A bit rich?

Red Ed says “Five more years of misery” Well he would, wouldn’t he? Having thoroughly abandoned the working class way back when – many of their votes are secured firmly on the back of residual Thatcher hate anyway – Labour are hitching their wagon to a gleefully pessimistic message and crossing their fingers in hope as they pray for an economic downturn.  Good to know whose side they’re on, isn’t it? But that’s the left, through and through. They can’t bear for anybody to be independent of the state so they would rather we all be driven into penury than have a chance to breathe for ourselves.

Quite by chance yesterday I stumbled upon a 2009 report by an ‘independent’ think tank called NEF –the New Economics Foundation. Ironically, it’s entitled A Bit Rich. Of course, like ‘progressive’ the description ‘independent’ only SOUNDS like a move in the right direction and is intended to cunningly conceal the partisan ideology of the very left. It is a subliminal attempt to plant the seed of approval and prepare the argument to resist dissent; how could you not want progress, or independence? In truth it is neither. Like calling a barman an assistant bar manager, or a waiter an associate or indeed calling a coffee server a barista, it is mere semantics; words impersonating action to alter expectations.

Anyway, with soothing words, NEF tells us we got it all wrong and using real-world money to put a financial value on people is a dreadful, baby-eating capitalist tool of a thing to do. In their alternative methodology it appears you pluck happy, fluffy figures from the ether and build an economic plan around that. Their estimates of economic worth, according to the Adam Smith Institute, are a tad fanciful, applying their own notions of value to members of society and then using extreme examples and emotive words to ‘tszuj’ their findings up a bit. So a tax accountant destroys £47 of value for every £1 they earn, while a glorious people’s soviet revolutionary recycling comrade rewards us with £12 for every £1 we pay!

While it is true that a person’s worth is more than just what they earn, their paradigm is spurious to say the least, blaming every single evil banker for every single penny ‘lost’ and ascribing the role of social hero to hospital cleaners, attributing the saving of lives directly to their contribution as if some future would-be philanthropist may not survive but for their judicious application of Flash. Well then, by that logic let’s pay hospital cleaners £100 an hour because if they are worth - as NEF asserts - 10 times what they are paid, this would inject £1000 into the economy for every man-mop-hour – Savlon salvation!

Anybody can play that game: Let’s say a person claiming Job Seeker’s Allowance adds £5 to the economy for every £1 they claim – why, that makes the coalition’s resistance to increasing welfare spending an utter nonsense! And if children are the future let’s assign a value of a billion pounds to each child, thus making every penny paid in Child Benefit money very well spent. If only Jesus were alive today-he’d be worth a mint.

As you read through ‘A Bit Rich’ you wonder when you are going to get to the part where, for every pound of pocket money a child receives, the sum total of joy in the world goes up by five unicorns. But if that child grows up to be a capitalist, a mermaid must die for every pound of profit on which they legally avoid tax. But here’s the serious point: if Labour get in this is the sort of background thinking that will actually be employed to shape economic policy development. Five more years of misery - I can hear them thinking - is that all the coalition has to offer? Labour can beat that by a factor of ten!

The Two Rs

I still have in my possession a treasured postcard from Hunter Davies in response to a request from Seismic Crew 115 in Libya, for a photo illustrating his serialised family – specifically, daughter Caitlin - from his Father’s Day column which ran in Punch magazine for ten years. I hope he gets to read this blog as, in his reply he accused us of being a bunch of students cooped up in a junior common room of some provincial polytechnic, rather than the daredevil oil explorers we really were. Anyway, it’s observational humour like that which sparked my own interest in writing and I’ve recorded and commented ever since.   

Quite why this should pop into my head when everybody else is writing about Maria Miller and the absurd situation David Cameron finds himself in, I have no idea but pop it did and got to me wondering why I write at all. Let’s face it, fewer than a fraction of a percent of published writers are able to make any kind of living out of it and the opportunity cost of not doing something more useful is enormous. I hate the pretentiousness of those who say “I simply have to write, darlings” because I know I don’t and I’m also not so precious as to believe that if I just stopped I’d actually be missed. Such is ‘art’.

