Owen Jones Survives!

I really can’t get overly exercised about Owen Jones’ ‘blatant premeditated assault’. But, oh my, his little adventure has been working overtime as a proxy for the relentlessly predicted but never quite materialised rise of the right. Far right domestic terrorism, I believe is the fashionable interpretation of what was probably – I really couldn’t care less – a couple of pissed-up wankers who either recognised the whiny little shit, or had experienced the little shit whining earlier that night. As obnoxious as is Jones’ politics, he’s hardly a prime target for settling a political score.

The front pages of the newspapers regularly sport photographs of assault victims: frail pensioners beaten half to death; police and bystanders macheted to the bone; virulent bruised, blackened swollen eyes; blood everywhere. The Boy Wonder? Not a scratch, well actually, a bit of a scratch. But fellow lefty polemicist, Polly Toynbee, lost no time in tweeting: “The physical attack on Owen Jones is a shameful and terrifying harbinger of the Brexit world of hate, intimidation, and scapegoating, egged on by an undemocratic, unelected Prime Minister…” Oh my good lord, is anything not the fault of Brexit?

But as an illustration of double standards this episode is a veritable Da Vinci, exposing as it does the splendid anatomy of hypocrisy which weaves its way through the whole of left-wing discourse. Owen Jones openly mocked what he calls right wing figures being ‘milkshaked’ and no doubt he is right behind the ‘punch a Nazi’ rhetoric which gives licence to thugs like the masked morons of Antifa to assault people with whom they disagree. Let’s not even mention that Jones’ favoured political causes have resulted in the deaths of millions, because – look! – far right extremism.

The hypocrisy of the left isn’t even disguised any more, as identity politics fractures into even more finely divided sects it is necessary to damp down the dissonance and openly support those you openly loathe, so long as they appear to sign up to some nebulous notion of left-wing solidarity. And while people like Toynbee and Jones and Lammy and Abbott shout about ‘divisive’ Tory policy from the rooftops they practise a level of division and subdivision with a near surgical skill. Even the LGBT banner, under which Jones is regularly seen, is a paper-thin attempt to cover the cracks as unnatural bedfellows are thrust together (pun intended) to claim a common cause.

Stand down the trauma team - he'll survive...

Did he deserve to be assaulted (and make no mistake, this was an unforgiveable criminal act and absolutely should be prosecuted)? Of course not. Did he bring it on himself? This should not even be a question we ask; if free speech means anything it means we need to let the objectionable condemn themselves by their own words. But, seriously, is this evidence of organised, far-right violence; do give over! OJ will milk this for all it is worth; let him. More people might see him for the utter phony he really is.

Right back at ya!

I notice there is no clamour from the supposed ‘far-right’ to no-platform speakers, or to close down freedom of speech. Notable by its absence are the massed ranks of far-right protesters marching through London to demand that left-wing hate preachers are denied entry into the country. And I have yet to see far-right activists egging politicians, obstructing law-abiding businesses or demanding that swastika cakes be constructed and decorated by progressive artisan bakers.

Painted faces, unintelligible placards, flying the flags of despotic states or pseudo states? Nope, those right-wingers don’t much seem to go in for that kind of protest. Nor do they appear to have a penchant for infiltrating and disrupting debates, public meetings or getting in the way of ordinary people trying to go about their business. I’m guessing they also have no mechanisms for repeatedly flouting electoral rules or demanding better-than-equal representation in ballots.

I don’t see the right pleading the case to disallow votes for people who don’t hold the same views and just what are they thinking when they allow opposing opinions to be openly heard? When was the last time you saw a BBC vox pop consisting entirely of rabid right wingers spouting jingoistic claptrap? And I’m not saying it’s never happened, but when was the last time you saw a panel show being hosted by an avowedly right-wing presenter? And which famous media figure last said ‘Fuck Labour’ out loud without censure?

When did you last hear about how the right wing has an iron grip on the media and controls the message so that you only hear or see anything through the ideological filter of the far-right press? And how many left-wing Twitter accounts are routinely suspended for tweeting mildly left-wing things such as ‘punch a Nazi today’, or ‘all Brexit voters are racists’?

If the right wingers are masters of this sort of agit-prop, they are doing a hell of a job of looking like the very opposite. And damn those right-wing educators with their emphasis on standards and performance and excellence. Those discredited, stone-age principals will... will... most likely result in people working harder, earning more, living longer and all without the help of the state. Goddammit!

