Holiday Getaway

Well, what a lovely piece of Christmas joy for those who were expecting to have their holiday trips abroad utterly disrupted by the Border Force strikers. It turns out, at least by early reports, that the various branches of the military drafted in to cover have accomplished their mission with aplomb, panache and at a level of efficiency hitherto not experienced by many seasoned travellers.

Remember only weeks ago how the strike apologists smugly forecast that hasty, ‘untrained’ replacements would be incapable of handling the complexity of the job? The Christmas getaway was forecast to bring misery to airline customers, turning them against the government and longing for a return to normality. It turns out that normality was long delays, piss-poor passenger-facing attitudes and incompetence; it is little wonder then that a fighting force, identifying as a unit, brought both humour and professionalism to the grindingly morose procedure.

What an opportunity to closely re-examine many supposedly specialised jobs and hold them up to the scrutiny of common sense. You would imagine that in an atmosphere of anxiety over career prospects, financial security, national debt and poor forecasts for economic growth, organisations would be focused on productivity and competence. But instead of filling the void with training and motivation, they allowed mediocrity to fester and strike-fever to grow.

Maybe people forget that the military constantly train to handle events they may never encounter; adapting is what they do. Dealing with their impending mortality in the face of action develops a camaraderie and a brutal black humour that binds people to a common cause. The creeping wokeness now being infiltrated into the highest levels of command bodes ill; the modern shibboleths of diversity, inclusion, equality and the like should have no part to play. You either fit in, or you fuck off.

This general strike – for regardless of how it is being portrayed a general strike is what it is – is not really an attack on just the government, but an attack on all of us. Our postal service, our travel plans, even our very health are not in good hands even when strikes are not planned. The country as a whole should be sitting upright and taking notice and deciding to reject it all. Being good at your job should be the bare minimum requirement.

Bring it on, son!

And why stop at jobs? The national psyche has been under assault for decades now, from apologising for ending slavery and putting skin colour ahead of ability, paying reparations for bringing civilisation to much of the world, finding offence in every single thing that a British person does or says… I suggest we quit apologising, stop ‘de-colonising’ everything and instead deploy that most British of defiant slogans “Bollocks to that!” I don’t normally make New Year Resolutions, but this year – and I hope you’ll all join me – I intend to be better at being British. Cheers!

To Tonga!

Musing on the existential societal disaster that is cancel culture, wokeism, or whatever else the supposed ‘progressives’ would have it, my mind set to imagine how the world in which I grew up would fare in this particular war. One of the apparent aims of the limp, lukewarm army of social justice activists might be to suck every last drop of joy from life.

If you are unfortunate enough to be a white male today you often feel you are to blame for every evil thing in the world. Without even trying you can offend so many nouveau sensitivities before breakfast that you feel you should be handing yourself in to the authorities. “And while we’re on the subject, your Honour, I would like the following charges to be taken into account: The Crusades, apartheid, climate change, pollution, the Poor Laws. Oh, and all that disgusting racist science.

There isn’t a cultural area in which what once passed for amusement or entertainment or history or the passing on of knowledge would not now be dissected under the scalpel of sour-faced miserablism. Everything you ever laughed at would now be a hate crime, everything you admired is now racist, misogynistic, transphobic… or originated in slavery. Today’s kids are actively been taught to despise our history.

Id’ love to see what would be made of the Tonga Song by Flanders and Swann:

 Oh, it's hard to say...

"Oly-ma-kitty-luca-chi-chi-chi"

But in Tonga, that means... "No"!

If I ever have the money,

'Tis to Tonga I shall go.

For each lovely Tongan maiden there,

Will gladly make a date.

And by the time she's said:

"Oly-ma-kitty-luca-chi-chi-chi",

It is usually too late!

 Can you just imagine the uproar? Clearly, this is rape culture, mixed with a bit of snide racism and no doubt hints towards the trafficking of innocent young woman. This game is easy. We now have so many self-declared special needs groups that pretty much anything written or performed yesterday transgresses the human rights of any number of them today.

Monstrous old rapists!

You have to wonder where it ends. Is this a trend that has run its course, with every new claim now becoming more risible? Or is the capacity for more offence seeking just as voracious as ever, with children reporting their parents to the thought police in ever increasing numbers each year. Are we to see punishment beatings, show trials, public shaming? Bugger that, I’m off to Tonga!

Shit Back in Anger

I’m disappointed by Jeremy Clarkson. Not because of what he wrote – many people wish far worse on that sorry excuse for a duchess – but by his apology for causing offence. As many people before me have written, the right to cause offence is a pillar of freedom of speech. In fact in Britain the right to freedom of speech was expressly carved out by the right to say what you wished to public figures.

I’m not saying that the gruesome twosome have no right of reply, although I doubt that either of them has the wit to so do. But the famously secretive couple, who wish nothing more than to be left alone, in quiet, contemplative solitude to make documentaries, give interviews and write books about their supposed ill treatment really do deserve all of the opprobrium heaped upon them.

They are vile. They are immature, squealing, spoiled infants trying to get nanny sacked for putting them to bed at the prescribed time. Mewling ingrates who scorned the riches heaped upon them and demanded more. Violet Elizabeth Bott wouldn’t even come close in an entitlement contest, and Clarkson was damn right to express his repulsion for the woman we all had to be told was black before we were able to be properly racist about her.

Of course, the so-called ‘liberal left ‘have been all over it as if he had actually committed the physical offence of showering her in shit. The hypocrisy of it all is astonishing. Those self-same, self-regarding champions of freedom were all for Jo Brand’s right to wish Nigel Farage had acid thrown in his face, or Nish Kumar’s unfunny (unfunny is all he’s got) appeal to kill your Brexit voting parents. And it’s fine, by all accounts, for people like Miriam Margoyles and Philip Pullman to wish death on Boris Johnson.

Clarkson should have either remained silent in the face of demands for appeasement, or else doubled down and written more of the same in his next column. Was it his lawyers, do you think? Or was it his own daughter writing that she was ashamed at what he had penned? The very appeal of Jeremy Clarkson – for those to whom he appeals; he’s a bit ‘Marmite’ to the rest – is that he dares to tread on ground that other authors fear.

James – the Holy Christmas Miracle – O’Brien was all over it on his show this morning, in the same episode in which he also discussed Tom Watson’s elevation to the Lords, as if the pair of them had not been deep down the Carl Beech rabbit hole. Little Jimmy was all too ready to acknowledge the wrong done by Watson, while never mentioning his own contribution to the affair. What loathsome worms inhabit the left of politics.

The crappiest couple... ... in the world.

But backing down is no way to deal with their immoral, illiberal war on what a person may think or say. In the face of such ridiculousness as, say, Critical Race Theory, or Trans-rights trumping women’s rights, we should all be capable of raising a hearty belly laugh and adding our own drop of dung to the mix. The ex-royal couple did not hesitate to shit on the Royal Family from as great a height as they could scale; why should we not shit back in anger?

Damn the law!

The headline in the Daily Telegraph read: “Four dead after migrant boat capsizes in freezing Channel” Followed by: “Rishi Sunak expressed his 'sorrow' telling MPs there had been a 'tragic loss of human life'” Home Secretary Suella Braverman made a statement: "It is vital, literally vital, that we end the illegal crossings in the Channel… These are the days that we dread. Crossing the channel in unseaworthy vessels is a lethally dangerous endeavour. It is for this reason we are working so hard to destroy the business model of people smugglers, evil organised criminals who treat people as cargo."

