Owen Knows

The other day Andrew Neil had a pop at Owen Jones, the pipsqueak polemicist. Unlike everybody else Neil probably won’t get blocked; Owen earns far too much from being ridiculed on air by the master to cut off his nose like that. But after a few years of everybody saying “Oh bless, the wunderkind is saying complicated stuff on the tellybox” even the left is starting to get fed up of him.

He does still have fans, of course, but then delusion runs strong in the more gullible sectors of the general population. But nobody deserves the endorsement of a proven liar: Mehdi Hasan tweeted on Sunday that “@OwenJones84 has more intelligence and integrity in his fingernail than most of his British media critics put together”; this on a typically whiny thread about his journalistic expertise. So I imagine it rankled when Jennifer Williams at the Manchester Evening News questioned his actual credentials. Hey, if the left can denounce Katie Hopkins, who has written for many fine organs as not-a-journalist... sauce for the gander.

But then if the left has ever been supreme at anything, it has to be hypocrisy. Yes, we are all guilty of it, but people like Jonesy take it to a whole new level, Denouncing anybody who dares mention uncontrolled, mass immigration in a negative way as indulging in ‘dog-whistle’ politics, Jones and his bedfellows whip up their flock into a frenzy of outrage via a knee-jerk necessity to invoke the spectre of Nazis rising from the past to sweep across Europe and bring darkness to the land.

To OJ the BBC is a tool of the ‘hard right’ ‘cruel Tory’ establishment, denying left wing voices and trampling on free speech. Owen, who is never off the box, blocks anybody on Twitter who disagrees with him, then uses his many media appearances to simply tell lies. Of course, they’re not lies to him, in much the same away as fire and brimstone preachers must either believe every image of hell and damnation they foretell or else be barking mad... or malevolently duplicitous.

But Owen does it from a self-identified position of loveliness. By sounding reasonable - we should be fairer, we should be kinder – look at me, see how kind I am... I’m adorable! How could I possibly advocate harm to anybody? But them; they are the enemy and as much as we abhor their methods – look at them, the far right, just look at them with their... their... tattoos, and their... their jobs! To the left the ends have always justified the means, but to assuage their dissonance they tell themselves they must resort to using what they believe the right’s methods against them because nothing else will work.

But when we slaughter, we do it in the name of kindness. Did you know that Jeremy Corbyn’s middle name is kindness? Well it is, and if that doesn’t tell you something... I’ll find something which will. And this, of course, is Squealer’s job, to make the message fit the events, to make words written after the fact appear to predict the fact; to re-purpose outright lies as inviolable truths. A famous person in history – and one whom Jones would denounce – used exactly the same tactics Owen uses every day.

The political compass of Owen Jones

Here is Owen – Goebbels – Jones performing to the gallery and attacking Frank Field in the Guardian. Really, Owen? Frank Field is now a Tory? In his final paragraph he kindly, gently absolves Momentum from any part in a forthcoming general election defeat for Labour. It’s the media, he says; the media is against us. We are the victims; we are the good guys. Yes, Owen, you keep telling yourself that.

None so Blind

Can’t see for looking? Can’t see the wood for the trees? Yesterday brought yet another flurry – or is it a rash? – of Labour apologists suddenly discovering what they struggled to see for five long years. But I’m not so ready to forgive their casual myopia; there’s none so blind as those who will not see. For all those years (and many before, while still in office) the Labour Party steadfastly refused to acknowledge what their own voters tried desperately to tell them. The very people who brought Labour into existence felt abandoned as their lives degenerated and every time they tried to raise their concerns the party cocked a deaf ’un and pretended all was well.

But their supporters are a stubborn bunch and clung onto their belief even as the existence of the godhead was being shown to be just smoke and mirrors. The conjuror revealed the cards up his sleeves, the stooge in the audience and the dove in his pocket and still the faithful willed it to be real magic. And then the little boy in the crowd pointed at the Emperor’s naked bollocks and, as if he had counted to three and snapped his fingers, they all woke up. Stunned, they realised they had been led up the garden path; tricked, betrayed and abandoned and all for an ology looking for an idea. The dream was over and the ballot proved it.

Yes there are still some too stupid to fully understand and yes there are those still willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, but only now, their credibility in tatters and their enemies triumphant; only now do the party leaders even begin to admit what we all knew for years. Not only wasn’t Labour working, it wasn’t listening either. The voters are innocent; all they did was try and try and try to get through. But the party apparatchiks deserve every last bit of humiliation that can be heaped upon them. Shame on you all; this wasn’t incompetence, it was wilful ignorance.