I’m being a tad disingenuous, actually, I do know why I’m writing about writing today. As usual Twitter is a goldmine for inspiration and a short exchange with a retired English teacher sparked off one of my hobby horses – the experiment in the 1960s with the Initial Teaching Alphabet which hindered thousands of infant school pupils in getting to grips with reading at an early age. Despite some small successes, it was a typical initiative of the progressives who, no doubt with good intentions, have caused irreparable harm to all areas of our society. Without reading your education is, to put it bluntly, fucked.

If you can’t read properly you can’t write and if you can’t write you can’t reason. You may think you can, but unless you start to put your thoughts in order it is quite difficult to articulate just what it is you believe. Of course, the internet is awash with people attempting to do just that, but the quality control is dire and lunacy is ubiquitous. So, you turn to established writers – the newspapers print more commentary than they have ever done before – and discover there is no consensus there, either. It’s rare indeed to find a news story which is cut and dried and not subject to opinion.

Which brings us back to what you believe. Without critical reading skills you are going to reject any column which doesn’t feed your existing prejudices; the most eloquently argued analysis will leave you cold so you’ll return again and again to the red mastheads and join the screeching mob of those who let somebody else decide for them just what is right and wrong. Thus the banshee screams of “Fatchaaa!” passed on from generation to generation and preventing reasoned discourse. Thus the perpetuation of the myths that, while you sleep, Tories plot to steal your food and grind up your babies for fertiliser.

I am daily astonished by the things lefties believe. I can only conclude they can’t read – maybe they are victims of their own educational experiments? And as for writing, you should grit your teeth and have a go at Owen Jones and Polly Toynbee and see the astonishing level of conspiracy theory they feed to their adherents; words can be powerful weapons and dangerous in the wrong hands. So where do I get off, you ask, thinking that anybody gives a toss about what I write? I don’t. And anyway, don’t blame me; blame Hunter Davies.

Whosoever casteth the first stone...

Twitter is many things to many people. At its best it can be a glorious way to spread  joy unconfined as happy tweeters share their uplifting thoughts with hundreds of followers and those same thoughts are transmitted around the globe, retweeted thousands of times to a potential audience of millions. Jesus would have loved it; just imagine, you could pen a parable and have half the world taken in before somebody read it properly and said, “Wait a minute”.

No, Twitter isn’t a force for good, but neither is it evil incarnate either. Twitter is better described (or decried) as a school playground; groups of friends sharing the fun, the odd fight drawing a crowd and here and there the manic loon, zooming about the place, pretending to be an aeroplane. Dotted here and there are the leaders and the losers, the lonely and the loony, but unlike the playground they choose to be here and it can be switched off.

One of the many things that twitter is known to be is the world’s Offendorium where people come to give and receive offence, to argue and squabble and then merrily block each other. In fact to some, being blocked is like taking a scalp and sometimes it is too easy; being blocked by Owen Jones for instance earns very few points as he blocks on sight. Omniscient being that he is he can look into your very soul via the medium of you being tagged into a conversation with which he mildly disagrees and instead of giving you the benefit of any doubt, there you are, blocked.

But some people genuinely don’t get Twitter. One such group of people are politicians, wrongly believing that all they have to do is tweet their wisdom and votes will come forth and multiply. Some of them do actually engage with the medium and use it well to connect with their constituents but others just come over as pompous jackasses. Prominent in the latter group, those who don’t understand the playground rules, is the leader of the opposition whose Twitter intern (‘Twintern’) regularly tweets up vacuous soundbites to which the popular meme for some months now has been to respond “Fuck off, Beaker”.

It’s a bit like replying “To see you, nice!” in response to Brucie’s ancient schtick, but unlike Forsyth, the Miliband account doesn’t respond either way; it is a one-way line of communication, receiving neither applause, nor adulation, nor indeed, offence. Enter Offendor, the warrior offendomong to take it on his behalf. Now, Old Holborn has written at length about the nature of offence – both giving and taking – and his sage advice has always been that it is entirely within your powers to NOT be offended, least of all on behalf of others, especially those who have not asked for your intervention.

But on Saturday night, a devout Labour Party activist (why, oh why, must they signal this in their bios?) who should have known better, waded in to play the unasked Good Samaritan. This is where the high horsery started:

Ed Milband Tweeted: “Gemma introduced me @scottishlabour conference last month. Her story of how she tackled her depression is important.”