Nasty pieces of work, each, according to the left, gifted a glorious opportunity to reveal their caring credentials and virtuous humanity. On a browse through Twitter I came across this thread, in which the brainiacs of political discourse offered their considered and no doubt sincere analysis of what the PM and Home Secretary ‘really’ meant. 

It’s worth a peek for such proclamations as: “I personally hold Braverman personally responsible for what happened in the Channel this morning.” Further: “She doesn’t care, I don’t think she’d care if it was members of her own family.” And “She's celebrating it”. The four boys who died through falling through the ice on a Solihull lake are already old news – the left will not cry for them or their families, but the four who drowned in the Channel? Well, there’s political capital to be had, so have at it.

I thought Labourites were boneheads before, but now I doubt whether bone - real, living tissue - is what keeps their brains intact, maybe their skulls are more like a mesh bag, letting the soft bits ooze out to be infected by whatever anti-Tory memes are wafting around the echo-chamber. What makes people, and particularly people on the left, so sure they know the inner thoughts of people for whom they have nothing but antipathy? Why do they continually bleat on about empathy and the human rights of total and possibly criminal strangers when they offer no such support to their own peers?

Meanwhile, have they stopped to ponder the instincts of the so-called red wall, their supposed core supporters? Many underprivileged (white under-privilege, obviously) constituents of Labour majority wards will be not so quietly cheering the deaths. They know that governments are powerless, but the real chance of mortality will carry far more weight than any of the deals our pathetic administration will strike with other pathetic administrations in an effort to look like action is being taken.

All this really shows, of course, is that those who believe they have a grasp on what the country needs are way out of step with the electorate. Were a policy to be advanced wherein the Royal Navy no  longer acted as rescuers and escorts, but instead manned lethally repellent gunboats, that policy would be cheered to the rafters by many of the very people the leftists think they speak for. And as for international law, haven’t we pretty much had enough? Hang the law and damn the the global outrage.

Strike!

The Labour Party should be sitting pretty on what would appear to be a near unassailable chance of winning the next general election. But never underestimate any political party’s ability to sabotage its own chances, principally by not understanding what the country actually needs; ideology only gets you so far, but ultimately you need to have actual policies which can really work, which can’t immediately be hijacked and subverted.

So, what is Labour doing amid the multiple crises which assail us? It appears to be morphing into Margaret Thatcher’s Tories. Wes Streeting has been on the stump saying that Labour is going to get tough with the health unions and that reform of the NHS is needed, not continued acquiescence to its demands. Now embarked on this trajectory, will it also have to come down hard on the very people who have long funded the party?

Postal workers, nurses, rail transport, bus drivers, Border Farce, university lecturers, barristers, school staff, baggage handlers, firefighters… all have had or will be having a go at attacking the government through the medium of creating chaos and bringing about the prospect of real harm to innocent old you and me. The problem is, of course, that the piggy bank has been smashed open and raided too many times. It doesn’t matter who did it – it’s a bit late for that – we are flat broke.

Does anybody think that any rational employer would squeeze and squeeze every last bit of loyalty from their workforce if there was an easy way to simply pay them more? Oh, seriously? Come on, the robber barons are long gone, replaced by administrations so sensitive to the soft needs of their delicate charges that they employ diversity coordinators and equality managers and decolonialisation evangelists and pay them handsomely for their odious grift.

But surely it is globalism and its impersonal exploitation of needs that is at the centre of all this. Inequality is not just a structural feature of corporate Britain, it is an inevitable outcome of supranational greed and the unchecked power of giant world-connected behemoths, who dictate to governments and effectively stifle local attempts to become independent of their reach.

The internet is – or can be - a force for good, but is just as effective a force for propaganda. The type of propaganda which tells you that you can’t walk alone, you can’t buck the zeitgeist, you can’t survive without Google, or Facebook, or TikTok, or whatever social media is harvesting your every thought. This is where a political movement founded on the individual could really be a game-changer. A party going into battle for the common man. Whoever heard of such a thing?

Coming out with tough talk against the health unions could be a master stroke for Labour, but it could also be a death knell to its campaign if it turns its back on its own red wall. Something has to change, for sure, but as ever it is unlikely to change for the poorly educated, low aspiration masses. For them, the majority of the population, the options to go it alone, to reduce their costs, defend their wages and manage their lives, remains stubbornly out of reach. This winter is set to be one of discontent indeed.

Please Ignore

If you have read about, watched, listened to or even merely wondered whatever the fuck the Sussexes are banging on about you are part of the problem. Sadly, as much as I loathe the ludicrous royal soap opera, even I have not managed to ignore it altogether and the fact that I am writing this means that I am at least partly culpable, too. In exactly the same vein, I heard on some R4 show the other day that Love Island is one of the most successful TV franchises ever.

What is wrong with us as a species that the zenith of popular culture celebrates and magnifies the worst instincts we possess? Driven by a prurient and morbid curiosity, we are mere fodder for facile, voyeuristic, lowest-common-denominator pap which neither educates nor truly informs. We are lower as a life form as a result. The Netflix ‘documentary’ (Fiction? Fantasy?) about the whining ex-royals (who nevertheless retain titles they don’t deserve) is just another low spot.

And there, I did what you do, I have a fucking opinion on something that I would be better off being completely ignorant about. So what do I do? Do I – like many – continue to have an opinion about something I steadfastly refuse to pretend to be interested in? Or should I dip a toe in the water and ‘do the research’? Wait, what am I thinking? I’d rather stick pins in my eyes, yet here I am, somehow trying to justify my own contradictory reactions.

I will resist reading about, hearing about or watching anything whatsoever to do with the hideous couple. I certainly don’t care what happens to them and still less what they think about it all. But all I have to do is open up a newspaper, turn on the radio or television or – heaven forfend – browse the gawdy baubles of the internet and there it is, splashed like projectile vomit all over the place.

Even hoping that the possible bill proposed by Conservative MP Bob Seeley to strip them of their titles is to engage in the topic, when my most heartfelt desire in this regard would be to see them not only defenestrated from the highest royal window but to be banished to exile and every trace of their existence to be expunged from memory. See how impossible it is to just ignore it all?

Amused we are not.

Amid the concerns over climate change, the current freeze and the cost of heating, inflation outstripping wages faster than any other time this century, the coming energy drought, the unstoppable influx of unwanted illegal migrants… In the face of all this how can it be true that the most pressing matter for the nation is what a pair of spoiled offence-mongers and race-baiters think about the in-laws? We don’t deserve the ability to communicate, do we?

Minor Worries

Coal mining is back, but of course the green-meanies oppose it on wholly unsubstantiated grounds, as is the modern paradigm. There are only two sexes, but contrary to all known biology you can choose from an ever-expanding list of genders, possibly a different one for every individual on Earth. We have a major skills shortage, but current educational orthodoxy posits that we need to encourage more soft and nebulous puffery at the expense of useful hard skills.

The contradictions are winning; in every area of human endeavour the lived experience of real, successful human beings is rejected in favour of a new emphasis on feelings. The environmentalists can warp the figures to make hugely expensive engineering mistakes appear to be cost-effective panaceas for all the climate ills. Likewise, the lawyers can make a virtue out of protecting the ‘human rights’ of those who openly encroach on the genuine rights of decent-living people.