For a century labour didn’t need to listen – they knew what their people wanted because they were their people. And even now they are not apologising because they are sorry for anything, they are doing it because they think it’s what we want to hear. Tony Blair took a leaf out of Margaret’s book and led his party to the right and into the light, but he still allowed himself to imagine the party knew best what people wanted. Things can only get better, they sang, and then assembled focus groups to find out what things people should be told would get better. The New Labour babysitters had little in the way of a vision, but they sure knew how to bribe the kids into keeping quiet.

Smoke. And mirrors. And now, as the latest line-up of bright-eyed hopefuls takes to the stage, they wonder what they can do to repair the rift. Surely not ‘The Third Way’ again? It is telling when agitators like Owen Jones urge them to take up the mantra the Conservatives have chanted for years. “Don’t let the Tories steal aspiration – we on the left must claim it” he squeaks in his latest piece for the gutless Guardian. Is he turning away from ultra-socialism and embracing Maggie’s way? Is he bollocks; in true Marxist fashion he really wants Labour to continue turning left, but just appear to occupy Tory territory and alter the meaning of the word.

Lost Causes

Thankfully, the true party of aspiration – you’d have to go a long way to beat the vision of a home-owning democracy – has five years to steady the ship and prove to the country that a hand up is far better than a hand out. Things can only get better? They can now.

The secret diary of Owen Jones aged 29¾

The press have been most unkind to me in the last 24 hours. Ever since I outlined – for free – my revolutionary plan for a brilliant new telephone system. A system owned by the people, run by the people, for the benefit of the people and – and this is the really, really brilliant bit – all paid for by the government, which means it will cost the people nothing at all. I sometimes wonder if it is worth my while even trying to tell people about the visions I have, because all they ever do is laugh and correct my sums.

Well, I’ll show them. When I get the royalties for my superb new book, ‘The Vile,Nasty Bullies and How They are Very, Very Naughty’ - me being a brilliant writer and all - I will be able to laugh on the other side of their faces. And it will be the last laugh as well because he who laughs last took the longest to get the punchline of the mixed metaphor... in Spain. So there. Anyway, they can say what they like; if they don’t go for my phone idea, I have plenty of other revolutionary, New-Marxist winners such as:

Nationalise the railways, for a start. And the supermarkets while we’re about it. The sea could do with nationalising as well, then the fish stocks would return because under a caring socialist government the cruel sea would be an altogether nicer place to live. And don’t think my ideas stop there, because they jolly well don’t. I have lots and lots of new ways of looking at how things are run. We could nationalise all the jobs too. And in case you think the only idea I have is to nationalise everything, think again. I would also – and this is completely different from nationalisation, I’ll have you know – take all the banks into public ownership.

Once the people… who were so cruelly wronged by the evil bankers and their plot for world domination in collusion with the baby-eating Tory government (which utterly wrecked the whole world economy in 2008, just so they could get elected by the Zionist-Illuminati-Papal-Anglican-Ku-Klux-Klan - ZipaKlan - conspiracy two years later)… once the people are in charge of all the money you will see just what can be done to productivity in post-colonial, multi-friendly, multicultural, Soviet Europe. You mark my words – but not in the way my teachers mark my homework; all that red pen shows they are just jealous of my genius.

It isn’t easy being a modern man of vision, a New Messiah, what with Twitter and everything. But my ambitions don’t stop with making the United Kingdom into a socialist paradise on earth, for which I will be the recipient of much garment-rending gratitude and adoration. Oh no, I plan to follow Saint Tony the Martyr into the Middle East and do a bit of envoying in his eminent wake. After all, how hard can it be?

Holy Broken Britain, Batman!

With my brilliance (did I mention my new book?) I will start with solving the Gaza conflict. Honestly, all those career politicians beating about the bush and taking sides. I have applied my enormous brain to the problems and I have come up with a solution; a brilliant solution - a final solution, if you will. What Gaza needs is a good old bit of nationalising. Under nationalisation it is not possible to make war; everybody will be far too busy trying to make a living. 

Agenda of a Dope

He writes a good polemic, I’ll give him that. Yesterday, Owen jones wrote this piece under the rallying cry of an "Agenda of Hope". You can read it all if you like, but here are my abridged study notes with commentary. Like all the lefties Owen has comprehensive and infallible answers to the intensely complex problems that generations of politicians and economic ‘experts’ have failed to solve; largely because real solutions involve unpalatable actions. *cough*eugenics*cough* But, hey-ho, let’s look at what the Boy Wonder has to say. He starts off with an emotive little story, loaded with triggers to get the Tory-hating classes’ juices flowing.

