Hearth and Home

The Nationwide Building Society announced yesterday that house prices had risen by 11% across the UK in the past twelve months. If that’s the case, Mr Nationwide, perhaps you can tell me why my own house is not only worth considerably less than I paid for it eight years ago (despite being fully renovated in that period) but is likely to fetch not a penny more than it would have done last year… or the year before? As always, supposedly ‘national’ statistics are pretty much useless in painting an accurate picture.

It’s like the weather forecast; no matter what the general prognosis, the majority’s experience of specific conditions will differ. In one village an enormous cumulonimbus dumps hundreds of tonnes of the wet stuff in under half an hour while in the next the cricket continues unabated until only the cucumber sandwiches stop play. Similarly, recession or not, companies fail and people are made redundant while others prosper and profit, yet the statistics deal only with aggregated productivity and fail to tell the real stories of the majority of individuals.

What’s my beef? It’s the fact that not only will our own government rarely properly consider and accommodate regional variations, acting instead on overall figures that are representative of almost nobody, but that the EU feels compelled to butt in and do the same. Help to buy has been a real boon to people trying to buy their first house in areas outside central Londonistan yet the commissars are now ‘suggesting’ to Westminster that they take steps to curb this apparent economic bubble by cutting off the only means many people may ever have to own their own home.

How dare the EU, having shown utter profligacy throughout its existence, turn its attention to dictating the detailed policies of supposedly sovereign nations, especially those who thank their lucky stars they didn’t adopt the euro. “Tractor production at an all-time high, comrades. Cease making tractors and divert all resources to bringing in the glorious turnip harvest!” Cue the mighty tractor army of the south-east gathering in a record tonnage of the favourite communist comestible while in the tractor-deprived north the crops rot in the fields. The national statistics show only good news, while in some parts of the country the only growth industries are undertakers and clothes recyclers.

The human rights industry grants rights to criminals whilst denying justice to victims. Discrimination legislation discriminates and criminalises the majority. Employment law puts people out of work. The common agricultural policy makes farming unprofitable and food scarce. Energy policy makes electricity unaffordable, or a luxury item for some. And importing ‘vibrant’ third-world multiculturalism makes no-go areas of our inner cities. For every blue-flagged leisure centre or community outreach hub apparently paid for with ‘EU money’ we have paid IN ten or twenty-fold.

House? Luxury!

We have been ripped off, lied to, insulted, affronted, subjugated and treated as vassals throughout our whole sorry history of association with this shabby ‘communism-lite’ experiment. And still the arguments always spring from an assumption that without the EU nothing good could have come to pass, because whatever successes we do achieve it is easy to turn the passive fact that we are a member into the triumphal and causal claim that it is because we are a member. Just remember all that when your EU-fawning offspring are still eating you out of the family home at the age of 40.

The Blair Essentials

Tony Blair. Anthony Charles Lynton Blair. What a nasty, treacherous, mendacious, evil little puppet he is. Statesman for sale to the highest bidder. Start a war, become peace envoy. Deliberately adulterate a tolerant population, then decry those among it who find tolerance a one-way street. Declaim “education, education, education” then preside over a sustained and quite deliberate erosion of the same. Cast aside that same deluded, under-educated generation in favour of your cheaper, imported wage-slaves then label racist all who speak up for them.

The New Labour project marked a deliberate separation of the British people from its democracy and ushered in a new politics, practised by and for an entirely political class. The last few dinosaurs – politicians who had previously worked in ordinary jobs for a living – are rapidly becoming extinct; those currently in office who can claim non-political work experience come largely from the law, the newspapers or, bizarrely, the world of entertainment. Soon, however, only the direct political entrant will have a chance of being nominated.

Politics, national, corporate or familial was always a game based on power before principle, office before efficacy, but at least it ultimately had to serve, albeit imperfectly, the greater good of those who gave it power. But the gradual shift away from dependency on the electorate seemed to enter a new phase under Blair. Under his imperious reign politicians no longer asked what the people wanted but smugly told them what they were going to get… and what they would get if they didn’t like it. The old joke “It doesn’t matter who you vote for, the government always gets in” became a joke no more.

Political parties no longer engage the public who just feel that that wherever you place your ‘X’ it makes little difference. They don’t get the local man or woman who knows them and will represent their concerns. If it’s a safe seat they get a quota-filler, or a spotty-faced political dynasty product in the form of a mini-Blair/Straw/Prescott who will contemptuously hoover up their tribal loyalty then ignore them until the next election. If it’s a vital marginal they will witness a bout between rising Westminster superstars, none of whom will give a fuck once the voting’s done.

And even in the face of the current ‘interesting times’ their only concerns are how to counter the appeal of other parties, how to play the political game, but never how best to serve those whose votes they crave. Once upon a time the electorate turned out in force and had the power to unseat the ineffective but more often than not today people neither know nor care who their MP is; it makes no difference so they just don’t bother. Elections are decided on a dwindling turnout of the politically motivated and nobody else matters.

Which Blair project?