The world, as many have observed for many years, is upside down. Why teach your kids self-reliance, hard work and persistence when they can ‘earn’ a perfectly decent living grifting off the largesse of the idiot state? All they have to do is to get onboard with the doctrines of the age and bang those little drums for all they are worth. Then, when those skins have worn through, they should be well-versed in how to take a simple cause-and-effect case and turn it into a whole new outrage.

Jane Fonda says that climate change is caused by racism and misogyny. The history buffs have uncovered the ‘truth’ that Britain is a black heritage country, built entirely by diversity, excluding white diversity, naturally. Maths and science are racist, as is all art, and of course every last brass farthing of profit was earned off the backs of slaves. White man’s burden? They didn’t know the half of it back then and the demands for reparations are only just beginning.

No matter what you think you lived through there will be somebody to tell you that the evidence of your own eyes is worthless. And just like good old Mr Goebbels, they will keep on telling you until you shut the fuck up and get out your wallet. With all the frivolous demands the state makes of my taxes it is a wonder we have any working infrastructure left at all. Nurse, I need a diversity consultant, urgently!

So who gives a fuck about opening up a coal mine, and why worry about little old ‘The UK’ trying to mitigate climate change when nobody else gives a damn? The government has put virtue-signalling green fantasies before realism and protecting the security, safety, wealth and quality of life of the nation’s beleaguered population. And woe betide should you speak out about the emperor’s new clothes. I have but one thing to say to all of this, and I believe I speak for the majority: they can all just fuck off.

Careful with that axe, Eugene

 Adam Rutherford, the BBC’s favourite geneticist, currently has a series on Radio Four – Bad Blood – about the evils of eugenics. So popular was it at one time that parents in 1920s USA appropriated the term itself to name their children. Then along came Hitler and the practice fell out of favour. But, come on, is the notion all that bad, really? We can’t be unique amongst all species that humanity cannot be improved upon by a bit of selective breeding.

And of course, the wealthy very much do breed selectively, and for the same reasons. Why would you not want to improve your bloodline? Did not wealthy families engage in arranged marriages to exactly that end? Do not companies partner with other agencies to improve their chances of success and longevity? Did the west not ban sibling marriage because of the negative effects on genetics? And surely the multicultural dream of New Labour is an exercise [largely failed] in human engineering on a massive scale?

But no, the use of the word eugenics today is much like the use of the word racism. It is an instant put-down to those who dare to suppose that the human race could do better. And while we might not know the ultimate recipe for success, few among us will have never harboured the opinion that certain people should be discouraged from breeding. But try to set out an argument for ‘better’ management of our human stock and you will be backed into a corner by accusations of being a eugenicist.

Our prisons are crowded and had we still mental asylums they would be overflowing, except all of their potential inmates are out on the streets in plain view. The slums are back, teeming with human detritus with little in the way of prospects, and as our refusal to tackle the monster of uneven population growth grows more stubborn, the problem grows with it.

Our lower orders – for there really are such things – are idle, displaced in the labour market by people with whom we share little in the way of common bonds or culture. Our entire country is flooded with unproductive drones at a time when we are being told that the demand for low-skilled labour is diminishing, yet can’t be met by our own. And isn’t this entire exercise itself a form of national eugenics, replacing our actual indigenous population with a different breeding stock? It is little wonder that better off native born Brits are deciding, whether for financial or societal reasons, to limit their families.

The government’s response? Cuts everywhere. In infrastructure, in health and social care, in policing, in education, in energy security. The list goes on but one thing is for certain, it is not getting better for any but a select few. The country is unrecognisable from only a few decades ago, maybe even just two decades ago. The one thing which is not being cut is immigration. If the axe is to fall anywhere it really ought to be used to split apart all the false arguments used to silence us. Cut the crap and let us have those verboten debates, or else watch the whole thing fall further into disarray and dismemberment.

Greenhouse Gas

In case anybody is labouring under the delusion that their children’s future is in jeopardy because of climate change, let me administer a big slap to bring you to your senses. You don’t know, and I certainly don’t know, what the next 50 years will bring. The climate scientists are pretty sure about what will happen in general over the next few centuries, but even they are in the dark when it comes to 2030, or 40, or 50 because NOBODY knows.

Allowing your children to blackmail you into rash actions is as foolish as allowing our government to dash headlong into embracing supposed ‘green’ solutions, at a ruinous cost to the economy. The world is full of amazing, wonderful things. It will be equally full of such things when its average temperature is 2 or 3 or 5 degrees higher than today. The risk to our future is not climate change – that’s happening, and we’d better adapt to it. But a far bigger risk to our immediate future is the ridiculous and unachievable ‘net-zero’ gamble.

Opportunities are huge, right now, for any charlatan in the guise of a green evangelist, to milk the taxpayer for £billions through false promises to alleviate unknowable threats. Only this morning I heard on the BBC World Service programme ‘Tech Tent’ an entrepreneur telling the world how solar would soon be the cheapest energy available. He neglected to mention that it is also one of the least efficient and only very few homes are energy-lean enough to run on solar and battery alone. For most people their solar installations may break even financially over their lifetime, but they will have negligible effect on the climate. If anything, the focus should be on energy consumption, but that is already being rationed by the price mechanism.

But what about the wind you ask? Various news outlets have been excited by Ripple Energy and their scheme for people to buy shares in wind harvesting. It looks good, possibly too good. But behind the hype is the reality and a good primer into how we are all being conned by the green energy revolution is this article by Matt Ridley in the Spectator. I have taken the liberty of posting up most of it on my own blog site simply because the Spectator is a subscription service, but the original can be viewed here.

What is truly dispiriting is that almost everything you hear in the news, in the documentaries, in commentary and on social media is driven by opinion, or worse, zealotry. There is a Facebook group I follow in which delighted adopters post up universally good news about their solar installations. But when you do the numbers it turns out that a sort of pious hope is heavily tipping the scales. And none of this is any good for the people who need it the most, the energy-poor.

Locked into higher tariffs due to the uncertainties of the market, energy ignorant and helpless against the corporate machine, just as in every other area of life they are locked out of the Brave New World. And it will get worse, as schemes like Sadiq Khan’s plan to penalise the motorist anywhere inside the M25 are taken up by other cities in turn. Denied cost-effective heating in the future, such as gas, life is going to get a whole lot more expensive for those (as always) who can least afford it. And so on, and so on.

And when, in ten, twenty, thirty years’ time it is revealed that all of this pain was for nothing who will hold their hands up and take the blame? When not one step of progress has been made in limiting the increase in global temperature, who will admit they were wrong, and that the sacrifices people were forced to make were too large and too ineffective? You know who… nobody.

The Racing News

You knew this was going to happen, didn’t you? The ‘African Queen’, Ngozi Fulani, so deeply wounded by Lady Susan Hussey’s interest in her ancestral origins, turns out to be a fraud. Born of Caribbean immigrants in London and christened Marlene Headley, she later adopted the teachings of the race industry and graduated from SOAS – the London college renowned for churning out prominent activists obsessed by skin colour.

Like Shola Mugabe Umbongo and Behind-you Andrews, the products of SOAS seem hell bent on finding offence where none is intended and invent micro-aggressions to feed their outrage. Susan Hussey was only asking exactly what Marlene has spent her own life asking. Maybe she was more affronted because she actually didn’t know the answer. Given the context of the event, “no, where are you really from?” seems to be an entirely reasonable question, especially as the supposed ‘charity’ she was representing is very clear who its clients are – abused white women need not apply.