“The alarm goes off. It’s dark outside, and Mary wakes to get ready for work at the checkout of a local supermarket. Like most of Britain’s poor, she has a job that leaves her and her children trapped below the poverty line.”

Of course, ‘poverty’ in Britain does not mean what poverty means in the rest of the world. It’s an inflated definition of want posing as need, invented for gesture politics and designed for the very thing Owen perpetually condemns the right for doing – dividing the population. But then, as a socialist OJ is no stranger to hypocrisy.

“She finds herself competing with colleagues for overtime, just to earn a few more pounds to spend on her kids. Even though her employer makes hundreds of millions of pounds of profit a year, it is the taxpayer who has to step in and subsidise those poverty wages to give Mary a chance to pay the bills and feed her children.”

Oh, do give it a rest, Owen. Now you’re painting a dog-eat-dog world where the poor squabble over the scraps and the fat cat toffs sit at high table and throw half eaten swan’s legs to the floor for their dogs. Or is that a scene from Animal Farm? Also, why is a company’s profit always a bad thing? So a 5% margin for a multinational is obscene, whereas a 100% margin for a fag smuggler is simple social justice, the little man driven to crime to buck the system?

“Mary had a rough night’s sleep because it’s nearly time to pay the rent.”

Yep, greedy grasping landlords again, ripping off the poor. Owen loves to busk on the theme of predatory slumlords, terrorising the weak and fearful. Shame that his rhetoric is spoiled by the huge number of landlords who were enticed into buy-to-let mortgages, with rents barely meeting the costs, every void month an outright loss and capital values plunged into negative equity territory. But no, in Owen’s world landlords are overwhelmingly evil and overwhelmingly rich pantomime villains.

“And so Mary leaves for a gruelling shift at the supermarket, working hard to earn her poverty.”

Aw, gruelling? She's on a checkout, not down a tin mine. This, of course from a man whose idea of gruelling is taking on yet another commission to write Dickensian sketches from his garret, portraying rickety children and gin-soaked washer-women on the fringes of society – such extreme hardship as Owen experienced first-hand during his penurious time at Oxford University.

“Mary isn’t a real person, but there are millions of people in this country who share aspects of their lives with someone like her. We all have to pay, literally, as poverty-paying bosses and rip-off landlords milk our welfare state.”

You can bet your sweet bippy Mary isn’t a real person Owen. If she was and you met her she’d soon see through your ridiculous posturing. Practically every single one of your ‘vulnerable’ poor, if elevated to higher wages, would slam the door in the face of the tax collector in any way they could. To suggest otherwise – that high earners are natural greedy, while low earners are naturally honest is divisive posturing of the most obvious kind.

“The Government and much of the media have answers for people like Mary. “Instead of being angry at your situation,” Mary is told, “be angry at unemployed people, immigrants, public sector workers, or disabled claimants instead.” It is an Agenda of Fear [that] makes sure that the real solutions to the problems faced by someone like Mary – and the nation as a whole – are never even discussed.”

But yes they are discussed, me laddo, and they are discussed endlessly by many people far more informed and engaged than you or I. Iain Duncan Smith has spent ten years thinking of little else and has been roundly applauded (from all sides) for his work yet, driven by your class war agenda, you label him as just another 'cruel Tory'. Furthermore, your caricaturing the coalition as Machiavellian puppet masters, engaged in a plot to subjugate the proletariat is exactly the same lazy tactics you have just decried in the above paragraph. Irony much?

But Owen has not only melodramatised the problem he’s got the imaginary solutions as well. Let’s just pray that his nine-point manifesto, his “Agenda for hope” isn’t based solely on magic beans. Honestly, why we ever let him go to market on his own is beyond me. Anyway, here we go:

1) A statutory living wage, with immediate effect, for large businesses and the public sector, and phased  in for small and medium  businesses over a five-year Parliament.

Oh, how disappointing, the magic beans are deployed in his very first item! Obviously, as a history graduate he is an authority on wage fixing. And how soon before the minimum wage is eaten up by inflation? And what IS a living wage? £20k? £40K? Better yet, £100k, then item 3 can kick in all the sooner. Business? Oh, that fled long ago to healthier economic climes.

           

2) Resolve the housing crisis by regulating private rents [and] reduce taxpayers’ subsidies to landlords.

Ah, more magic beanery. There’s a theme here – increase wages, lower rents, magic up some dosh to build council houses. But wait, you already lost the businesses and hence the real tax revenue with point 1.