Then, once they are in post their sights are set on higher goals – European commission positions where votes simply don’t matter; all they have to do is follow the bidding of their new political masters and the little people, those countless millions who have to live with the disastrous consequences of shallow political whimsy, are powerless. Remember all this as you watch Tony Blair, who is once again on manoeuvres for such a position. And when Anthony Charles Lynton Blair finally ascends, god-like, to the Euro-throne, say a prayer for the soul of our dear, departed democracy.

Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it

Does anybody remember who won the local council elections? Surely it has to have been

Labour with a 324 seat gain. The overall picture still puts the Conservatives ahead with 8296 seats overall, but they lost 236 in the election; that’s a comparative gain of 560 seats by Labour. So it’s no wonder the Tories have been quiet about it all, allowing UKIP to take the limelight a little over the subsequent Euro elections; burying bad news, so to speak. My thanks to the always interesting Peter Hitchens for highlighting this.

His blog neatly sums up how tricky it is to separate fact from fiction in politics and indeed even in the news. If you have an area of intellectual expertise – the law, technology, business, the sciences – you already know how the newspapers are almost universally incapable of relaying the truth to their readers. And even worse, they indulge our confirmation bias with astonishing brazenness. Thus the planning of a new wind turbine is either: a harmful attack on people’s health and sanity (Daily Mail) a progressive and necessary step towards fuel sustainability (Guardian) lining the back pockets of Britain’s parasitic land-owning classes (Socialist Worker) or a new holy temple of enlightenment and salvation (Green Party News).

There is no real place for the truth in all of this as there is no such thing as the truth when it comes to politics. Oh, there are facts all right, but facts are difficult and often need specialist knowledge (we used to call it education) to analyse them. Raw data can be difficult to discover and even more difficult to convert into meaning and even in the supposedly open information exchange of the internet most of us rely on others to do the donkey work. My blog for instance, is always written from my own perspective of what is right and wrong and while obviously always showing the one true path, might not be to everybody’s taste.

So the next few years are going to be really interesting. Let’s assume that whoever wins the general election next year will have had to offer some form of referendum on our membership, or otherwise, of the European Union. Like our party political system there are die-hard Europhiles and Europhobes whose minds will not be changed, but the opinions of probably half the electorate are up for grabs. How are they going to be able to decide which way to vote? And I’m serious about this; whose version of ‘the truth’ will they go with?

Them 'as wants' to stay in the EU have years of momentum on their side. The project rumbles on, crushing all in its path and nobody dares challenge the received wisdom that we are better off on the train pissing out than running along the platform trying to piss in. But who said we needed to piss in, or on, anything anyway? Some supposedly foregone conclusions are nothing of the sort yet remain unchallenged.

They say that Britain couldn’t survive without immigration. They say our coffee shops would grind to a halt, our offices would never get cleaned, cars never get made and crops never get picked if we had to rely on British workers. What on earth did we do for the thousands of years BEFORE the EU then? It’s only because successive socialist-inclined governments over the last half century have allowed our values to be steadily eroded and have taken easier options – easier for them. Instead of doing the hard things – maintaining or improving education, guarding morals against a rising tide of laissez-faire, do-what-you-like individualism, instilling civic pride and a healthy level of patriotism and yes, putting Britain and the British first.

Oh it’s all very old-fashioned, I know, especially with the seductive myths of happy multicultural diversity and all that shite, but those who make policy have almost exclusively NEVER had to suffer the consequences. Even those politicians from relatively humble backgrounds know that having risen to cabinet level it is unthinkable that they will ever have to return to the type of lives the greater majority of their constituents put up with. I still believe it is up to the individual to make their own way in life, but if government has one purpose, surely it is to protect the environment that makes aspiration achievable.

What if, unencumbered by EU regulation and socio-political group-think, Britain could home-grow and train, as we used to, the very best in the world? What if life outside the tired, old union sluggard is not mere survival but confident and successful and vibrant and the UK has in its grasp the possibility of becoming a world powerhouse again? Yesterday’s ‘The Big Questions’ single enquiry was “Is there life after death” and despite all the confident assertions, nobody really had any truthful answers. Nobody knows until they go and there wasn’t one audience member who had actually come back from the dead to tell us what lies beyond.

Brexit or bust?

Well as sure as eggs is eggs the European Union will, like all administrations, run its course and decline into obscurity. Indeed, we may already have witnessed its early heart attacks. Nobody knows what awaits our part of the world after the EU shuffles off its mortal coil and joins the choir-invisible and it’s certain that nobody in the here and now can say. Independence might not only be new and interesting and exciting, it might be the start of a whole new global success story, but one thing IS for sure. If we don’t try it we’ll never know. 

Don’t even think about it

Remind me, again, of the relevance of John Major? All of a sudden the dinosaurs are being wheeled out to warn of the murky waters beyond the known world, the leviathans that lurk where the charts end and the deep, dark seas of despair that await all who would venture beyond the maternal embrace of Mother Europe. Ken Clarke, of course, never went away, but it seems that his constant insistence that life outside Europe would be a geo-political death sentence is no longer enough.

