rest of us see when the taxes we have no choice about paying are frittered away. For the majority, however, charity must surely begin at home.
In 1966, while queuing for an ice cream I overheard the football
World Cup final score on somebody's transistor radio and went back to tell the family. I don’t
remember being jubilant, elated, or any other emotion, I just remember hearing
the news and passing the information back to the others on the
beach. I was 8 years old. I imagine I was pleased but I truly don’t recall.
I’ve never been a massive football fan; a bit crappy as a
schoolboy and, if truth be told, never all that much of a team player. It strikes
me that teams work best under firm leadership and an ordered hierarchy, whereas
in business and politics, in society itself, teamwork is often invoked when in
reality it is very much dog-eat-dog; the individual gets the glory, but praising
the team is seen as part of the ritual.
Most people are not really in teams, no matter how much
the word is used; you get on with your job, your life and you generally succeed
or fail all on your own. But in sport it has to be different; a bunch of talented
individuals will rarely win against a disciplined and practised team effort. From
school side to local club to the Premier League, people adopt, at various
removes, a vicarious sharing of the prizes.
And in international sport the national team becomes emblematic
of the nation itself. This may be at the heart of the English problem. We don’t
want the team to represent politics, social strife, or egalitarianism; we just
want the win. We don’t want footballers as social commentators, as saints or shining
examples. We just want them to be damned good at the game and to bring home the
trophies.
I don’t really know much about football; I don’t much care. But
over the years I have become less invested in the national game as I have seen
how much it seems to mean to people I don’t think I would thankful to team up with.
I don’t know the players and I lack the lexicon to pontificate over a pint
about how much better the match would have gone had I been in charge (unlike so
many armchair coaches and managers.
But I do feel qualified to comment on the use of sport in
politics and my view is quite simple; it should play no part. I know that’s a
forlorn and naïve hope and sport will be used to any political end to which it
can be bent, but it is tedious and predictable when it happens. Last night,
today, the air is rent with cries of racism. Oh, give me a break.
Why do people not realise that professional sportsmen, while they may be physically at the peak of their powers, rarely possess the intellect and grace to speak for the nation? While mature thought and an educated world view is not beyond their ultimate reach, it is way beyond the credible grasp of a man-child who plays a game for a living. By putting an agenda not supported by all front and centre, the so-called beautiful game can turn very ugly indeed.
What I like about humans is… Oh, wait, that blog would
end right here. I mean, what I find curious about humans is their readiness to
respond emotively to a topic without thinking first. I noticed two things this
morning which prompted me to tweet. The first was the reaction to Katharine Birbalsingh
by angry people determined to paint her excellent schooling approach as some
form of cruelty. The second was an impassioned outburst by Neil Oliver about vaccinating
children, or, rather, not.
Both stirred the cultists who treat children as idols to
be worshipped, to engage in some good old traditional online abuse. The hatred
in some comments was quite visceral, as people decided to project their own interpretations
onto the argument and, as usual on social media, reason was the first casualty.
So, abandoning reason myself I tweeted out what I thought was a simple enough
question: “Why do people revere children above all? Seems odd to me.”
Actually, I did know what I was inviting. I’ve done The
Twitter for a while now, so all I had to do was sit back and let people assume
I was having a pop at kids when in fact I was asking about the way in which
many adults lose their mind when it comes to children. I quickly lost count of
all the “children are the future” replies – the go-to aphorism whenever this
subject is raised. So let’s do that first.
The future just is. Tomorrow is the future, and the day
after, and so on. The existence of kids is entirely irrelevant. Of course,
without progeny the human race would die out at some time in that future, but
the future of the planet need not include all species. There is something selfish
about the assumption that the world needs homo sapiens, and there is a growing
opinion (much of it from children) that Earth would be better off without.