To which, on cue, others replied “Fuck Off, Beaker!” and variations thereof. Not only was Gemma not identified in full (there was a link, if you cared) she was not tagged in by a Twitter handle. This was not a tweet about or to her, it was just another ‘man of the people’ placeholder by Miliband’s media morons. But Gemma was not to remain anonymous for long as our brave Christian Soldier leapt in to berate the Beaker baiters:

He tweeted: “@Shugism @GABaines @PanchoTaffy @Rolo_Tamasi @lemonrhind Will you apologise to @Ed_Miliband and Gemma Welsh for your disgusting tweets!”

 

To which the natural response was an immediate: “No, will we fuck. You can fuck off too, four eyes.” Ah, the playground taunt, best left ignored… except he couldn’t and standing as high in his saddle as he could, our brave Offendo-Knight, moonlight glinting off his righteous armour, ordered, “I am not asking you, I am telling you!” The sound of faces being palmed echoed around the Internet. But it was to get worse.

He asked “So you think mental illness is something to joke about!”

To which the obvious reply came: “Yes. Mental illness is fucking hilarious!”

Then he foolishly wrote this: “Dear @LouiseMensch @IainDale @TimMontgomerie @campbellclaret Will you help me name and shame these vile clowns?”

 That was it – the floodgates of derision were wide open as he threatened to set his high-placed imaginary friends on the lot of us and Twitter did what it so often does… Fight! The funny thing was that at no point did anybody make a joke about mental illness, or direct any ill feeling towards Gemma. The only target was the perfectly legitimate Ed Miliband who genuinely does look more like a muppet than a human being and is as out of touch with the electorate as he repeatedly maligns David Cameron for being.

Oh, if only Twitter Jail was a real jail

Maybe being out of touch and grasping the wrong end of the stick is an inbuilt Labour instinct; after an hour or so Sir Offend of Grievanceshire signed off with a triumphant last sally: “Well one thing, all the nastiness in my Twitter feed from the trolls with regards to Ed Miliband and the mental health issue, I got to them!” Oh yeah baby, that stung so baaad! The storm abated, the waters calmed and then somebody summed up the whole thing thus:  “His mistake is thinking we have a better nature to appeal to…” Amen, Twitter.

The Sinner

Ryan hadn’t had the easiest of lives. Try as he might he always seemed to make a mess of things and typically, last night was one such occasion. He was raised as a good Catholic boy, but hadn’t been to church – hadn’t even thought of it - in over a decade. He always thought his troubles dated back to the time as an altar boy when he had been wrongly accused of stealing from the collection and had been shamed in front of the congregation. He couldn’t even go to confession because he had nothing to confess.

Suddenly, feeling like an outcast, feeling always under suspicion, he began testing the tolerance of those around him; if he was going to be treated like a criminal, he may as well behave like one. His schoolwork began to slide and as his grades fell so did his attendance. Playing hooky became an easy lie as he intercepted school letters to his parents and spent his days smoking stolen cigarettes and hanging around seedy amusement arcades. Soon his petty thievery became a habit and in a few short years he was well known to the local police.

It was only a matter of time before he was accommodated at Her Majesty’s pleasure and on his release, his parents disowning him, he was set on a life on the wrong side of the tracks. Drink, drugs, burglaries, muggings; he was hell-bent on digging himself an early pauper’s grave. But all that changed when he met Róisín. She gave him a reason to get up in the morning and sober up his act and when he lapsed and was sent down for another short stretch she waited for him and took him into her home on his release.

For a few months life was good. They talked about starting a family and he cleaned up, took a dreary job and settled back onto the road to redemption. Róisín was still in the church and every Sunday she tried to persuade Ryan to come with her to mass, but her church was the same one he’d been kicked out of all those years ago. God may forgive him, but he wasn’t yet ready to forgive his servants on earth. She never nagged him but somehow her easy faith and the comfort she took from it ate away at him.

Then, last night it had all come to a head. One drink too many; getting a bit lairy down the pub; shouting his mouth off at the staff; Róisín’s tactful handling of him as she bundled him into a cab. All of these were nails in the coffin of his self-control as he sat there, indignant that she had so casually treated him like a child and excused his behaviour to the landlord, who had wanted to call the police. He felt both helpless and angry and when they had got home he had struck her across the cheek even as she tried to coax him back down to earth.

And that was the final straw. She pushed him backwards out of the door, raining ineffectual blows against his chest and he staggered off out and into the night, drunk and sobbing and raging against the cosmos. He slept fitfully on a park bench and woke shivering and broken, a deep cramp gnawing at his stomach. Dragging himself upright and still substantially drunk he bent double with the pain. And then he realised he was outside the church, that church. He might yet be saved. It was early morning but a light shone from within and he crossed its door for the first time in years, praying he wasn’t too late.