3) A 50 per cent tax on all earnings above £100,000

Genius! So, the sooner the minimum wage rises to £100k, the better. Bring on the Weimar rates of inflation please, so we can reach this Nirvanic ideal in a matter of months.  

4) An all-out campaign to recoup the £25bn worth of tax avoided by the wealthiest each year.

No need, pal. They’ll have all fucked off already (see above)

5) Publicly run, accountable local banks.

Sounds good. But will it work? Given that there will be little in the way of private enterprise left, the big money jobs will only exist in state-owned institutions. Give it five years and the state banks will be rife with corruption with devious practices imported from the very worst of both banking and the public sector.

6) An industrial strategy to create the “green jobs” and renewable energy industries of the future.

Again, magic money… If the green machine can’t compete without subsidy you are effectively doing to the regions what the ruinous propping up of the coal industry eventually did to those same areas. Sooner or later, you WILL run out of other people’s money and put your precious working class back on the scrap heap.

7) Publicly owned rail and energy [and NHS] democratically run by consumers and workers.

Hail the glorious Bolshevik revolution! And have another turnip, comrade! Haven’t we been here before? Unlike Owen I was actually alive during the period when ‘means of production in the hands of the workers’ had us tagged as ‘The sick man of Europe’. No thanks.

8) A new charter of workers’ rights fit for the 21st century.

In other words, extend state control not only to wages and rents but to how businesses are actually managed. Sorry, did I say businesses? Silly me, there won’t be any, will there?

9) A universal childcare system that would pay for itself... 

Oh, behave! A system that pays for itself? And did you read that sentence through before you hit ‘Save’? You really believe that, don’t you? And for that handful of beans you sold the whole fucking cow? You stupid, stupid boy.

But let’s look on the bright side. All we need now is for Labour to adopt your Dope’s Agenda, extending the dead hand of state to stifle every individual initiative and control every natural urge and we will have the perfect communist state. A telescreen in every room and Victory Gin for all! Huzzah! What’s that you say, children? They’d never do it? We’d never fall for it? Look out – he’s be-hind you!

Writers'... oh, it was on the tip of my tongue...

Some days blogging comes less easily than others. The words are slow to arrive at Typing Central and only sluggishly imprint themselves on the page. It’s as if the tunnels in my brain that get the thoughts and memories and vocabulary from one place to another are obstructed in some way, like those underground waste channels that can’t flow because of the years of accretion of tons of solidified fats. Yes, I guess I’m saying my mind is like a sewer. A fatty sewer.

Where to start? And more importantly, where will it end up? All it takes is the merest nugget of a notion, a gobbet of gossip to get you going, then the snowball starts rolling and you’re away, mixing metaphors like a grain of sand in an oyster that gradually ends up a pearl one, knit one. But not today; it’s like the barricades in my bonce are impeding the ideas and clotting up the creative flow. If only there was term for this… this mental blockage that affects writers. Damn this writer’s block. Hmm… ‘block’… I wonder?

I got blocked by Owen Jones ages ago simply for re-tweeting a challenge to his pontifications on class, poverty, the role of government and the nasty, nasty Tories. Most of the people I know on Twitter have been blocked by Owen; he blocks so often, so readily and on such flimsy grounds that he probably employs a school-leaver on sub-minimum wages to do his menial blocking duties for him, leaving Owen free to wring his hands in despair at the cruel plight of his fellows in the downtrodden working class. Just like his Aunty Polly no doubt rails against the pitiful wages she pays her Tuscan pool boy.

So it’s little wonder that when Dan Hodges had the effrontery to express surprise at @OwenJOnes84 outing himself as probably middle class, the self-proclaimed champion of the oppressed immediately blocked him. Blocking, on Twitter, simply means you no longer see that person’s tweets and they can no longer follow yours, but there are plenty of simple ways around it. It’s like turning your back on somebody in the middle of an argument, but not as bold as actually walking away. Owen Jones loves to denounce people as being unable to debate but every time I’ve ever seen him encounter dissent, as he refuses to deviate from his well-worn script, he reaches for the Block button without breaking his stride.

He just doesn’t want to hear anything that detracts from his entrenched ideas about the nobility of the people who made him a best-selling author and launched his no doubt lucrative career on television and in print. Fortunately he’s chosen his ideology wisely: as a lefty he can employ doublethink and ignore all the evidence to carve out success while decrying those who do likewise. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he’s planning on buying shares in Twitter’s IPO with a view to making big bucks now, rather than waiting for his reward in the socialist utopia he hopes to one day bring about.