Ah, but, they explain, without children we won’t have future
adults who will forge ahead with the human project. True, but they won’t be
children then, will they? Childhood and how it is handled, is a costly
investment in our future society; this is also true. Why then, do people get so emotive
when those few, like Katharine, seek to optimise that investment? And why do
largely the same people get angry at the prospect of seeking to protect those
children from disease?
I just feel that when it comes to children many lose
their objectivity altogether. In earlier times, parents were demanding
vaccination. Now, largely due to the ridiculous amount of information, misinformation,
disinformation and opinion out there people think they are making informed
choices when in fact those choices are anything but rational.
I’m not taking a side on the vaccination thing on which I remain obstinately and honestly ignorant. That isn’t what this is about, so I won’t respond to any vaccine-related replies. What it is about is the propensity of humans to jump to conclusions and adopt positions based not on facts, but on emotions. This may not be the best way to order our affairs, but I concede it is the human way. And I reserve the right to remain curious about it.
Is it just me, or is Angela Rayner actually very stupid indeed?
Famously leaving school with more children than GCSEs (not that GCSEs are in
any way indicative of intelligence or reason) she has spent the run up to the
Batley and Spen by-election positioning herself as Leader-in-Waiting. I say ‘positioning
herself’ but is it really ‘being manipulated by Momentum as a useful idiot for
a power grab’?
Voted into the Deputy Leader position by the unions, she
is a poor running mate for Keir Starmer, who needs no assistance at all in
appearing vacuous and policy-free. Because,, of course, that is Labour’s
current offering to the electorate, isn’t it? Vot us into power and we will vacillate,
procrastinate and wave whatever flags you order us to wave while doing absolutely
nothing whatsoever for fear of upsetting the lengthening list of ‘the usual
suspects’.
But Rayner? Clumping about wearing the shoes of a teenager
and defending that style decision with breathless lack of comprehension she
makes Little Britain’s Vicky Pollard look like an exemplar of incisive decision
making. Yeah, but, no, bu’ yer, bu’ no… or sumfin’ or noffin’ or wha’ever… It
is almost as if the Labour Party are conducting an experiment – inspired,
perhaps by BLM, Shola Mugabe Umbongo, the LGBTQI+++ set and others – to see
just how far hey can go before the boy in the crowd plays the ‘emperor naked’
card.
You would have to utterly cultified, incredibly dumb or otherwise
incapable of independent thought to be able to imagine her, for one second,
occupying the post formerly taken by Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher.
And can you just imagine her on the world stage? Or at the palace? “Yer wha’
yer Majesteh?” The crypt in Westminster Abbey must be practically humming as former
statesmen spin wildly in their tombs.
Keir Starmer is, of course, hopeless. Forensically
failing to lay a glove on the hapless Boris Johnson, Captain Hindsight is scarcely
a challenge – the next election is Johnson’s to lose. But can you imagine even
a die-hard communist voting for the flame-haired fishwife unless they somehow
believed that they would among the ones to pull her strings? (In which case,
they would be even bigger useful idiots then Anj-er-ler herself.)
Of course, whoever leads the Labour Party into the next election already has a fifth columnist ally in place. The fecund and famously cock-led Johnson will, it seems, stop at nothing to bankrupt the country in the name of environmental justice. When you can no longer afford to drive, heat your homes or pay your electricity bill, power cuts notwithstanding, even you may be tempted to give Labour another go…
In the end a mere 323 votes put a weak and lacklustre Conservative candidate in second place behind a woman whose only credentials to stand were a dead sister, martyred in Labour folklore, and her out sexuality which is the kind of identity candidate Labour love to promote. Either way it’s a lose for the electorate in Batley and Spen. Keir Starmer’s feigned glee cannot hide the dire state of left-wing politics in the west.
Torn between standing true to their traditional values, or
abandoning former voters for the kaleidoscope of special interests competing
for attention, the last twenty years of Labour has been a downward spiral of mediocrity.