Representing herself as a proud child of the dark continent and prominently sporting a Jamaican headband, and especially having espoused her African origins so deeply, why didn’t she answer the original question with the response any reasonable non-race-baiting grifter might have offered in such company? “I was born in England, my parents came from the Caribbean, but I have adopted an African name to show my proud heritage” would almost certainly have elicited a delighted response. “How marvellous, my dear. Tell me all about it.”

But that would be entirely contrary to the purpose of this, just the latest in a prolonged and very deliberate attack on whiteness. For all her protestations – she has been all over the airwaves talking loudly about how she didn’t want to cause a fuss – the whole thing has played out perfectly. Ask who you are not allowed to criticise, said Voltaire, and you will know who rules over you. And we get it: white supremacy, bad, but how does that make black supremacy good?

How safe do you feel now, Whitey?

Sistah Space, the charity runs by Ms Headley doesn’t just go to bat for abused women of colour, it also runs courses to train white people in ‘cultural competency. Because, yes, it is white people who are the problem. Just imagine the headlines if a white charity ran courses in ‘how to leave the machete in the jungle’, or ‘please don’t rape her just because she’s white’? It’s all gone far too far and it is high time we learned not to pander to the critical race theory mob. Back in your box, Marlene.

It's All Gone

News of the 504,000 net migration figure comes along with a host of excuses. Oh, that’s post Covid re-entry; it’s overseas students; it’s genuine refugees and entitled visa holders from Afghanistan, Ukraine and Hong Kong… and anyway, it’s good for the economy. But wait just a goddamned minute there; how can it be ‘good’ to employ overseas visitors (who will almost certainly become permanent residents) when we have record numbers of British born people economically inactive? (There are currently over 5 million people on out-of work benefits. Yes, really!)

Amid a decades-long housing crisis, how can it be good to need to provide a brand new mid-sized city’s worth of housing every year, especially when we are not building at anywhere near such a scale? When the economy is already tanked how can we afford to pay for perfectly able people to remain idle out of the taxes of incomers on minimum wage? In fact, a minimum wage employee is a net recipient of welfare and only those paying over at least £6000 a year in taxes can be said to break even, so where are all these £30,000+ cleaners, delivery drivers and ethnic restaurant staff?

Communities tend to look after their own, and the more family oriented the ethnic origin, the more solidly stands that principle. In the UK we have, for many years been doing our collective damnedest to break up the nuclear family and replace it with a moral equivalence framework in which however you wish to live your life has exactly the same value. So if you sit on your arse and breed indiscriminately you are just as valued a member of society as somebody who lives within his means and remains faithful to his brood.

I am beginning to think that maybe Jack Straw was right and that the English (and the Scots, the Welsh, and Northern Irish) are finished as a race; it certainly looks that way. Pay a visit to any of our mass-market stores and watch the human dregs schlepp around in baggy sportswear that has never seen a track or a gym. And what is it with the current trend for flip-flops and socks? Once, if you were to be seen in public you would make an effort; now it has become acceptable to wear your sloth on your sleeves.

And just what is the current population, anyway? A decade ago we were told it was 68 million, today it remains the same despite annual net incoming figures at around a third of a million. Can nobody in the government do the maths any more, or – which is more likely – have they just given up? Because that’s what it feels like. We have given up on immigration, law and order, education and society in general. Nobody has the will to carry on.

Britain today, in one picture...

When the government itself won’t recognise, or can’t see, the problems it is little wonder that they don’t act. When every move they make is opposed by forces entirely antipathetic to the survival of Britishness you can see why they are nervous. It really feels that this is now very much an existential crisis, and I fear for the good citizens of the UK whose rights to self-determination are being stripped away in front of their eyes. I am no Little Englander, I have long been critical of the worst of our own, but for pity’s sake will nobody speak up for our island race?

Keep Calm and Twitter on

So, the Muskmeister has proposed a general amnesty for suspended Twitter accounts, provided they haven’t ‘broken the law’. But what law? US law, international law, nebulous ‘non-crime hate incident’ law, or delicate-soul Twitter law? The rules have never been particularly clear; while one is banned for using a formerly perfectly everyday phrase which might just be contrived to contain a germ of antipathy, another gets to freely  dispense literary sewage without sanction.

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Twitter algorithms employ anagram solvers in their quest for offence, instantly banning any mention of g-i-n-g-e-r, or slicing up proper nouns like Scunthorpe to discover the hidden outrage gems inside. So, if you are a white, western male you have to suck it up while persons of hue call for your painful eradication from the planet, yet you could be suspended for asking why such speech is allowed.

But let us look ahead to the glorious reinstatement of my account. Which account though? I’ve had so many that I’ve lost track. Will I get back my parody Len McCluskey account, or the one I set up for the cat? Is it possible I could regain the thousands of followers I had steadily amassed under my original handle, or will I have to be content with my last one, which relied for validation on a mobile phone number not my own? Can I even remember who I said I was supposed to be?

I can’t even really remember why I joined Twitter in the first place, having heard it was all about people tweeting their breakfasts, but having hopped aboard I found it much to my taste. I never grasped Facebook, especially when, about ten years ago, they changed the format and I lost interest altogether. LinkedIn I found just creepy, as people who vaguely knew me would look me up and contact me. Why, goddammit, why?! When a work colleague sought me out I deleted my account. I don’t know why, but I’d rather be an anonymous internet nonentity than have to deal with the ignominy of being ‘out’.

As for other platforms, I have never been tempted by the Instagrams, Snapchats and Telegrams and I am utterly indifferent to TikTok. Unless you are seeking unearned fame and dubious fortune, or else you are a business reaching out to as wide a customer base as possible, I can’t see the reward for plastering your every thought and minute-by-minute photographs of your day across the canvas of the worldwide weird web.

Of course, if I am back, so too will be all those accounts who blocked me – knocking on for a thousand – as well as many who will by now have become deceased. Will I remember those whose banter I cherished, back in the day, or will I look on in bewilderment as folk I don’t recognise try to greet me as a long lost friend? And will all of our accounts be returned with original settings intact, or will I see again those who I blocked or muted in turn?

Will it even happen at all? Or will we all be banned again within days? If we have learned anything from Elon Musk’s very special and very public managerial techniques it is that even the daftest, doziest and most out-of-touch of us have the ability to become the richest man on the planet. It seems to have little to do with genius, much to do with luck and everything to do with getting away with it. See you on Twitter?

When you wish upon a star

There never was a star to represent each country in the European Union, but both Brexiteers and Remainers like to pretend that the UK had its own. And depending on which side of the argument you stood it either represented freedom, the reclaiming of our own national stardom, or it served as a token of our membership of a club of friends. Forget about the star; the star is not going to save you.

Clinging to an idea is not the same as making that idea come to fruition. Having a vision, no matter how grand, how aspirational, how very admirable, is not the same as realising that vision. The world as we knew it is pretty much fucked and there is no going back. No amount of petty pontificating is going to get us out of the harm we have inflicted upon ourselves. Not as a result of Brexit, but as a result of weak politicians leading pampered electorates. Now that the heat is on, it turns out that very few can stand to be in the kitchen.

We used to be an industrial powerhouse. To a great extent Germany still is. But no, successive governments decided that we should abandon that which had allowed us to bestride the word as an industrial Colossus and instead become a ‘service economy’. How did we allow ourselves to agree that we could build wealth and future happiness on diversity and the hospitality industry? Oh, and greedy bankers, money launderers and City crooks.