That’s the problem with ideology and shit – it’s a lot like religion. With no apparent benefits but plenty of opportunities to donate, you illogically deprive yourself of various pleasures in the hope that you will get your reward in the fullness of time, i.e. when you’re dead. Whether your fantasy reward is a stash of sultanas, a gaggle of giggling virgins, a diet of milk and honey or peace on earth and goodwill to all men it isn’t going to happen any time soon, so you have to go out and grab it while you can in the here and now. Owen’s great hero, Karl Marx, must spin nightly in his grave as he waits for eternity for Marxism to one day NOT create destitution.

If you REALLY loved me, Owen, you'd grow a beard.

I mentioned there were ways around blocking? One way is to get somebody else to re-tweet your message to the blocker. Another is to generate a hashtag that trends. So if you get a chance, have a gander at the hashtag #OwenJonesSongs originated yesterday by @nby83 to see the imaginative ways in which Twitter's many OJ blockees can still get their point across. Yes, when you’re stuck for a blog subject, Owen Jones is the gift that keeps on blocking giving.

Going like clockwork... oranges

Oh it’s too good to miss and I haven’t blogged about the boy Owen for a while but he’s always good for a mention. In his latest polemic for the Independent (Oh, the irony!) he puffs smoke up the arse of the "missing force in British politics", his much-vaunted People’s Assembly.

“The unemployed; disabled benefit claimants; immigrants; public sector workers: all have come under far more sustained attack than those who plunged this country – and much of the world – into disaster. We've burned your house down, say the Tories: so it’s only fair we burn down your less deserving neighbour’s house, too. ”

So there he goes again, the architects of misery and ill fortune are not the disastrous dabbling with unworkable state socialism, the thirteen years of borrowing and spending and the hideous expansion of benefits to trap pretty much everybody into some level of state dependence. It’s not the simultaneous raising of aspirations and lowering of employability, leaving British school-leavers at a disadvantage against unskilled workers from the darkest corners of the globe. Nope, it’s the good old British class system to blame, as always.

While Owen was still in nappies ordinary people across the land were scratching their heads and wondering how Tony Blair’s miracle was being worked. How was it that workless people were affording cars and holidays and even buying houses? Could people not see that constantly re-mortgaging their homes was an unsustainable income model? And where was the money coming from to bribe tax payers with ‘credits’ to stay in work, or to bestow imaginary ailments to keep them off the jobless figures?

For balance, the boy wonder also had scathing words for the opposition: “As for the Labour leadership’s confident, coherent alternative to Tory austerity – well, I’ll let you finish laughing before you read on.” But it’s hardly a savaging because in his view ‘austerity’ is still entirely to blame, somehow, for Labour's former profligacy.

But the reality is that – just as in that disastrous decision to put yourself into negative equity – the road to recovery is long and slow. The coalition’s attempt to rein in spending while maintaining pretty much the entire welfare bill is almost certainly the only realistic option and a slow steady return to sanity is surely far better than some quack cure worse than the original disease.

Young Master Jones longs for some imagined rising up of the downtrodden masses and on his tour he’s doing his best to be seen as the resurrection of the firebrand rabble rouser, whipping up the mob into a frenzy to march on Downing Street and demand… well, what exactly, Owen?

“Letting councils build houses and controlling rents, rather than subsidising landlords; a living wage, instead of state-subsidised low wages; an industrial strategy to create hundreds of thousands of renewable jobs, instead of the misery of unemployment; an all-out war against tax avoidance worth £25bn a year; public control of the banks we bailed out: here are demands that have long been ignored. They won’t be ignored any more.”

I’ll let you into a secret you young Marxist scallywag. It’s all bollocks; empty words. The force you want to start your new people’s revolution is not the massive army of tough, wiry, manual workers you might have commanded in the 1920s, but a rag-tag huddle of welfare-softened, skunk-addled, benefit bunnies and their ideologically muddled cheerleaders. Those who can work and want to work are too busy doing what they’ve always done – working. If you were ever to get your house building programme you know damn well it’s the East Europeans who will get the jobs and your cherished left wing government would then have borrow even more to keep your constituents idle and breeding.  

Owen Jones prepares for his next big speech.

Owen concludes “The fragmented strands of progressive Britain are coming together; the anti-austerity movement is making its belated appearance. Finally, the left is entering the ring.” Yes dear, yes they are. I can only hope they've got their throwing-in towel at the ready.

Conspiracy!