You can’t court the muslim vote by standing a candidate whose very existence is
anathema to them. And you can’t unite the working classes by berating them and sowing
division. Starmer’s throne is as unstable as ever, I’d say
If anything, Labour won by the ballots which were not
cast. No matter the fervour of the metropolitan news media, no matter how the
chattering classes were billing this as a pivotal by-election, less than half
of those eligible to vote bothered to turn up. I suspect that large among the
abstainers were thousands of die-hard ex-Labour voters who would never vote
Tory in a million years. They think their silence speaks, but it only speaks
against them.
In yet another stronghold, the walls of the keep have
worn ever thinner; at the next general election this constituency is far from
safe and a few strong moves from Johnson, the People’s Philanderer, may be all
it takes to swing the mood. Labour is far from secure and the leadership far
from settled. I pity the party for its dearth of talent; awash with every kind
of queer, there is not a single saleable policy in sight.
But the Tories have nothing to feel smug about; on every
front they are looking less like a popular choice and more like a punishment
beating for the plebs. On immigration, a massive issue for many millions of
Brits who feel completely abandoned, Priti Patel is proving impotent and increasingly
desperate. Nobody is falling for the rhetoric when they see the daily shuttle
service from the continent, followed by the slick reception process.
On the pandemic, no matter the medical realities, people
have just had enough, and the mood is such that many will willingly risk
infection just to be able to get back to normal. Of course, if lockdown is
lifted completely and the death rate rises dramatically, Sajid Javid will probably
be blamed. But if the opening up proves inconsequential most people will assume
the government panicked over lockdown in the first place. There is no win for
government here.
Green, build-back-better policies are going to make some
people (who will almost certainly be portrayed as Tory cronies) extremely rich
at the expense of the majority. Save the planet but lose the country. Every
measure put forward involves massive disruption and cost for marginal
environmental gains. I’m still waiting to see a joined up strategy, but all I
see is more misery for the workers.
Batley and Spen has proved a damp squib. No big upset, no
seismic change in the direction of the public discourse, just a sizzling out of
a briefly ferocious conflagration. Nothing to see here, really, please move on.
As always, for all the heroic talk, for all the bluster, nothing is going to
change. And I still don’t know or care – nobody does - who the Tory candidate was.
Batley and Spen, an electoral constituency unknown to most,
pre-referendum, yet now pivotal in the fight for… for what, exactly? Of course,
Labour will court the muslim vote because Labour is the party of islam, fully
signed up as it is to the demands of the muslim Council of Britain. The mCB [lower case intentional]
has a series of pledges which, while intended to sound innocuous, spell the end for white rule in the United
Kingdom, as sure as mohammed is a savage, goat-fucking, child rapist, presumably
the model followed by far too many of his adoring fans.
Some of those pledges explained:
1. Tackle racism and
islamophobia – this means, define perfectly normal fears of displacement as
racist and keep on playing the race card despite every rational attempt to
explain that islam is not a race.
2. Religious liberty - Defend the
right of muslims – and people of all faiths – to express their faith. This is
disingenuous because islam has exactly zero concern for people of other faiths.
4. Safety at places of worship
– as with pledge 2 this means to confer special privileges on muslim
communities so they can play the adhān at all times via vast PA systems and let
the British know, in no uncertain terms that they have been conquered.
6. Refugees – oh yes, and more
and faster. Not any old refugees though, but those ‘fleeing’ the countries they
turned into shitholes, so they can turn this country into a shithole. And,
10. Ethical Foreign Policy –
fucking Palestine, every time.
So, of the bigger challenges which face the modern world
in the coming decades there is one more existential than all the others and it
is the prospect of the death of the west at the hands of islam. But not from
any marauding horde storming the beaches and scaling the heights. Instead, under
the guise of multiculturalism, successive governments have refused to address the
islamic elephant and have instead punished British people for speaking out.
And by British people I do mean non-muslims, because
there can never be any allegiance before islam for the inbred savages who use
the rape of young girls to demonstrate just how untouchable they are. This is
not asylum seeking; they are not escaping from islamic persecution, but quite
deliberately colonising in the name of islamic barbarity, as their faith demands.
