The Bell Jar

Trapped inside a self-imposed prison from which you can see only what of the world is immediately outside can give you the illusion that you know what is going on. And if all you hear is your own words, your own suspicions, bouncing back to you it would be hardly surprising if you began to believe your own theories. Political movements thrive on this echo-chamber effect as their acolytes hear and see only what they want to see and hear. This is how cults operate.

Labour’s supposed ‘grass roots’ campaigning group, Momentum (Surely ‘Inertia’ would be more apt?) is currently trying to whip up a groundswell of opinion that defies logic. In this strange world, instead of seeing the vast majority of the population getting on with things and looking out for themselves, as they surely must, the see a forbidden forest of darkness and squalor and unbearable cruelty. And because they each tell themselves the same story it is reinforced with every hearing.

The other day somebody tweeted, in outrage, a photograph of a poster advertising a private GP service. Look, they said, proof! Proof that the Tories are selling off the NHS! When challenged and when it was pointed out that this as actually of some benefit to the NHS, allowing those who had already paid for the NHS through their taxes to pay again for consultation and treatment, the tweeter simply didn’t hear it. The only thing they heard was their own echoed voice, yes, here is the evidence.

The same happens with schools, transport and many other publicly funded services; the higher earners not only pay for all of it (nobody on UK median wage contributes even close to the monetary benefit they gain) but they then pay again to go private. And then they are castigated by the left for not paying their ‘fair share’. This, of course, is absolutely true, higher rate taxpayers pay far more than their fair share and if they truly held any power they could easily choose not to. But no sayeth the glass-house incumbents, the Tories only work for the ‘rich’, recently defined by John McDonnell as anybody on over £75k.

But any logic is ignored by Momentum and their camp followers as they continue to bang the drum for class war against the Conservatives and drive that red wedge through society. A series of nested tweets has been doing the rounds:

·         As a teacher it is my duty to inform the public that after 7 Tory years schools are on their knees. Your child's education is at stake.

·         As a nurse it is my duty to inform the public that after 7 Tory years the NHS has been decimated. You and your children's health is at risk

·         As a firefighter, it is my duty to inform the public that after 7 Tory years, the UK fire service has been decimated. You are now less safe.

Etc, etc and on and on and some people are too dim to actually look around them.

Profile of a Labour voter in 2017...

Outside that bell jar not a single baby’s head has been stamped on by a Tory jackboot. Not one person in possession of their sanity has been forced to eat their young to survive. No gassing, no police state, no disappearances...  The world goes on, doing what it does and government - any flavour - does its best against the odds to facilitate it. Those who thrive are those who try, not those who sit and wail and wait for somebody else to fix their poor choices. You want a future for your children? Break the glass.

The Death of Honour

Oh, I know what you're going to say, it died a long time ago and I think you are probably quite correct but here’s the thing; its rotting corpse is really starting to stink up the place. You would think by now they’d have at least given it a decent burial but sadly no, it is not to be.

Of course, when the Vikings came over at the end of the first millennium it was not with their own benefit or honour in mind. Oh no. They had seen that we were lagging behind in the essential rape and pillage industries and we needing a damn good dose of looting, slaughtering, burning and general ransacking to put us back on the straight and narrow. Thankfully, their helpful intervention came at just the right time to inject a bit of important stoicism to the burgeoning British character.

Similarly by the time we got to the fourteenth century it was clear that we had lapsed once more and our moral character was in grave danger as a result of a sloppy assumption that we would lead long and happy, healthy lives. Luckily on that occasion it was from Asia that our salvation came and thanks to the importation of sufficient oriental rat fleas, the Black Death put paid to our weaknesses in a trice, cut a swathe through our populations and made us buck our ideas up a bit.

Oh yes, Britain simply would not exist in our present form were it not for immigration. It is only thanks to immigration that we have a nation at all; if not for invading hordes of Angles, Saxons and ‘Juts’ according to Benjamin Obadiah Iqbal Zephaniah, who travelled to this land from his native Birmingham over half a century ago, why we would have no nation to speak of. God bless you, Benjamin, for reminding us ‘juts’ how pivotal to our isolated island history rampant immigration has been. Thank god we ‘aksed’ you over.

He who controls the present, they say, controls the past. But in the Internet age anybody with access to a computer can have a stab and Labour have been busy stabbing away at history in front of our very eyes. Everywhere you look and on every subject you will find that Labour now have all the answers that were cruelly withheld from them in power. Watch any news programme or follow any political discourse in any newspapers, online or in the airwaves and you will hear and see it for yourself.

On welfare, immigration, education, defence, foreign policy, the NHS, HS2 and even on the economy Labour can deliver. As you listen to the mellifluous tones of confident young men and women, delivering their messianic messages you can only marvel at what trickery was deployed at the last election to deny them their rightful place in power. Why, even as we speak, the monstrosity that is the whole Paul Flowers, rent-boy, corruption, mendacity, rent-boy, coke, rent-boy, incompetence debacle is slowly being crafted to join history as a failing of the Conservative administration…

As was the borrowing, the overspending, the disaster of multiculturalism, the house price crash and and the inflation of the welfare state to exceed the tax take… the dirty, rotten Tory bastards. And only now can we see the truth of how it was that the wicked Conservatives, in an act of truly audacious sabotage, attempted to bring down the Labour Party by enlisting the nasty Tory bully boys of Unite to rig the vote and employ Aardman Animations to elect The Wrong Miliband. The utter shits.

A word of warning now. If you are ‘A Left’, as a result of which you will have no functioning irony glands, it must be explained that the preceding 600 words have all been deliberate lies. Don’t worry; they are the kind of lovely, caring lies that the Labour Party can be proud to uphold. I tell you this only so that one day when you start to speak and somebody slaps you so hard across the mouth that it nearly breaks your festering, lying jaw, you shouldn't take it as an act of aggression alone; it is merely the sound of reality being vigorously reinstated.