What the grey man said was that a British departure was unthinkable, by which he meant a waggy fingered “Don’t even think about it.” He even used that form of words on Radio 4 yesterday morning. Furthermore he insisted that David Cameron would emerge triumphant from reform negotiations and we would all move forward in harmony and peace and prosperity. I thought it was interesting how he was happy to predict the positive outcome of a process that has always failed in the past, yet utterly denounced the possibility that an independent Britain might not only survive but thrive, free from its Eurochains.

As evidence of Cameron’s statesmanlike stature Major cited his supposed negotiated reduction in the EU budget over a year ago, which fabricated victory was not only effectively rebuffed by every analyst in the land at the time, but has also been comprehensively trashed by last week’s demand for a half-billion quid more from British coffers. It’s fitting that the best example he could offer of Britain’s negotiating power was an abject failure to negotiate a single thing of substance.

If you want more examples just look at forty years progressive loss of sovereignty despite all the promises and posturing. “Up yours, Delors”? Don’t make me laugh. The EU institutions ride contemptuously roughshod over the wishes of formerly independent nations and the best that those nations’ leaders can offer is to repeat John Major’s advice “don’t even think about it”. But the prospects for a Britain outside the EU is exactly what we should be thinking about. And thinking about it long and hard and often and openly.

Because, if we don’t, there will be nothing to debate come a possible 2017 referendum. If people quietly lie down and “don’t even think about it” we will have a referendum that effectively asks you to choose between a well-rehearsed and heavily-funded ‘IN’ position which has been quietly propagandising for years with fearful predictions for calamity on Brexit, and a poorly researched ‘OUT’ campaign that asks you to vote on a gut feeling that we might be better off out. The in campaign needs no evidence, its job has already been done, but the out camp needs to do some real leg work to counter the non-arguments of the ardent Europhiles.

Be brave, be for Brexit

Whether your doubts are based on the loss of control of our national borders and laws, or the detachment and indifference of the political establishment; whether your antipathy for the EU is based on the over-regulation of your thoughts and actions; or whether you oppose major policies on energy, climate, economics and trade, if you want a genuinely informed and fair ballot the OUT lobby has to offer a viable vision of Britain outside the EU. If it doesn’t, the vote will go only one, predictable way and we will be dragged, not even screaming, deeper into a mongrel country called Europe. I don’t even want to think about that.

Something for the Weekend

With the advent of the single parent family, a phenomenon that has gone from shameful (or sad) to ubiquitous in a few short decades, many a ritual commonplace among my generation is practically unknown to youngsters of today: Riding on dad’s bicycle crossbar, a kick-about down the park and the steady hand of quiet masculine discipline. So Tony the barber was delighted when a man and boy entered his salon together one sunny Saturday morning.

They took a seat and waited patiently as the queue slowly progressed, accompanied by the snip of scissors, the buzz of clippers and the reassuring manly fug of old cigarette smoke, aftershave and proprietary hair dressings. The little boy studiously examined the fading style posters and the advertisements for grooming products long since defunct as the man flicked through the ancient magazines. Tony observed the sacrament as he recited the holy words to his current customer, “Anything for the weekend, sir?”

As the shop door tinkled closed, Tony swept the clippings into a corner and the man took his place at the tonsorial altar. He winked at the lad as Tony adorned him with the holy vestment of the faded and well-worn cape and applied the comb. “How do you like it, sir?” he queried and then set about the man’s head with the practised ease of a skilled artisan. In no time the job was done and with a flourish of his brush Tony flicked away the fallen curls and presented the man with the back-of-the-head mirror in the time-honoured fashion. Satisfied, the man stepped down and beckoned the lad to take his seat.

As Tony pumped up the chair to working height the smiling man said to the young lad “I’m just popping out for a few things. Be a good lad and wait for me here when you’re done, okay?” The shop door tinkled as he left and Tony set to work initiating the youngster in the ancient ways of barber lore, enquiring “Been on your holidays, yet?" as he began to snip away. Soon the job was done and the lad dutifully took a seat on the bench as Tony welcomed up the next customer.

Morning turned to afternoon as Tony plied his trade and soon a couple of hours had passed, during which time the man had not returned. Not wishing to worry the youngster, who seemed quite happy with Country Life and three-week old newspapers, Tony said nothing but as the clock above the big mirror struck two he judged it time to make his concern known. Bidding his last customer farewell and in a lull in trade he and the boy were now the only people in the shop. Tony took a seat beside the young fellow.

The Brylcreem Boys are back!

“I don’t want to worry you lad, but it looks like your dad has forgotten about you." The boy put down the magazine he had been flicking through and replied “Oh, he’s not my dad.” Tony was taken aback at first but of course, these days it was exception rather than the rule that a boy should be accompanied by his own father. “Who is he then?” asked Tony, “your step-dad?” The pause seemed to last for an age as the boy took a steady breath, “No” he said, “I just met him outside and he asked me if I wanted a free haircut.”