Now, because of the Green agenda, we can’t even contemplate a return to manufacturing, reduced instead to offshoring our emissions by buying everything from overseas in a dismal attempt to claim net-zero credentials. Our high streets are awash with money transfer shops, bookies, fried chicken outlets and modern pawn brokers. We are broke, busted, brassic… screwed.

Boris Johnson and others like to talk about the thousands, nay millions of jobs in the Green economy, but where are they? Not in manufacturing, the bit that brings in the big bucks, but where? Designing and commissioning green energy systems requires talents we hold in only scarce quantities, having sent generations of school leavers to study how to be offended by everything. And installing such systems requires aptitudes and abilities we squandered by telling kids they were above such menial labour.

So we have to import our intellectuals from Eastern Europe and our grunts from anywhere where the minimum wage is three shekels a day. There is no grand vision to do otherwise, no plan to recover our national dignity. Instead we will simply allow the overthrowing of all that this country once stood for, and for what? So that we can pontificate from the World Cup sidelines about our record on LGBT rights? So that we can stand proud of our bi-monthly Black History Months? So that we can recite, over and over again, the mantra that diversity built Britain until people actually come to believe it?

Whatever you think this represents, you're probably wrong.

I might once have said ‘not on my watch’, but it was never up to me. Governments have failed us. Our judiciary has failed us. Education produces so little of realisable value that we may as well just offer degrees in finger painting. Our infrastructure is crumbling, our services shot to hell and our borders flung wide open. We have already welcomed in the Barbarians, we may as well just do as they tell us.

Talking Cure?

 On the drive home the other day I heard a report regarding the state of the current workforce, or perhaps more correctly the current shirk-force. It seems that many have not returned to work after lockdown. On hearing lockdown I paused for a moment. Oh yes, that brief period in 2020 when the government went mad and paid everybody to stay at home… except for those whose job it was to regularly come into contact with many strangers.

I remember the interminable online discussions about the situation and the crazy conspiracy world of anti-vaxxers and others who yearned to tell the world how elite cabals had planned it all down to the last detail. I think the ensuing fallout confirms, however, that it was way more cock-up than conspiracy. Anyway, back to the malingering workers, and I choose my words deliberately.

It is a long-established matter of record that if you keep on telling people the same thing, they will eventually, no matter how sceptic they were at the outset, come to give that thing some credence. Maybe it starts off with a grudging acceptance that rather than being actually untrue it maybe does have a kernel of veracity for some. Once embarked on the journey the confines of the rabbit hole become more comfortable and eventually, the ‘wisdom’ of crowds dictates that it is so.

For years now, the populations of developed countries have been berated for benefiting from the spoils of earlier generations and their now questionable morals. It is little wonder then, that being browbeaten for so long, those same populations become susceptible to accepting the blame for pretty much everything. To then be told that in bearing that burden it is likely they will suffer from poor mental health, it is little wonder that – hey presto – we are in a mental health pandemic.

A very large part of the reason – dare I say, excuse – for the new absences from the workplace appears to be because of ‘mental health’. I note that qualifying adjectives are no longer required. Today, to have mental health appears to mean the exact opposite. And across the country former workers are seizing the opportunity to sit on their arses and not be challenged because of their perilous mental state.

Oh, come on! Swinging the lead has never been so accepted, and now that it is becoming normalised it is hardly surprising that more and more are taking it up as the easy option, rather than getting off their fat backsides and doing their bit to rebuild the economy. Over 20 per cent of working-age Brits are economically inactive, neither in work nor looking for it. This is a national disgrace. Worse so because those jobs will end up being taken by incoming low-grade workers in the main.

If you can work from home, fine. And if you can afford to retire, fair play to you. But if, as I strongly suspect, a huge proportion are playing the system the burden falls once again on the backs of those of us for whom anything other than working is sheer luxury. I just submitted my tax return. What a kick in the teeth then, to recognise that most of what I pay will go towards the upkeep of so many human grazing stock.

What’s the cure for depression, anxiety, feelings of inadequacy, morbid fascinations, portents of doom, unease about the future, fear of climate change, the upwards spiralling of the cost of living and all the things that people fret over? Talking about it? I don’t think so. It’s about time we stopped letting people talk themselves into illness and started prescribing some stiff-talkings-to and a good old-fashioned British kick up the arse!

What Has the Industrial Revolution Ever Done for You?

Much talk at CoP27 about paying for ‘loss and damage’, couched in the terms of reparation for the evil done to the current climate by we bastards in the developed world. In particular, Britain, the crucible of modern civilisation, comes in for massive criticism. As Greta Thunderthighs herself might say, “How dare we!?” But must the ‘sins’ of the father always be visited upon the sons? Just like the eternal nagging of the BLM movement, it is always somebody else’s fault, isn’t it?

Well bollocks to that, all of it. If you feel that you have been punished for an accident of your birth, why should it be somehow just for others to be punitively berated for their slightly more advantageous accident? The pursuit of equality – such an outcome being impossible to both describe and to bring about – invariably take the form of handicapping talent or good fortune. Of course life is unfair, it’s a roll of the dice, but if you try to hobble the winners eventually they take their game elsewhere.

It is literally madness if you seek help to come threatening violence (or, as we call it now, invasion by mass immigration). The industrial revolution brought you roads, medicine, industry, a means of escaping agrarian poverty and mere subsistence. It brought you communication and education and reduced your death tolls immeasurably. And, in fact, despite your perceptions and prognostications about extreme weather events, fewer people today, across the entire plant, lose their lives due to the effects of climate.

Life expectancy in what we used to call the third world is greatly increased, and with prolonged better health, as a result of which, your populations grow. And because so many of the supposedly ‘most vulnerable’ live in societies where procreation appears to be a competition, if mankind is the driver of climate change, then it is these countries where the future problem lies.

Just as the movers and shakers of the Industrial Revolution brought solutions to the economies and the health and welfare of the world, it is those same advanced societies which are doing the most to ameliorate the effects of former industrial processes. The solutions do not lie in sub-Saharan Africa, nor in China, Brazil, India or even the appallingly backward provinces of Pakistan, one of those most vocal in their condemnation of Britain's unintended malice.

None of these countries will be in the vanguard of future advances in combatting the effects of climate change. Instead they will play the bigger part of making it all worse, as they demand we reduce our emissions simultaneously with them acquiring all the means by which to increase theirs. It will be Britain and the US and Germany and the Nordic countries which will drive progress, not them. Reparations? They should be paying us.

A Fair COP?

In a world where ignorance and incompetence rule the day it was only natural that the charisma vacuum known as Keir Starmer would want to capitalise on both with this ridiculous article in The Guardian in which he attacks Rishi Sunak’s stance on COP27. The Guardian readership, that well established echo chamber of leftist thought, that self-regarding intelligentsia will likely lap it up, but will they either understand it, or challenge its trite and simple lies?

It is all very well saying that Labour would bring about an economic and energy miracle that has defeated the best minds of the most capable countries in the world, but where is the policy, the detail? In every case where Labour says they would do better, that their solutions are ‘fully costed’, that they would bring peace and prosperity, the solution seems to hinge far more on simple faith than hard science.

Goons like Richard Burgon keep bleating on about wealth taxes, with no real argument as to what they mean by wealth. Shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, likewise, has never been quick to publish the means by which Labour would reverse the declines in our fortunes. And Starmer himself is a mere, adenoidal talking head, repeating the mantra of opposition: we will make it better, but we can’t tell you how. ‘We will be better than them’ has never sounded anything other than infantile.