Those damned Nazis – come on, let’s say it to their faces - would punish criminals, police the streets, insist that those who come here abide by our rules and integrate into our society and make it harder for freeloaders to sponge on the largesse of the taxpayer. They would even – and this is unconscionable – put the country’s finances back in the black and deny our friends abroad the opportunity to take the piss and expatriate our national wealth.

Brave freedom fighters of Antifa... no fascism here, folks

But fortunately, comrades, this isn’t going to happen any time soon because a tiny troupe of freedom fighters is pushing back. Despite almost zero presence in political activism, society at large, local government, education and the world-wide media the left are managing to have their tiny voices heard. Even as the jack boots are stamping down, this band of angels with only love in their hearts is stamping back. The rise of the right? They are going to have to rise a little harder, I’m afraid.

Don't be stupid, be a smarty...

As the political world rages about Boris’s islamophobia and Jeremy’s anti-Semitism, while those who would be governed by them really couldn’t generally give less of a toss, I can’t help but wobble my head at the sad state of world affairs. Once, would-be leaders had noble aims and lofty ideals to make the world a better place; great statesmen plied their trade and built reputations for honesty, diligence and forthright adherence to... well, to something at least honourable. Now? Now it’s like a bunch of kids squabbling over inconsequential fripperies.

The greater mass of the British population are natural centrists. Oh, they may vote, at least historically, for leftist parties, misunderstanding their intent, but the core vote is fundamentally conservative by nature; by human nature. The Tories haven’t been even close to being right wing in living memory, which is one of the reasons they react with such horror to the much-vaunted but little-evidenced, ‘rise of the right’. Ask a working man what his true values are and you will hear recited the basic manifesto of what used to be the Conservative and Union Party:

Work, don’t shirk; pay your taxes; look after you and yours and charity begins at home. Tolerate others, but don’t let them take the piss. Law and order, control the border and happily and uncontroversially wave the appropriate flag at the appropriate events. Be proud, be patriotic but don’t take it too seriously. Crack on, make do and have a laugh at yourself when you fuck up. Give a bloke a fair chance, defend the weak, look after the sick and never forget that there, but for the grace of... etc.

But, oh my goodness, look at what passes for political activism today. Anti-Trump activists are actually – and hysterically - inciting violence and insurrection. Anti-Brexit activists have actually – and hysterically – called for violence and insurrection. The hapless and inept Tories, crippled by their desperation to offend nobody, just sit back and take it when they are attacked and defamed as ‘literally Nazis’ and ‘the nasty party’ by the nice young people who vocally wish them dead; by violent means.

Meantime, an invading and wholly incompatible ideology is excused yet another attempt to kill and maim because Boris made a lame quip? Who even believes this shit except for those with a vested interest in perpetuating the myth of multiculturalism? Britain is not and never was ‘a nation of immigrants’. And it is perfectly possible – demonstrably so - for black and brown people to be racist as racism has literally nothing to do with whether you hold  some nebulously defined position of ‘power’ or its proxy, ‘privilege’. What a crock.

You can’t make something true just because you say it is true and those of us – on both sides of the actually quite slender political divide – who daily deal with the real and pressing matters of the world know this. But still the divisive factions – all of them, every single one, cleaving to the far left – insist on maintaining the lies. Their mantra: keep the lie simple, keep telling it, especially tell it to the children and watch as the lie becomes truth.

Nazi? Moi?

While useful idiots like Owen Jones are screeching incoherently about the ‘far right’ and fascism and how the jackbooted Stormtroopers of the neo-Nazi Tory Party are recreating 1930s Germany it might be pertinent to point out a few cold truths: Leftist propaganda techniques are exactly as Joseph Goebbels recommended. It is not the right, but the friends of the left who are trying to kill us. And if they really want to see Nazis they need only look in the mirror.

On the Rise

Even if you don’t look very far, every day you will hear, or read about, the rise of the ‘far right’. It is taken as a given by otherwise sober news outlets, that Brexit and other recent phenomena are entirely the result of a concerted onslaught on our hearts and minds by manipulators spreading ‘hate’. The Nazis never went away, they imply, they just took jobs at the Daily Mail, although this article in said organ does a fair job of outing the real source of hatred in the today’s increasingly uncertain world. Swallow your revulsion and read it.

