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.