100% ‘green’ energy by 2030 sounds great, but it is not possible without redefining what you mean by ‘green’. The target he is proposing is at best an accounting fraud, but it gets nowhere that good. It would mean off-shoring our CO₂ emissions by a combination of shifting even more industry abroad and by counting some emissions as ‘better’ than others. Drax, for instance, gets away with both and despite it creating more CO₂ than when it burned coal, it counts as zero because it burns wood. (The carbon-neutral cycle it claims to be part of has a cycle time measured not in tens but in hundreds of years.)

To get to where we need to be, we need a better educated population – that’s a timescale of a generation, or more likely two. To get towards zero emissions we need reliable technology at an affordable price and thus we can rule out the contributions made by average families. Those of you luxuriating in your off-grid, low-energy, prosumer (producer and consumer – yes, it’s a real word now) world where you hand knit your own electricity from golden yarn spun from the sun’s rays can pat yourselves on the back all you like – it will probably take the lifetime of the tech to negate the environmental cost of creating it.

The bare facts are that if the world genuinely takes climate change and the role of CO₂ in creating it seriously, then the world needs to work together. Starmer is right about that. But if he thinks that in a mere six years, assuming he takes power in 2024, his motley bunch of angry class warriors are going to bring that about, he is either spectacularly stupid, or fundamentally dishonest. If he wanted to do what he says he wants to do, he would be better to join forces with, rather than attack, the government of the day.

Blaming the Conservatives for the globalist economic mess gets us nowhere. ‘Holding government to account’ is a hollow, meaningless phrase trotted out for the tabloids. The very language of opposition is mere petulant foot stamping. And as for all the supposed green jobs, they are already there, in China, in India, in Korea, in Germany. But they are not coming here and are not likely to come here; the UK's net-zero future is a fairy-tale and all the initiatives have already been taken by others. World leading in green energy, my arse. 

Let this sink in

 See how it works yet? Let that sink in. I’ll wait. But you knew that, right? The social media shorthand for “Even though I know nothing about you, I’m confident I know far more than you know… about everything.” is getting tedious, amirite? But seriously, I was once told that if you are under thirty and hold a firm political opinion, that opinion is almost certainly not your own. The polarisation of politics lends itself to this thoughtless accepting of the ‘facts’ belonging to your side of the argument and rejecting all others.

The same laziness occurs with language; it is far easier to simply repeat what others have said than to craft original sentences of your own. We all do it. We do it with headlines, with jokes, with pithy phrases, no matter how ludicrous, to the extent that the dictionary people now contend that literally doesn’t have to mean literally… literally. And superlatives are flung around carelessly, rendering them worthless.

We inhabit a linguistic world of repeated and regurgitated slogans and soundbites, often deployed clumsily and inappropriately, and almost always without considering how it makes us look. It’s as if people now speak in the language of the Super Soaraway Sun’s headline gagsters. Footballers have been mangling the language for years, but some of their gaffes of previous decades now rank as deep philosophical commentary in comparison to what social media has done to our communication. Sick as a parrot. Literally gutted.

Add to that the effortless ability to believe contrary things, just so long as they sound like things we should believe in and you get the idiocracy that is the developed world. Daft ideas, illogical ideologies and plain stupid assertions go unchallenged because they are couched in the language of instaneity. Accept and move on; even better, add your own borrowed understanding – it’s the science, stupid – and pretend to yourself that ‘your’ opinion matters.

You can't both be right.

As a result of all this, threads on social media rapidly descend into simplistic garbage whereby everybody appears to know exactly what the other side is really thinking, and everybody appears to have a quick-fix solution to every problem. Thus it is apparently possible to fix the economy by both spending more while spending less, by contracting the state and by expanding the state, by limiting immigration and by throwing the borders wide open.

I can read Twitter, but I can’t engage with Twitter, which means that, no matter how much my urge to wade in with my two-penn’orth, I have to sit back and just watch the threads play out. And what an education that has proven to be. From the sidelines you really can see the inanity which both sides bring to any discussion. If only I could force myself to exercise such a taciturn position in face-to-face discussions I would seem the wisest man in the room. See how it works, yet?

PS: It seems I can no longer even read Twitter now. 🤷‍♂️

Get Me Out Of Here

 Matt Hancock going on I’m a Celebrity is not just an example of an elected official being tone deaf, it is an outright insult to his electorate and evidence, if evidence were needed, that politics has become a joke. Some are justifying this appearance as a modern-day stint in the stocks – for sure he is going to be regularly voted to perform like a clapping seal – but what have we become that this sort of action can even be seen to be acceptable?

Politicians have long had to live down the strong public notion that they are only in it for what they can get out. This sort of clowning only helps to demonstrate how shallow some MPs can be and how little they appear to care about those they nominally represent. The Tories in particular are seen as the party of corruption and back-handers. Such public displays of frivolity will do nothing to quell that image.

Following the row after Nadine Dorries’ appearance one would have been forgiven for imagining that said appearance had put paid to this sort of nonsense. Boris Johnson notwithstanding we don’t want our public figures to make displays of themselves, and Hancock has none of the charisma of the bumbling blonde bombsite. He is going to make an utter twat of himself, isn’t he? But does that even matter?

The sort of audience that these shows attract might have spectacularly short memories, and they are unlikely to have had a great deal of engagement in daily politics. So, there is a chance that Hancock might, bizarrely, gain some support. There is even talk of ‘the next phase in his career’, whatever career that may be. But if this does, indeed launch him into another means of making a living, what an indictment of our national psyche.

For all the talk of politics and political ideology that I encounter, because I seek it out, I am aware that very much the majority of the population are left cold by it all. A well-placed headline, fact or fiction, will enrage them for a minute and some will cleave faithfully to the mast of whichever ship they have chosen, based entirely on prejudice and ignorance. That such people get to choose who is in charge has always baffled me.

Humans exhibit an incredible range of ability, from almost entirely useless and lazy, to incredibly gifted, talented and dedicated. Only the best of us should really be involved in the business of making it work for all. The average human being would be entirely unequal to the task. Please don’t tell me that Matt Hancock is among the best.

Migration Miracle

 And just like that, we’re back to immigration, with every attempt to raise the subject in debate howled down by shouts of “Fascists!” and the blanket labelling of every Conservative as ‘far-right’. The left-biased media is awash with commentary and Suella Braverman is on every front page being variously compared with Enoch Powell, Nigel Farage and I’m sure, Hitler. Welcome to the same old war.

Immigration, good or bad, is too simplistic to be of any use. The net benefit argument is of no relevance here, neither is the “my grandparents were immigrants” line, because we are not talking about invited, necessary talent and manpower. We are talking about the highly visible channel crossings, and before that the lorry crossings, of people we know little about. People who, we often learn, have never been near a war zone, unless you count France.

But we’re not talking in any meaningful way, are we? The government need to be seen to be taking it all seriously, but the opposition merely want to oppose. In the guise of caring internationalism, hatred of the Tories is openly expressed and the lust for power is plain for all to see. The migrants are just as much political fodder for Labour as they are to the Conservatives, and still nothing is done to solve the very big problem of illegal, mass immigration.

No matter what ‘solutions’ are proposed they are quickly portrayed as exactly mimicking 1930s Germany, but what is absolutely unacceptable is simply welcoming them in, dispersing them around the country and letting nature take its course. Desperate people can quickly turn to crime, and the desperate people here are the UK citizens seeing their country change before their eyes. The last 20 years have witnessed unprecedented change and much of it deliberate.