A key descriptor here is the word ‘activist’. Political activists pretty universally fly the flag of one particular colour and that isn’t the hue of blue. Indeed, people on the supposed right are more noticeable by their lack of activism. No mass demonstrations, no rioting when they don’t get their way. They don’t engage in looting or pointlessly destroying other people’s property and it almost unheard of for a ‘rightie’ to issue cheap death threats or wish cancer on their opponents. They are far too busy working for a living and pursuing what the left term as their hateful ideology.

The Mail may not be the finest newspaper out there and yes it does display a bias towards the British and towards traditional British values, but promoting hate? Do me a favour!. Live and let live and self-reliance may be anathema to the left, but it hardly constitutes hatred, let alone a definable political ideology. People on the notional right are far more likely to be apolitical at heart and tend not to impose their world-view of the on the rest, saying only, ‘it’s up to you’ and ‘life is what you make it’... and ‘mustn’t grumble’. It’s hardly the stuff of revolution, is it?

The Mail article linked above responsibly exposes the utter hypocrisy of the ‘Stop Funding Hate’ movement. In common with all its kindred tribes – Hope Not Hate, Reclaim the Streets, Unite Against Fascism – the collective often referred to as ‘Antifa’ rely on the unthinking obedience of its mostly juvenile acolytes. As they parade their banners and screech their slogans and spit and snarl, the degree of cognitive dissonance on display is remarkable, even for their incredibly high threshold of tolerance towards holding competing views without seeing the contradictions. They punch people because they are more peaceful.

Such malcontents talk openly and without fear of censure about causing physical harm, sexual abuse and even death to people for whom they hold the deepest enmity, yet cannot see in themselves that which they are determined to prove exists in others: Trawling through a news story for the flimsiest hint of antipathy, such as referring to a foreigner as, say ‘a foreigner’ they will, on finding (or imagining finding) such references, instinctively scream ‘Hate Crime!’ And then in denouncing this crime will call for their followers to demand the metaphorical public dismemberment of the person who dared to type the hate-filled word.

This is how Corbyn and his rabid fans will be brought low – when one day it dawns on them that the much-promulgated and fervently hoped-for ‘rise of the right’ simply does not exist. When the supposed far-right atrocities turn out never to have occurred. When they awake from their dream amid the burning ruins of the city they used to call home. When the camp followers one day - perhaps while setting fire to a pregnant woman for daring to say she didn’t think all Tories were murderers - suddenly wake up and ask themselves... Are WE the baddies?

Brexit. It’s hard

The bonkers game that sees the Conservative Party try to match Labour’s fantasy football league of politics is breaking sinister new ground with Philip Hammond’s mooting of a generational tax divide; tax the old to bribe the young. While Labour can shift its stance daily – Brexit sunny-side-up, Brexit over-easy, hard-boiled Brexit – and hardly anybody cares, the government is like a flailing toddler trying to land a punch on a six-foot adversary whose hand is on its forehead. It looks foolish and useless.

I honestly believe that not even Labour voters now actually believe in Labour’s policies, for two main reasons. One, they have no firm, plausible, agreed and deliverable policies whatsoever. And two, they have no need to worry about anything so boring as how the debts get paid as long as the man in the top job keeps handing out the Werther’s Originals. Oh, Jeremy Corbyn, they sing, united in their mass delusion that Old Man Marxism is the answer.

But here’s the odd thing. Across Europe it is the right-wing, populist, nationalist movements which are making progress, shaking things up and giving the big-state, socialist rulers bloody noses. Whereas here in the country whose traditional national character is the very embodiment of Conservatism it is to the left that chunks of the electorate are turning. Because, to those who haven’t seen it in action, socialism sounds so... nice.

History will remember Tony Blair for one thing and it won’t be the war that all the left-wingers keep berating him for; it will be the bringing about of the very character change that is fuelling their rise. The left should be worshipping him. When he said he wanted to rub the right’s nose in diversity he wasn’t kidding. He took that puppy by the scruff of the neck and shoved its snout right into the great big pile of stinking multiculturalism he had deposited on the hearth rug.

