Pig Tales

Times are hard and the pushers of the EU project are determined to paint on thick the harder times they want us to believe lie on the outside of the barbed wire Euro-fence. If all goes according to plan and we end up leaving we might need to tighten our belts a little, or forego the easy access to exotic ingredients to sate our appetite for world cuisine, although I very much doubt it. But such musings reminded me of the time when I lived in a rural idyll as a much younger man and Britain was more or less self-sufficient for food..

It was summer time and the strawberry-picking season in full swing; good money was to be had for those willing to get on their knees and shuffle through the rows collecting the ‘red gold’. We were a regular annual crew and for a few short weeks it was like a strawberry Klondike as we earned around twice an average labourer’s wage just because we had nimble young fingers and joints that had yet to develop a worrying creak. At breaks we would wander around the farmyard, curiously poking our noses at strange sights and smells. And one of the smelliest sights was old Jasper, the farm boar.

He was a happy pig, Jasper, feasting on household scraps and at this time of year, as many overripe strawberries as he could handle. He was gregarious, too, joyfully accepting a pat on the back or a tickle of his ears. But one year something had changed. As he trotted across his pen to greet us nobody could fail to notice the cause of his new, noisy and clumsy gait. Jasper had a wooden leg! We watched, open-mouthed, as he clip-clopped around on the cobbles and sought out the farmer to find out what had happened.

The farmer seemed eager to tell. “Let me tell you about that pig,” he said, “that pig is like a member of the family, he is. When moi daughter was around three years old she fell in the duck pond, yonder. Without a moment’s ‘esitation, that brave porcoine ‘ero plunged straight in, swam over and rescued her. Without that pig I dread to think what moight ‘ave ‘appened. We owe ‘er loife to that porker, we do.”

“But what happened to the leg?” we chorused. The farmer silenced us with a raised hand and continued. “And then,” he said “a few years back, the old barn set on fire.” We looked at the blackened ruin which had been a feature of the farm ever since we’d been picking here. “Jethro, moi boy, was in there, forking ‘ay. Well, ‘e was overcome by the fumes, but this pig see, ‘e didn’t stop to ruminate. Oh no, ‘e were straight in there and ‘e dragged Jethro out by his belt and saved ‘is loife!” He had a tear in his eye as he recounted that fateful day and we allowed a respectfully silent moment to pass. But eventually we could wait no longer.

This little piggy went to market...

“But what about the leg?” we asked, exasperated. The farmer fixed us with a baleful eye, berating us for our brazen impatience. With a steady tone he carefully explained, “When you’ve got a hero of a pig like that. When you have a magnificent, life-saving beast like that…” We waited as the farmer took a breath to complete his oration “… well, you ain’t gonna eat ‘im all at once, are you?”

Fining our way out

In a world where we sit back and do nothing against a Neolithic death cult intent on beheading every last infidel and allow them to drive their own needy millions to our shores, testing our ability to remain blind to our own overwhelming and imminent destruction. In a world where people like Sepp Blatter can resign over allegations of systematic corruption but then continue in post for another six months with impunity. In a world where we spend £billions to alleviate a non-specific global climate issue we don’t understand, further enriching lots of rich people in the process at the expense of the poor, it’s good to know that we can focus more clearly on problems closer to home.

It appears that Hackney Council is taking a tough stand on anti-social behaviour linked to begging and sleeping rough by introducing a new Public Space Protection Order. The order empowers the police or ‘council officials’ to miraculously prevent the aforementioned begging, boozing, loitering (with or without intent, I presume) swearing, shouting, abusing public toilets, sleeping in doorways, taking drugs and causing what is cutely referred to as ASB. Wait a minute, don’t we already have ASB Orders? A breach of a PSPO attracts a £100 fixed penalty notice and failure to pay can land you in court where you can be fined up to £1,000.

Yeah, nasty Tories! But wait once more; Hackney is as Labour as Labour can be and all of a sudden I’m getting a flashback to Tony Blair’s brilliant idea of frog-marching drunks to cashpoint machines to pay fixed penalty notices. But even as I feel the guffaws developing deep in my gut I can also see with some clarity the sheer socialist genius of the idea. Jailing the homeless would be pointless; that is playing right into their hand and giving them exactly what they want – a roof over their head. So with a bit of lateral thinking let’s punish them by levying a fine they can never pay; let’s taunt them with their own inadequacy. That oughta do it.

What next in the lefty armoury of fuckwittery and failurenomics? How about we fine everybody who is not a millionaire – wait for it – a million pounds! Then we can give that million pounds to an actual millionaire in return for, say, leasing out his land for a solar farm, then – and here’s the genius part – levying a 50% tax on his earnings so that after a few short years we can get that million back into the nation’s coffers. The more poor people we fine the richer will become the millionaires, the more tax they will pay and 'Hey Presto!' back in the black we jolly well go.

