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.