If the government can’t come up with a way to deal with the problem – and let’s be blunt, it is a massive problem – the population will take it into their own hands. It is already happening, and it is beginning to look like societal breakdown. Resentment is not just stoked up by the rhetoric of one side, but by the vexatious interpretation of that rhetoric by the other. Will the next war in Europe be on our own soil?

Why can't we get past this?

We have enough problems right now, more than at any other time I can recall, yet the instincts of our leaders and their successors is to expend more energy on sloganeering than on action. Being able to recognise and deal with any one of those problems without turning every minute of every day into a political struggle would be a start. Being able to get round a table and discuss the migrant problem properly would be a minor miracle.

The Oilers are Wrong

 The Just Stop Oilers have been at it again, this time spraying orange paint on a number of government buildings. Blind to the negative attention this attracts, they inconvenience people just trying to go to work, create an unsightly mess, almost certainly incur fossil fuel costs in the clean up and security reactions… and do absolutely nothing to further their aims.

But what are their aims? It doesn’t seem very joined-up to simply demand an end to all new oil and gas contracts without proposing alternatives. Ceasing to use fossil fuel is an impossibility for any civilisation which doesn’t want to return, very quickly, to a scavenging, hand-to-mouth existence. We can’t support a population of our size without energy dense solutions and the capacity and intermittency of so-called green paradigms renders them at best a partial assist.

The Oilers appear to believe we can instantly switch to a low-carbon lifestyle. Maybe the many apparent pensioners involved in their movement have already feathered their nests with solar photovoltaic panels, heat pumps, super-dooper insulation, heat recovery systems and the like, and can boast of excellent climate-healing credentials. But at what cost?

And when I say cost I don’t just mean that they can afford it after a lifetime in the petrochemical age of relative affluence, while others still in work can barely pay their monthly bills, which hypocrisy bodes ill for their ultimate redemption. I also mean at what cost to the environment? Because those technologies built in the East, using coal-fire electricity and shipped here burning millions of barrels of oil, represent a massive carbon footprint which their deployment will almost certainly not offset in their lifetime.

The people who install much of this technology are poorly equipped to explain the benefits, or do the holistic calculus, but they don’t need to. The media – equally ignorant of the full facts – merrily trots out the green is good mantra, oblivious to the harm they may be doing. I would absolutely love to live off-grid, sustainably, self-sufficiently, with a minimal carbon footprint, but I will never be able to afford it. And likely, neither can you.

So, once again I ask, what do they really want? Most rational people, when bumping against reality, learn to adapt their ambitions. Only fools keep on doing the same wrong thing over and over again, rolling the dice, in the hope that this time the house doesn’t win. But the house always wins, no matter how much orange paint you spray.

What does he think he's achieving?

For what it’s worth I think we need a massive education programme. Not ‘re-education’, instilling doctrinal soundbites, but actual education. If people understood the physics, the nature of energy itself they may be able to make better, more informed choices about how they manage their lives. The same could apply to financial decisions, health, and voting in elections. Education, education, education? Dream on.

I should be so lucky

 Much doom and gloom about the economy runs through every news outlet, even in the wake of the new governance under ‘Rashid Sanook’. In fact, it may even be because of the new governance. Notwithstanding the left’s hatred of anybody other than themselves trying to fix the things they believe are wrong, the simple truth is that, socially, intellectually and economically Britain is fucked.

We no longer make anything in any volume, we no longer trust our own people to be competent in any kind of work and we are beholden to the money markets to funnel their illicit gains through the greedy hands of a tiny few in the City of London. So, should we ever try to stand up against the trafficking of finance, the national income is stifled and we are left with the impossible task of begging for yet more borrowing.

We have mortgaged the family home to the hilt and are facing redundancy, and just like the PFI-financed NHS we may soon owe more in rent that we can possibly earn. Imagine it; Britain, the country which practically invented the modern world, including its financial institutions and all that makes it work, failing to make it work for ourselves. It’s like selling the blueprints to China in the expectation that they won’t use them to out-compete and undersell us.

The former colonies can kiss goodbye to any thought of reparation – soon we will need to go cap in hand to them just to sustain ourselves for another year, another month… another day. And nobody knows – literally nobody knows – what can be done about any of it. The machinery is too complex to be able to decommission any part of it without causing collapse in other parts. Every action has consequences, but we can’t predict what they might be.

Every man and his dog has quick-fix solutions based on little more than ignorance and prejudice. In the case of idiots like the Labour MP Richard ‘Benny’ Burgon it is wealth tax, windfall tax and generally 'eat the rich'. Same tired, old, discredited soundbite policy on the hoof without a thought for what happens next. Then the luvvies, the minted soap stars, sports stars and models, come out with their ‘be kind’ claptrap, as if they alone possess empathy for their fellow man, insulated as they are from the fallout of inequitable sharing.

Benny: same old, same old...

Even the ‘experts’, the economists, have the luxury of never really having to see their projects through, and never having to say sorry. As government advisors, when they fail it is put down with a shrug to eternal forces and off they go to come up with another new pet theory. But, whatever that theory there can be little doubt that what passes for capitalism, at least in the UK, is pretty largely broken.

There is hope, however: being an economist is easy, as is making your first million, as is becoming the richest man in the world. All you have to do is have a great idea, a keen work ethic, the balls of steel which come with absolute self-belief… and a shit-tonne of pure, unadulterated luck. Without good fortune, all that hard work will often yield nothing. So, the solution is plain enough - stay lucky.

Tories

Who would be a Conservative MP right now? I mean, in government, but powerless against the antipathy of the establishment and generally reviled by the wider public. The most honest, faithful, dedicated, hard-working constituency MP is lumped into the same category as the most mendacious, mercenary, lazy accepter of back-handers and honours for favours. Damned whatever you do, what’s the point?

As a permanently suspended Twitter account I can still browse, but I only get whatever the almighty algorithms decide to serve up. Bereft of the guiding tastes of mutual followers, I can now only read tweets about kitties, puppers and how much people hate the Tories. Formerly my Twitter economy would regulate my environment with a healthy mix of sceptics, scoundrels and people on my wavelength, protecting me from the worst excesses of the liberal online world.

But now the filters are well and truly clogged and I just get an endless round of righteous lefty hatred. Not toward me – I’m a Twitter non-person, they don’t even know I’m there – but towards anything remotely to the right of Saint Jeremy of Corbyn and his Marxist comrades. The tee-shirts declaring “I’ve never fucked a Tory” were mildness incarnate in comparison.

In his song, Russians, Sting sang: “Mister Krushchev said, ‘We will bury you’ I don't subscribe to this point of view. It'd be such an ignorant thing to do, if the Russians love their children too”. Quite. He went on to warble “There is no monopoly on common sense on either side of the political fence”. Astute. Yet here we are, with the side of truth and social justice, the ‘be kind’ set falling into the same trap the cold war sprang. Are the Tories really so very different from the Labours?

“We share the same biology, regardless of ideology.” And with that biology we share the same needs; shelter, warmth, food, safety, and all the trappings of civilisation. Nobody, whatever political gods they serve, wants to end their days as heads on pikes on the railings of Westminster as revenge for the bloody war they waged on their own people. Even Putin, no doubt, believes in his mission.

So, instead of wishing the new “Rashi Sanuk*” government well in its mission and looking to influence its choices the opposition in all its forms immediately goes on the attack. Mr Sunak is, of course, a coconut, say the brown racists of the left who genuinely believe they cannot be racists. And every member of his cabinet is a baby-eating, granny-starving tool of the evil global capitalist machine.