The Nation's Salvation

When the world’s problems can be solved so easily by the simple trick of abandoning all logic and ignoring all practicalities it is somewhat of a surprise that Labour did not win the election and are not now ruining running the economy. But now they have a whole five years to employ their combined IQ of seven in the effort to come up with some whacky, crowd-pleasing offerings to tempt the voters next time round. I’m putting money on them rebuilding the welfare state from the proceeds of a massive, national, fucking, swear box!

Dad’s Army

Who do you think you are kidding Mr Cameron, if you think Old England’s won? Forget about the 1% - they will always survive - it’s the miserly 2% you’re grudgingly putting into defence of the realm that’s bothering me. There were only two whole calendar years during the entire twentieth century in which British forces were not engaged in military action somewhere in the world. Without us Europe would have fallen under Teutonic rule, but we were there to dig out for our allies. Twice. Fat lot of thanks we appear to have received in return.

Today, with multiple threats from many sources, we are running our armed forces into the ground and the government is refusing to commit to spending NATO’s agreed 2% of GDP after this year, claiming instead that they will 'adequately' fund our defences after the upcoming strategic review. When it comes to spending ‘review’ never means an increase, it only ever means cuts. And cuts can only be accommodated by the stretch of existing resources for so long; our armed forces have been stretched decade after decade, to the point where loyal senior military commanders are publicly briefing their fears.

The USA are concerned that we are withdrawing from our traditional seat at the top table of world powers and by running down our forces we will soon reach a position where, unable to project power into remote theatres it will be even easier to justify scaling back to just a coastguard and a few Dad’s Army platoons. The EU is determined to progressively dismantle national forces with sovereign allegiances in favour of a centrally ordered European army and our own pro-EU gobsticks are using this circular argument as a reason to stay in the EU in order to still wield global influence. Does anybody else think this is horse shit?

Britain has traditionally punched well above her weight and has been renowned as having some of the best fighting forces the world has ever seen. Run it down and you lose that knowledge, that tradition and the pride that makes it all possible. Reduce manpower and you inevitably let things slide; those skills take a generation or more to rebuild, so if we are not handing them down, intake to intake, it is inevitable that very quickly we lose the ability to recruit and train our own successfully. They already did it in the NHS and Education; how soon before we look like the sort of slovenly, ill-disciplined buffoons toting ancient weaponry that we used to snigger at on arriving in foreign airports?

Don't tell him, Pike!

Ever seen two blokes arguing in a pub? The posturing, the chest bumping, the shoving? It’s our equivalent of long, colourful tail feathers or a bright red inflatable neck goitre and it’s about measuring up, bluffing it out and avoiding getting hurt. Both sides huff and puff but nobody throws a punch; both sides get to retreat unmarked and pretend to their own supporters that they won, really. That is the truth behind Cameron’s faux ‘renegotiation’, making insignificant concessions look like big wins. The alternative is out in the car park, sleeves rolled up and ready to slug it out, prepared to take a few bruises. But you need real balls to do that. And the knowledge that you can look after yourself. Soon that will no longer be a possibility.

The Battle for Britain

Daniel Hannan wrote very recently that we should beware of the scaremongers and he is bang on the money. The forces of ‘in’ have been waging this war for many years and they have a wealth of material all ready to put the fear of god up the little people. A few months ago Channel 4 aired the blatant propaganda of ‘Ukip: The First 100 Days’ showing Britain degenerating into a fantasy neo-Nazi regime after a surprise Ukip victory in the general election. The pro-EU lefties must have been wanking themselves into a froth at this depiction of what, in their shallow, unidimensional loathing of anybody not bowing before the diktat of the little red book, would happen if actual democracy was served.

Then, last week the BBC aired a reframing of history, thinly disguised as a warts and all examination of Britain’s greatest wartime Prime Minister. ‘Churchill: When Britain Said No’ was nothing more than an anti-British polemic giving an unwarranted amount of time to the unsubstantiated opinions of rabid communist agitator David John ‘Danny the Red’ Douglass. He claimed that the man for whose funeral virtually the entire country stopped was utterly hated by those very same people who lined the streets in solemn tribute. Of course Douglass has form and was no doubt instrumental in whipping up hate mobs to burn Margaret Thatcher in effigy after her death. They do so love to hate, the left.

