They Seek it Here…

Following the general election of June 2010, it took Belgium a further 589 days to negotiate, agree on and formally recognise and enable a government. It didn’t seem to bother the Belgians greatly. In fact, beginning in December 2018 they seem determined to repeat the process and have only recently installed a caretaker Prime Minister to oversee the coronavirus issue. Given the inability of the diverse and disparate parties to agree, this could become a permanent arrangement, in which case the Belgian people would be justified in wondering what was the point of having elections at all. (Pretty much the ultimate ambition of the EU, as it happens.)

The fact is some roles in society, many of them extremely well paid, perform no useful function and would not be missed. Such roles are often so obscure that most people are unaware they exist at all. A whole plethora of functionaries can be described as rent-seekers. Rent seeking is when somebody seeks remuneration without contributing any productivity and is particularly prevalent in publicly-funded bodies, although many advisors and consultants in the private sector are equally leech-like.

The fable of the Emperor’s New Clothes is well known, but regularly goes unheeded while parasitic charlatans continue to practise their blood-sucking with impunity until they are revealed for the thieves they really are. Thief isn’t too harsh a word, either. The exotic con man who persuades your middle-aged aunt to part with her savings for love is doing exactly the same thing as the life coach who convinces you that you need help to wipe your arse. They may tell themselves that the money was offered freely, but in their hearts they know exactly what they are doing.

But these are relatively small beer and such lone scammers’ careers are often short-lived. In large organisations, however, there are plenty of places to hide and the insertion of rent-seeking blood-suckers has been incorporated directly into the core of the entity’s paradigm. Remember all those ridiculous mission statements that were all the rage not so long ago? People were paid to come up with those. Just as the Iron Law of Bureaucracy decrees that bureaucrats document a company to death, once you have one non-job in place the infection soon spreads and the nonsense quickly follows.

Addicts often have to go cold turkey rather than try and cut down or substitute one dangerous substance for a slightly less dangerous alternative. Many recovered addicts report that they do not miss the thing they once thought they utterly depended upon. And especially in these times when we have had to tighten our belts no doubt most of us have carried out an audit of our lives and discovered all sorts of things we can give up. We all understand buyer’s remorse and sometimes even feel shame for our folly, but in the end we see the funny side and laugh at the stuff we bought, but had no real need for.

We have a resident Face Painter???

The best way of working out if something is necessary is to see if you can get by without it.  If you can, you didn’t need it. If you didn’t even notice it was missing you never needed it. Now, ask yourself, during lockdown did you experience any great craving for any of the following: human rights lawyers, sociologists, race relations advisers, inclusion and diversity officers, customer experience managers and any of the other costly and pointless non-jobs? What, in all honesty, did they bring to the table? Whose lives did they enrich other than their own? I reckon it’s way past time for that audit and high time for us all to have a  bloody good laugh.

Back to Work

I’m back to work tomorrow for at least a couple of days, then very likely in full time quite soon and while I have thoroughly enjoyed the lockdown, it will be something of a relief to return to gainful occupation. In addition, knowing that I will be playing a larger part than most in pushing new online, virtual ‘solutions’ means I will be one of the more important cogs in our little machine. New ways of working should make us more productive and allow expansion of income without having to try and cram ever more into our already crammed premises.

It will also be a relief to get away from the madness of Twitter and the media in general. So many people clamouring to be heard. So many people falling prey to the worst prognostications and then, by some curious online osmosis, making their own prophecies of doom in turn. So many clueless pontificators, each afflicted with their own special mix of gullibility, fear and devious sophistry; all of them putting together two and two and coming out with whatever number they first thought of.

People like Carole Cadwalladr see devious cadres plotting sinister world domination; the creeping tendrils of whichever organisation she believes she has exposed this month are everywhere. Your thoughts are being manipulated by shady capitalists who have the world’s politicians in their pocket. But why should Catlady have the monopoly on who are the good billionaires and who are the bad? Or are they ‘all in it together’. We need to be told! No, actually, we don’t. People are gullible enough without being fed such a rich diet of alarm.

The media has done its job and by repetition of the same questions over and over again, questions which are not really questions at all, has managed to push the credulous to doubt that the government has done anything right at any part of the pandemic. Naturally, there is a political divide, with those broadly backing government remaining calm and listening to the relaxation of lockdown advice. But, if you have a hard-on for Boris, as intellectually superior as you are, it seems you have an inordinately difficult time of grasping what ‘stay alert’ means. Odd, really, especially as just days ago you were all experts in epidemiology.

The new national pastime appears to be dreaming up further inanities to put to government. “I have a niche hobby. Why has the government not given specific advice as to whether it is safe to return to it?” Wags have managed to re-hash the same gag, with different accents, but all based on Vicky Pollard’s “Yeah, but no, but yeah, but…” shtick and suggesting that ordinary people can’t grasp whether they can go back to work or not, whether they can use public transport or not, whether they, blah, blah, blah.