It'll take more than six Hail Marys to absolve this!

He lurched along and entered a confessional booth, groaning in torment. And suddenly he was quiet and calm, gulping great breaths of restorative air. Then a long silence, broken eventually by the priest gently coughing from the other side of the screen. No response. Another cough, louder this time; nothing. Finally, the Priest pounded three times on the wall of the confessional booth and finally Ryan responded weakly. “There’s no use knocking so hard… there’s no paper on this side either!”

Diversity Challenge

Well, if you didn’t see it the second round of the Dear Wee Nicky Clegg versus Nasty Bigot Adolf Farage was an absolute hoot. An hour of pure joy as the oh-so-sincere Clegg rattled off ad hominem attack after spitty little insult after snidey remark in a bout which, to my mind he’d lost before the first question had even been posed. His opening address telegraphed his entire limited fight plan and every single response sounded like a scripted attack on Nigel Farage’s personal values. He rarely answered a question without obfuscation and evasion; at times he looked distinctly shifty and otherwise behaved like a petulant child.

Whoever had advised him had clearly decided – from the sanitised bubble in which the media hacks and politicians alike dwell – that the instincts of the already racist British public must not be allowed to be further tainted by UKIP’s hateful bigotry. A shame then that they utterly failed to read the genuine concerns of a huge proportion of the great unwashed, most of whom have the vote and who are fed up of being lied to. It was irrelevant whether they intend to vote for UKIP or to vote to leave the EU, should we ever get the long clamoured-for referendum. Nigel Farage may not be the answer to the country’s future, but he is the only politician presently asking the perfectly reasonable question; what the hell did you lot do to my country?

When the cosmopolitan elites take their delightful nuclear families away to far-off lands to immerse themselves in another culture they come back invigorated, fizzing with joy at Poppy’s rudimentary grasp of the local language and little Hugo’s newly acquired taste for an obscure artisan cheese dish which they simply MUST try and replicate for their next dinner party. But then the disappointment sets in as they discover that among the three hundred and seventy four cheeses available at their local Islington delicatessen, Bokmakiri isn’t one of them. And none of the ignorant serving girls behind the counter can indulge Poppy with an authentic Kiswahili greeting. Why, they declare, then we must bring the world here.

The world, of course is delighted by the offer – they have heard of our streets paved with gold and have met the grand British vacationer and seen his inquisitive generosity at first hand as they sold them newly-minted artefacts at heavily inflated prices. Also, when they get to England they will no longer have to subsist on bloody buffalo cheese but they can gorge on pizza and chicken tikka masala and dress in suits and jeans and tracksuit bottoms. And no longer will they have to have families of seventeen or cook around an open fire at the side of the road. They can become British!

No, no no, say Adam and Evelyn, no, you must not sacrifice your culture, you must bring it here and dance for our amusement. You must bring your clothes, your customs, your late night noisy street life, your smells your vendettas and your seventeen children and never change – don’t go changing. You must build your own churches, run your own shops and erect your own shanty town community centres. Planning permission? No problem. Integrate? Oh, you don’t want to be British – they are nasty, parochial, racist people.

In fact, so abhorrent are the white working class that you must come here and overwhelm them in reparation for what they did to your country; all those ugly roads and railways, all that sordid commerce. Come here and show them how it is to be a true citizen of the world. And don’t worry, they will move aside and give you jobs and school places and houses and interpreters and we will curb their simmering resentments for they are too ignorant to understand, as we do, that culture is important. So important that you must never lose yours… while theirs, loathsome, tiny-minded and based as it is on hatred and fear, must be utterly eradicated.

Of course, Clegg’s big schtick was based on his own peculiar sentimentality for the wondrous diversity we have in Britain today, as if Britain’s inclusion of every other part of the world wasn’t already diverse enough without more white Europeans. But have you ever noticed how diversity is too good to be left to the ‘ethnics’? It’s been a one-way street; while change must be foisted on Britain to make it ‘better’ our rulers appear to insist on incomers maintaining their monocultural ways. This is what ordinary people resent; the notion that politicians know best what is good for them. The only nose being rubbed in diversity last night was Nick Clegg’s.