And now another gob-on-a-stick, the Canadian UN envoy, Francois ‘Crapeau’, has waded into the issue of the UK replacing Tony Blair’s blunt-trauma weapon the Human Rights Act with a British Bill of Rights, with the ridiculous statement:  "We have to remember the 1930s and how the rights of the Jews were restricted in Germany and then the rights of the whole German people.” And "Countries that go down the path of reducing the rights of one category of people usually don't stop there." Like the Nazis, Frank? Seriously, you little shit? Curious, isn’t it, how those whose allegiances are to such ideals as world government, common purpose and wielding immense and unaccountable power over billions of helpless citizen-slaves are so quick to conjure up the Nazi comparison.

The trouble is though, it does actually work. So powerful is the notion and so indoctrinated are people – it’s practically all that is taught in history at school, by all accounts - that all you have to say is “that’s how the Nazis started” and the sheer terror of the monsters they might become pushes them to vote for the nearest form of socialism available. Of course British National Socialism could never ever be like German National Socialism, could it now? After all, they bombed our chippies!

Plenty of work in the EU... to set you free.

But make no mistake, the issue of the European Union is already a sub-military conflict with its bureaucratic battles having been fought ever since Britain’s entry through skulduggery and its retention via the disgraceful unbalanced referendum of 1975. Furthermore it is a war waged against us, paid for by us. Every penny supposedly gifted to Britain by the EU and trumpeted as largesse represents a mere fraction of what we pay in; it’s like prisoners not only purchasing their own barbed wire but paying outside labour to erect the fences around them. Brexit? It’s the next Battle of Britain. 

Razor sharp

The final scene fades in and the lone gunman cautiously approaches the Mafia don, who is alone at his desk and unaware of the presence of his stalker. The camera zooms in, the intruder filling the frame and a single green blink is seen from the dial of his wristwatch before the focus is pulled quickly out, the point of view retreating vertically upward, beyond the boundaries of the room, revolving to zoom in to a satellite. The signal is bounced twice before reaching Langley, Virginia, where a team of operatives study flashing screens. An alarm sounds and a red button is pressed.

In the grounds of the godfather’s residence three armed guards are simultaneously despatched by unseen assailants and a shadowy figure approaches the ground floor window of the Don’s study. We see the Mafia boss and behind him the stalker. A door bursts open and the main lights are turned on. Two others enter the room and cover the stalker whose pistol is aimed at the crime boss’s chest. One is the FBI field agent who has been pursuing the stalker. The other is a British under-cover cop. The gang boss grabs his pistol and shoots the intruder; the Brit shoots the FBI guy. The cop nods at the don, holsters his pistol and exits. [Roll Credits]

We are left thrilled and disturbed; what have we just seen? Wait, the Brit was working for the Mafia all along? But why then was he seen at the marina in a previous scene? And how did the disgraced FBI man get his badge and gun back? And who, exactly, was the would-be assassin working for? More questions than answers and a plot as full of holes as an Aero but a strangely satisfying outcome. Before we have tried to unravel who did what to whom and why, our memories start to become hazy and we bring our own focus back to the here and now; work, family, money. We were entertained for a couple of hours, but now it is back to reality

Twisted tales, conspiracy theories, shadowy forces controlling our world – we love that shit. But the truth is usually much more mundane. The boss isn’t trying to get you constructively dismissed; he just doesn’t like you. The Jews, sorry ‘Zionists’, didn’t carry out the attack on the Twin Towers in a complex operation twenty years in the making; the jihadis really did just fly airliners into them. And Cultural Marxism isn’t a coordinated plot involving millions of teachers, councillors, police, judiciary and trades union placemen; It’s just what we call the mess of an outcome of years of misguided beliefs in ‘fairness’ instead of pursuing higher expectations.

William of Ockham’s fourteenth century hypothesis lex parsimoniae or ’law of parsimony' states that among competing hypotheses that predict equally well, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. What has become known as Occam’s Razor states that "Other things being equal, simpler explanations are generally better than more complex ones." It is a principle I like to remind myself of, once in a while, in order that I don’t get carried away by the outlandish conspiracy theories that permeate the Internet like a gullible plague of grasshoppers.

Keep. It. Simple. Stupid.

And thus to the forthcoming EU referendum. Prepare for smokescreens, a never-ending hall of distorting mirrors and unsubstantiated, complex ‘explanations’ about how everything is interconnected and like a game of Kerplunk, if we vote to leave the order of our society, nay the very fabric of our universe will be rent asunder. The EU question is not about benefits, nor is about immigration and freedom of movement. It isn’t about red-tape business regulations, the European arrest warrant, nor human rights. It isn’t even really about trade. It is about one thing and one thing only. Sovereignty. As more and more big guns get embroiled in the whole affair, forget that one, important, simple thing and you may as well step into your own shackles. Believe in simplicity, believe in Britain and vote out.