So, at a time when Mrs May and her entourage should be circling the wagons and digging in for battle, they are distracted by leaks and leadership challenges and self-destruct suggestions like ‘let’s hike up the taxes on our most loyal supporters’. The EU team are laughing down their sleeves at us and frankly taking ‘le piss’, shrugging their shoulders and saying ‘non’ at every turn. And in this they are aided and abetted by a Labour Party willing to simply acquiesce and submit entirely to the EU’s demands.

Submission is quite a handy stance, too, when it comes to Labour’s love affair with islam. Under a Labour administration many more muslims will hold positions of power, the borders will be as porous as surgical gauze and the economy will be entirely controlled by Brussels. Corbyn won’t need any policies of his own as he will willingly accept whatever the EU caliphate dictates.

Stop asking the electorate and start leading them!

So what’s to be done? Aping Labour policies has never served the Tories well; they should immediately refrain from going down that track. Trying to buy off the student vote is pointless anyway because young people will always hate to hear the truth especially from the Tories. Instead Mrs May should take a leaf out of Europe’s book. Not the EU, but the people of Europe. Take a right turn, resurrect your Conservatism and give us a ballsy, what-the-people-voted-for, outright rejection of everything the EU stands for. 

Squeaky Clean?

Michael Sheen says he is leaving acting to become a full-time political activist and fight the good fight against – wait for it – the rise of the far right. This will, necessarily, involve rubbing shoulders with some of the country’s great malcontents. He will spend time in the company of militant vegans, foul feminazis, crazed conspiracists and especially in Port Talbot and its environs, disciples of the church of Anti-Thatcher, whose sole contribution to the debate is that it is all the fault of the woman who let their grandparents buy their council house.

It’s a curious thing, yer actual human; the most resourceful species on the planet and also the most miserable. Gloomy pessimism is so central to human nature we’d die out without it. Expecting the worst prepares you for it, so, in the event of anything less, you are ahead of the game. But you can take a predilection too far. Dreading failure is one thing; actively engineering it is quiet another and the current mood among the malcontents, stoked up by the fervent imaginations of the perpetually aggrieved, is destructive in the extreme. Whole swathes of impressionable children – and I include Sheen in this collective – are being swept up in the hysteria.

Once upon a time in Europe the Black Death claimed significant slices of the population; many never reached their teens, let alone their twenties and an old age pension, had one existed, would have had to come into effect before your thirtieth year to have had any recipients. In an age which pre-dated politics for the masses, survival was a matter of chance and how the dice fell was left to the church to explain, a task it performed spectacularly poorly. It all comes down to information and how you use it. Then as today, ignorance disguised as divine insight perpetuated the notion that somebody else was to blame; it’s the pessimists’ mantra.

In the early nineteenth century, when machines promised great efficiencies, the hand-weaving Luddites, instead of embracing this progress and using it themselves, destroyed what they saw as the instrument of their redundancy and in doing so hastened their own demise. What they fought against was inevitable and part of a progress that would continue to bring greater prosperity to all, admittedly at the expense of a few. ‘Twas ever thus; despite all the portents of doom, despite all the forecasts of abject poverty and inhuman treatment we live in times of unprecedented ease and plenty

And one of the most plentiful resources is information. The trouble is that our ability to process it dispassionately has become severely hampered. Whether it is poor critical thinking skills or a lack of general education or simply a prolonged infantile attitude which makes hard reality much trickier to grasp than fancy folk tales, the Luddites are back and this time the machines they are fighting are themselves. By the careless use of social media, the acceptance of fake news as true and a general appeal to puerile identity politics, the protesting classes have convinced themselves that the quiet ballot-box revolt of ordinary people is somehow an orchestrated uprising.

Mr Sheen... notice how the duster is in his LEFT hand!

So, Michael, people too stupid to understand have been manipulated to vote against the forces of globalisation? People ignorant of the facts have been organised into rabid lynch mobs to racially abuse immigrants? Gangs of incredibly thick peasants have been duped into ushering in the agents of their own destruction? These stupid, stupid, stupid people have somehow managed to ‘overthrow’ your desired order by exercising their right to one man, one vote? The rise of the right? It is nothing more than the rise of the right to have your views known. It strikes me that the ignorance, the mobs, the mass protests and the rabble-rousing are still pretty much the preserve of the left. Going to help make everything clean, Mr Sheen? Good luck with that.