Never forget that islam means submission, for there will be peace only when
every dissenting voice is silenced.
Batley & Spen is one place where they have openly shown
their intentions and bared their teeth, daring to threaten even the party which
supports them. It is one of many but watch as the process accelerates. There is
now a barely sub-critical mass for the caliphatisation of this country and
emboldened by the total lack of action, they will rise up everywhere they can
bring their numbers, secure in the knowledge that the police will protect them
from British resistance and punish those who refuse to submit.
The mCB and its soldiers are intent on punishing Labour for disobeying their orders; they now feel confident enough to win even without Labour, for whichever party gets in, that constituency will still be controlled by the sheiks. And this isn’t just the start, it began in earnest over two decades ago. In fact, worse than that, it started when islam itself cast its dark shadow on the world. This is war, it always has been; and there really is no other word for it.
Throughout the whole Covid thing I have been a sceptic.
Medical affairs have never interested me anyway and I always zone out whenever
such things are discussed. Cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer’s… the maladies of the age hold
little fascination for me and I pretty much take my chances; I don’t go out of
my way to invite illness and I do as I am advised whenever – which is rarely -
I am afflicted.
But for some, health is a lifelong crusade and the NHS
and its reaction to epidemics has always been a political game for a
significant number of the population. Many parents, I observe, have become so
used to the recent idea that freedom from all illness is some sort of human
right, that some abrogate all responsibility to educate their charges, relying
instead on the machinery of state to fix everything. Others are so consumed by the
spectre of future guilt that government funded prophylactics are rejected out of
hand.
This is not to belittle parental concern, more to set up
the thesis that there is no single right answer; as with all matters human: “Yes,
we are all individuals”. I have never thought the Covid threat particularly
serious, having survived similar infections on many, regular, occasions. And as
for the implications that it is a sinister killer disease unleashed to decimate
the population, well, they’re going to have to do better than that. A current counter-rumour
is that is just a re-branding of seasonal illnesses – hay fever, influenza, etc
– in order to instil alarm and fear. To what end, I ask?
But anyway, we have far bigger threats than Covid –
immigration from the third world is set to overwhelm the welfare systems of
Europe, systems which are already creaking at the seams trying to cater just
for their own citizens. And governments are cocking a deaf un at entreaties
from those same concerned citizens, afraid that their rights are to be reduced
to mere subsistence after centuries of progress. Import the third world, get
the third world, they say and it certainly seems to be happening in every major
city.
As a direct result, the general breakdown of law and order
stretches the authorities who, once again, seem powerless to control the proliferation
of knife and gun crime at street level. Meanwhile, we are told, organised crime
such as drug and people trafficking, modern-day slavery and fraud are reaching
epidemic proportions of their own. And what is demanded of us? Tolerance for
‘different cultural sensitivities’.
And then there is climate alarmism, driving governments
to adopt policies which will prove ruinously expensive for the vast majority. When
personal transport is unaffordable and public transport is a knife-crime
lottery, when low level work is exclusively the province of the slavers and
many high-end jobs are off-shored and devalued, what then? Where will we be in
a few winters’ time, when people are unable to feed their families and heat
their homes and go to work?
It is hard, when you consider such things to not conclude
that our governments hate us. But I fear it is worse than that. If the government
truly hated us it would be all too apparent and the seeds of revolution would
surely be shown. Instead of a visceral loathing I believe the ruling classes quietly
despise us, as obstacles to reaching their idealistic goals.
As a result, it is all too tempting to simply leave us out of the equation. Western governments seem to have ‘evolved’ from management to management advisers. They have taken the man out of management and replaced it with algorithms that have no regard for humanity. Long ago, the time and motion men took the reward out of skilled craftsmanship; now they are extracting the joy out of life itself. Jam tomorrow? Even that hope has gone.