We never really got beyond this, did we?

It’s not so very long ago that the evil international machine was the communist one, so maybe globalism is just a convenient way to label whoever you consider the current ‘Russians’ to be. Well, according to everybody with a platform, the real global threat is climate change, so why does it seem like just another way for each side to beat each other up? Why can’t the eternally opposing ideologies of left and right put aside their differences and work for this common cause? I suspect the answer is that the ideology which engineers the divide is too strong. Maybe we just have to hope the Tories love their children too.

*Sleepy Joe Biden’s hilarious and total mispronunciation on hearing the news.

It’s the Brexit, Stoopid!

I note with interest the growing EU fervour in the air. On the media, on social platforms, and no doubt in the usual talking shops, Brexit is back in vogue, or rather blaming everything on Brexit has become, once again, the cause du jour. It’s the catch-all to cover every ill. No doubt it is Brexit which caused your central heating to fail or made you slip on that wet floor. It is Brexit that created the storms because, muh, global warming, right? And we all know climate change was as a direct result of Brexit, so…

If you voted to remain and remain convinced that leaving was an enormous folly it is likely that your cognitive bias will happily let you nod along to every assertion of its evil. Project Fear, they said? Well just looky here now. When people point to the no-small matters of Covid and Ukraine… and incompetent UK governance such affairs are disregarded as mere deflections. The conspiracy theorists are having an absolute ball.

Andrew Adonis famously said “If Boris goes, Brexit goes” and he has made no secret of doing his damnedest to bring about a bid to rejoin, at any cost. Pretending to care about the little people, Lords like him have no interest in the fact that it was mostly those same people who voted to leave. Yes, they voted in their ignorance, cry the ardent remainers, who alone are vouchsafed the intelligence to make such a decision. But it’s the little people who felt they got nothing from the EU anyway and the smug middle-class remain rump who got the most.

As anybody with a few grey hairs and an observant eye will notice, everything else we could have voted for brought no change. For decades Britain has languished in a low-productivity, high aspiration, low talent, low wage world where second-rate politicians ascend to astonishing heights by the patronage of equally second-rate also-rans who seem to hold the levers of power. The leaders of powerful blocks are all Wizards of Oz; the tiny, feeble, uninspiring man behind the megaphone. What else was left but to vote for a game-changer?

The levels of bile out there for Brexiteers is quite alarming. Well beyond merely bordering on hatred, these pro-EU people viscerally detest and despise those who broke their precious thing. You just know that, given the power, they would cancel out all voting rights for anybody who disagreed with them. Which would be interesting because while they agree with each other that Brexit is very, very bad, they have no unified theory of just why Brexit is bad.

It’s a Tory plot. Cameron was played by the Kremlin. It’s the bankers and the hedge fund managers. (the only thing the Euro-intelligentsia seem to ‘know’ about hedge funds is that they positively thrive on economic downturns and do their best to bring them about) It’s the Nazis in the Tory Party, obviously. It’s, it’s, it’s…  a very, very ,very bad thing, and there’s an end to it.

There is no recognition that many have done their very best to throw spanners in the works, have encouraged the EU to negotiate in bad faith, have visited Brussels and promised we will return if only Brexit can be seen not to have worked. They never had a plan for Brexit, they cry, they believed the lies on a bus! It is relentless. Can they not entertain the possibility that the intransigence of Parliament itself has played no small part in our current chaos, that Covid brought to a halt all efforts to deal with anything but Covid, that the Boris Johnson witch hunt and subsequent Tory shitstorm may all have contributed?

Nope, because everything bad is because of Brexit. And despite their voice being the only bloody voice we ever hear about it, day in, day out, they think they are being silenced and censored in the press. They also still fervently believe that they alone have the answers; all of them different answers, obviously. But at the bottom of all of this is this deep, deep loathing for anybody they feel they can blame for ‘taking away their rights’, rights that few of them appreciated or understood, or even exploited. And yet they’re supposedly the good guys.

Got Brexit done? Hardly.

Maybe it will all blow over. Maybe the Sunak administration will stabilise things a tad and maybe the country will get back on its feet again. Whatever does happen I predict that few will be satisfied and after four decades of blaming the EU and its forebears for all our problems, we will probably spend the next four decades blaming our departure. I’m just pissed off that instead of actually getting on with the job, we seem to need all of our failures to be somebody else’s fault.

Is that a fact?

 As attention turns to the PM electoral circus, there are some who still have it in for Liz Truss. The mischief continues as she is out of office but far from finished as far as the vengeful public are concerned. If you doubt the ability of the great unwashed to be happily ill-informed the responses to this tweet by Dragon Deborah Meaden would be a useful primer.

"Can anyone who knows clarify the two-month threshold for PM to receive salary for life?"

For a start, the tweet itself is disingenuous. Surely somebody like Meaden isn’t incapable of doing a bit of research for herself, but if she is so tied-up busy why ask Twitter, of all places? For those who are not in the know this is about the Public Duty Costs Allowance against which Former Prime Ministers can retrospectively claim – backed up by vetted receipts - up to £115,000 a year for expenses associated with continuing public duties. It is neither a pension, nor a salary and it is not granted.

But this is the internet, where the truth falls into a poor also-ran place against speculation, ignorance and blind prejudice. A good number of respondents took Meaden’s query as a statement of fact that yes, any ex PM automatically receives a pension/salary of £115k for the rest of his or her days. As. A. Fact. I quote some of the responses below:

·       “I think as long as you have been appointed by His Majesty the King Prime Minister. Even if that lasted for a few minutes before resigning.”

·       “It will be right. Jobs for the boys and girls Westminster. She will probably get promoted to the Lords. Where she will be able to collect £332 per day attendance allowance.”

·       “It is true and even Keir Starmer has called for Thick Lizzie not to get that money of £115 thousand a year for life around that figure I think”

·       “I've heard she's 100% getting it but is being urged to decline it. She hasn't yet declined.”

·       “I worked it out and if she lives 30 years she will get over 3.4 million. Works out at £78,000 a day for 44 days and that’s paying her for the weekend.”

A small number of respondents sought to correct the assumptions but quickly segued into wondering how well it is policed. Another few used the opportunity to speculate over whether Boris Johnson was funding his holiday from this supposed slush fund and a few came up with such kite flying illiteracy as “How many free school meals would the ministers' pensions actually fund? Think about it. Likely the whole nation. Not likely they actually need and depend on said pensions, what with all those hedge funds and private investments they vote on to protect.”[sic]

Still more piled in to suggest that people like Deborah Meaden herself ought to be running the country, oblivious to the reality that she had begun this mendacious thread out of either malice or ignorance, neither quality being one you would seek in a leader. Or maybe it was just naivety and laziness and she tweeted without a though as to its effect. Again, not something you would look for in a figurehead.

Which brings us back to Starmer who once again demonstrated his lack of guile in handling the media when he was effectively pushed into calling for Ms Truss to reject an offer which was not even being made. Somebody really needs to get forensic over this stuff, I mean, it’s embarrassing when people get things so wrong.

Instead of looking to how we get the country back on its tracks, people are fixated by somebody they don’t know, not being given something they don’t deserve… and using the opportunity to add their two penn’orth on financial affairs about which they also nothing. And we give these people a vote? But maybe it is all just harmless bloviation. As the saying goes “I’m sorry dear, I can’t come to bed. Somebody on the internet is wrong.”