There may not yet be need for the national distribution of tinfoil hats and ‘Keep Calm’ public service announcements, but there is something badly wrong at the heart of British politics. Nobody in Parliament quite knows what to do any more and nobody outside quite knows how to vote; just what do the parties stand for? Conan Doyle had Sherlock Holmes say “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

Franciscan friar William of Ockham gave his name to the theory known nowadays as Occam’s razor whereby, among competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected.  Or in modern parlance the least complicated explanation is most likely to be the truth. But to hell with all that theoretical bunkum - everybody loves a good conspiracy theory, don’t they? And both sides have them:

Polemicist gob-for-hire, Owen Jones likes to talk about some odd sort of right wing conspiracy whereby the (Boo!) Nasty Tories seek to permanently subjugate the former working classes, denying them a living wage and forever keeping them down. They hiss and point and stare down their beaky, toff noses while quaffing Champagne and passing legislation to allow their cronies to buy bits of the NHS even while millions die in unstaffed wards. Oh and they closed down t’pits in which the young Owen once dreamed of earning an honest crust. Now he’s reduced to spouting his neo-Marxist waffle at any newspaper willing to pay his fee.

Well, I’ve looked into all this right-wing conspiracy how’s-yer-father and as far as I can see, those with a right-of-centre bent are far too busy making a living to give a toss about keeping the workers down. The only thing they’re bothered about is paying as little tax as the system will allow. One thing that seems actually demonstrable is that in administrations practicing a light touch, almost laissez-faire approach to their economies the role of the state shrinks, as do its costs, as prosperity rises for almost everybody. Because these devious capitalists actually cause jobs! Of course some people can’t be helped, whatever system is in place.

On the other side of things we have the left and oh my, what a lot of devious meddling has been going on since 1848 when Uncle Karl offered up the family recipe  for, er… the destruction of the family, among other things. We get Lenin and Stalin and Mao and all sorts of purges and five-year plans and plots to murder intellectuals before they think about you too cleverly. We get Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and we get Jean Monnet, the architect of the EU, with his plan for a full-on federal European state by stealth, which is going so well that even when countries try to leave they can be told to vote again or are forced to follow economic bail out plans that leave their people starving.

We get Cultural Marxism and Common Purpose and Demos and the Fabians and the Frankfurt School and so on. Every campus is riddled with right-on children wearing Che Guevara tee shirts and dreaming up witty and ungrammatical slogans for placards. We get all sorts of variants on the theme such as Utopian Socialism and Anarcho-Syndicalism and Mutualism and even, oxymoronically enough, Libertarian Socialism. My god, Marx could make a few bob on licensing if he was still about. It’s no wonder his followers can’t run a country - they can’t even agree what flavour of pinko they are. How about, for the chattering classes, Mocha-Marxa-Cappu-Commuccino?

And so to those conspiracy theories: Capitalist conspiracies - for they do exist – always revolve around a few people forming cartels to make big profits, usually by offering something too good to be true and relying on human greed to do the rest, taking advantage of a few thousand gullible mugs. Socialist conspiracies on the other hand involve ambitious, evolved, disconnected Über -brains plotting over many years the means of bringing about the subjugation of hundreds of millions of people to a form of interminable Sisyphean serfdom on the basis that only the schemers know what is best for everybody else. But which is true?

Sherlock's method quickly dismisses the socialist conspiracy as impossible, so where does Occam’s razor guide us? Will people fall for the stealthy, clever-clever socialist plan for the breakdown of society by attacking its traditions and criminalising words and deeds and thought itself, eventually driving everything down to its lowest level in pursuit of an undefined equality in which everybody is too poor to rob? (Labour currently call that ‘One Nation’.) Or is it more likely that some greedy rich bastards try to get richer by exploiting the just-as-greedy poor? Either way it seems we're doomed.

 You know what? Owen must have it right, after all. No matter which way you look at it, Communism is just too bloody complicated and implausible to ever work - all those rules! Now excuse me while I fashion myself a hat...

(PS: You want real conspiracy? Try this: Christopher Booker)

Oh no! It's Owen Again!

I didn't study Politics and Psychobabble at the University of La-de-bleeding-dah, but I didn't need a degree in name-calling to pass through education into gainful employment where I have resided ever since the nineteen seventies. Picking up tools, producing real things, turning a profit and by and large contributing to the economy is an excellent vantage point to observe that the devil does indeed make work for idle hands to do.

At ‘street level’ this means simple benefit fraud, a bit of light theft, casual smuggling, counterfeiting and the cultivation and dealing of illegal substances. Among the alumni of the London School of Busybodies it takes the form of the study and furtherance of cults[sic]. At least it looks like it. Who knows the truth behind The Frankfurt School, Common Purpose, the Bilderberg Group, Demos, The Fabians, et al? One thing’s for sure; wherever the left gather there will be plenty of theoretical politics.

What the Philpott case has revealed is the utter desperation of a policy-free Labour Party and the callow opportunism of its cheerleaders. It is so much easier to rail against success than to achieve it; so much simpler to hate than to cooperate. While the media has naturally focused on the lurid lifestyle of the odious man, outraged rhetoric has been hotting up on… er just one side.

You can’t help but notice how those in the centre ground – there really is no ‘right wing’ in British politics - tend to calmly carry on, accepting the bad news then resuming their best endeavours, doing what they can to reduce the size of the shit pile. George Osborne’s response, after making it clear that Philpott’s crimes were his alone, was to echo what many millions of ordinary people feel – that questions should be raised about this sort of lifestyle.

“Questions should be raised”? From Ed balls’ spluttering hysterical response you might think he’d proposed the slaughter of the innocents in Bethlehem as, red-faced and foaming with outrage, he denounced the Chancellor’s perfectly reasonable and well considered words as exploiting a tragedy for political gain. It was hilarious – has Ed ever considered a career in pantomime? (Oh yes, he should!)

The left wing press went into overdrive to echo the cry with a great wailing and a gnashing of teeth and gallons of spittle flew across the land as various commentators rolled out their finest faux fury to hurl the same accusation – 'how very dare' the Nasty Tories exploit a tragedy like this? Oh, the irony.

Twitterrati in full flow

Any minute now they’ll get the Boy Wonder, Owen Jones on the telly… and there he is. And there. And there! He stated on Twitter that had the evil government not been so vile he wouldn’t have had to be on telly at all. Had to be? Oh Owen, your hunger for exposure would shame an X-Factor retread!

If anybody is using this event to further political objectives it is surely the opposition who have never grasped that simply saying no and stamping their feet at every single government policy is just silly. Rolling out The Jones to do a Violet Elizabeth Bott to order on the telly box does them no favours whatsoever. Because more and more people are recognising that many of the things they denounce became entrenched during labour’s wasted riding of the no-more-boom-and-bust years.

So I have a challenge for Owen – the biggest foot-stamper out there. Iain Duncan Smith has worked tirelessly to understand the problems of Britain’s society at large and through the Centre for Social Justice has made positive steps to bring about change for the good of all. How about, instead of ranting about £53 a week challenges, you actually listen – I mean really listen – to what he has to say and divert some of your time away from your own media career to work with him?

Borrowed time, Owen?

Your time in the sun may be short-lived and there are only so many times you can say “demonise” and pass it off as original thought. If you truly want to improve more than just your bank balance then swallow your Marxist pride, shake the man’s hand and roll up your sleeves.

The Owenisation of the Shirking Classes

We had a good thing going, once we’d worked it all out proper, like. See, since at least the Seventies there’s been a general decline in the heavy, dirty jobs that us plebs are good at – the unions didn’t really help, if we’re honest. At the same time we had the cold war and the rise of the weedy, speccy socialist intellectual. Teachers who had never fought in the real war and well-to-do, arty types on the telly started telling us we deserved better and all that, you know, like education and stuff? At first we fell for it and tried harder to get qualifications but, man, that was well-harsh, you know?

But at the same time we noticed that even though the country was broke, nobody let you starve. In fact, if you’d got kids you were sometimes better off on the Old King Cole than in a crappy job. Of course, there was the stigma of being a loafer and all that, not pulling your weight, but the Labour boffins had a plan for that as well. Soon, it was considered socially acceptable – even, you know, normal, to make a living just by having kids. Okay, you had to duck and dive a bit, you know, make sure you didn’t get cornered into a paternity test and everything, but on the whole it was okay. 

I mean, we’re not stupid, innit? You do the sums: do you work hard at school, so you can work hard at life so you can buy a house and then worry about paying the mortgage and the school fees and higher rate taxes and all that, or do you just sprog up, get a council house for life, sit back and cruise. I see ‘em, the clever kids I was at school with – they’re just as fat and unhealthy as me, but man, the stress on their faces, you know? 

Okay, so they started calling us Chavs. Fair enough, we know what we are; we’re a legitimate social class now – there’s people got PhDs on the back of studying the likes of us, like they was that David Attenborough or Dian Fossey or whatever. They’re happy, we’re happy – everybody’s happy and the bennies keep on coming... 

Then along comes Owen fucking Jones. 

At first we thought he was on his paper round, but then he keeps asking all these questions, right? Turns out he was writing a book, egged on by his mum I expect. Probably after a doctorate or summit, we thought, but no. He’s only gone and blown the whole shebang. “Chavs”, he called it, “The Demonisation of the Working Class”. Is he having a laff? We int worked since before he was bloody born and damned proud of it we are an’ all. 

But no, like the Mother Teresa of Manchester he starts meddling where he’s not wanted. He’s not one of us – he thinks he is, but he’s not – and he starts getting all high and mighty about it all, blabbing to the New Statesman and The Guardian and The Independent and wotnot and he’s on that BBC Question time every fringing other week, shooting his mouth off about how we’re maligned and bloody ‘demonised’. That word is doing my head in – every fucker uses it now about fucking everything. 

Oh he means well – he thinks he’s a bloody crusader but, honestly, all he’s done is alerted yer actual working class and got them all wound up and angry. But it’s too late now isn’t it, Owen? Because not content with writing books about us and turning us into hate figures your lot only went and stirred up the grafters who paid for it all as well; letting in anybody who wanted to work for fuck-all and keeping the wages down. Why did you do that? 

So now, thanks to you and your bloody mum – that Tolly Poynbee bird – and all your Labour mates, nobody can manage without bennies, even if they are working. And they’ve just sussed out that bennies have been going up for the last five years, while working wages have been going down. I tell you it don’t take a sociologist to see it’s going to end in tears. We weren’t fucking ‘vulnerable’ until you started banging on about it. We were doing fine. 

Equalitee - Labour Stylee!

So cheers, bloody lefties; thanks a bunch. With the cost of living going up and up, bedroom tax coming in, workfare projects... the writing’s on the wall. If it gets any worse for us, we might have to up sticks and take our benefits to Bulgaria.

Owen Moans

Well today - delicious irony - Owen "The boy wonder" Jones is having a pop at the Labour opposition and Ed Balls' latest attempt to rephrase Tory plans as his own.

Well, Owen, as it was your lot who got us here in the first place with unrestricted immigration driving down real wages and 'progressive' education driving down standards and welfare handouts liberally scattered to all and sundry to try to hide the truth, is it any wonder we now need some hard medicine to treat the British Disease? 

Of course OJ wasn't around in the 1970s to see the origin of that particular phrase, but I bet he'll be around for a few years more, dashing around on his white charger with his self-ordained defender of the downtrodden banner, sewn by his mum, striking fear into the hearts of baby-eating Tories and Labour politicians alike.

Don't you just love it when they turn on their own? I'm patiently waiting for the day in the the not-too-distant, dumbed-down future where Owen Jones' brand of schoolboy socialism is rated as searing political insight and he has become the epitome of the venerated grand old man of letters to a generation of lost souls... then one day he loses his rag at their indolence and helplessness and refers to a waiter or a barman as a workshy pleb. I live for that day. :o)

Poor Old Me

Child poverty. In Britain? Oh, give me a break.

Today in the (ahem) "Independent" Owen sanctimonious Jones once again attacks the Tories for something caused primarily by the thickitude and greedy-graspiousness of humanity and the unintended (or possibly entirely intended) consequences of Labour's largesse while in power.

The Communist wunderkind says, "With 3.6 million children growing up in poverty, the Tories have stumbled on an ingenious solution: they will redefine what child poverty is" as if that's a bad thing. It's not and poverty is long overdue for a common sense redefinition.

Labour have always mistaken relative poverty for absolute poverty and the bleeding pink, gutless, sociology brigade have added layers of unachievable aspiration to the mix to make poverty mean anybody having less than they think they deserve. Of course, the underclass - for make no mistake, there is one - are not capable of that level of thought, so quislings like Jones are more than happy to provide them with the 'right' answers to such enquiries.

In the imaginary world inside the redder than bright-red paperboy's head, all Conservative politicians are millionaires, a sum they earn by squeezing the juice out of the dried husks of the downtrodden poor, no doubt wearing tail coats and quaffing vintage champagne, while singing the Bullingdon club song to a time beaten out on the hollowed-out skulls of starved children.

In truth, relative poverty is an absurd measure. Which 'average' income is taken as the yardstick? Is a two-child family below the average wage still poor? Compared to a ten-child family they would appear rich. Oh, except the ten-child family would almost certainly be sustained healthily by the taxes paid out by poor, working households. Free education, free healthcare, a welfare state - by any objective measure there is no such thing as 'child  poverty' in the UK. 

Desperate child poverty in the United Kingdom

Yes, children go without books, without guidance, without love and attention, even without food on occasion, but that's not due to poverty; that is neglect, which is a different thing altogether. Maybe the slavering socialist malcontents should consider why one of their most enduring legacies is the withering away of social mobility and social conscience on their watch?