But I have a suspicion that, like me, ordinary working people are perfectly capable of staying alert and staying safe. We’ve long lost interest in the statistics, the science, the conjecture and the blame game and we just want to gradually return to whatever employment remains. Let’s face it, without the private sector returning to being taxpayers, the public sector is going to run out of money. Again. So, you’ll excuse me, I’m sure, if I continue to not have an opinion on the government’s handling of things other than to assume that they know far more than I do. And you’ll excuse me, please, if I just get back to work and do my bit.

Migration Watch

We are harbouring an invader which threatens the very fabric of our society. A creeping menace insidious and inserted in every corner of our land, which will, unchecked, destroy all that we hold dear. And it is neither the corona virus nor the government’s response to it. It has been observed plenty of times that the west’s tolerance is one of its biggest weaknesses. In seeking to confer fair judgment and equality we have, time and again been exploited by those who have no reciprocal appreciation of the tolerance afforded them.

For a decade now the Conservative and coalition governments have continued to say it will tackle the problem of illegal immigration. Daily we see reports of dozens, hundreds even, landing on the Kent coast alone. These are the ones we know about, and almost none of them are being returned. In fact we are told that only around 5% are ever, eventually, deported to wherever they came from. In the meantime we are responsible for their welfare. Think about that; they commit a crime injurious to us as a nation, but it is we, the victims of that crime, who must pay.

International rules about conduct at sea mean that outside an act of war we can’t endanger them by sinking their boats. And if they deliberately sink their own boats we are compelled to rescue them. Our border ‘force’ appears to use no force at all but instead acts more like a courtesy escort service. Certain EU provisions mean that we are powerless to simply tow them or ferry them back to France and no doubt intercepting them in the parts of the Channel under French dominion would have its own legal implications.

It might be helpful if Priti Patel, as Home Secretary gave us a full account, in layman’s terms of the complexity and difficulty, but no doubt there are political reasons why this might be problematic. The argument can, of course, be made that if we land them we know where they are, but given that a couple of years ago the Home Office estimated that we had around 1.2 MILLION illegal immigrants, is that as wise as some may think.?

Are they detained, in which case, where? Or is it far more likely that they have submitted their bogus asylum claims, which prevent them being immediately ejected and have been released into the general community to vanish without trace? To give you an idea of the scale of this, as at 30^th June 2019, the total UK prison population was 82,676. That means there are almost FIFTEEN TIMES as many foreign criminals at large than domestic criminals under lock and key. And it is worth repeating that this is just the number we know about.

But the creeping menace isn’t the migrants themselves; they are just doing what perhaps all of us would do if we truly believed life would be better elsewhere and we had the means to make that move. The menace is the industry which has grown up around their presence. It is an interesting case study in capitalism yet driven exclusively by the left in a staggering example of doublethink. Through persistent lobbying, marketing the notion of multiculturalism and branding all dissenters as racists, this insidious and deeply damaging industry employs thousands if not hundreds of thousands of activists, paid for by the public purse but doing not one bit of public good.

Even were La Patel to be able to extricate us from international treaties and conventions, pacts and promises, I very much doubt that the situation would change and certainly not in the short term. The worst of it is that we allowed ourselves to be browbeaten into accepting it. We deliberately chose not to delve too deeply and when whistle-blowers popped up they were side-lined and ignored. In the 1980s we faced a deadly disease in response to which the government launched the slogan – AIDS: Don’t die of ignorance. Perhaps the same slogan should apply to our immigration situation.

Indecisive

The misinformation, disinformation, spin and just plain lies continue to shower down from Mount Corona. It is practically the ONLY thing anybody is discussing and if you are going to use the metaphor of a war, it has more in common with a frenzied bare-knuckle scrap than any organised campaign. What weapons anybody turned up with are neutralised as soon as they are drawn or rendered useless on impact. But it’s not as if any sensible battle lines are drawn and it isn’t even clear how many combatants are engaged. It is a shit show.

The denizens of the Press Pack appear to be in contention with each other for the awards for most misused statistics, clumsiest attack lines and the near universal inability to stitch together an article which retains even its own inner logic. Confused, combative and rabidly driven to find the scoop, all they are really doing is turning the public against them. Expect some venerable titles to cough up their last and disappear from print forever.

If anything, the broadcast media are even worse, needing as they do to fill 24-hour spit roasts of anybody they can drag into their studios. This is a platform which has become more and more discredited as viewers tire of the gotcha interview, the relentless interruptions and the uneven treatment of guests on different sides of the argument. And it is even more desperate than normal as, in these locked down times, the ever pointless vox pop programme punctuators are near impossible without inviting the long arm of the law to reach out and feel your collar for unnecessary human interaction.

And now with the Neil Ferguson affair_[sic] the airwaves are a-buzz with yet new conspiracies that he persuaded the government to lock down knowing that it would worsen the situation… at the whim of his lefty mistress. Oh yes, people – and including serious people - are actually touting the notion of deliberate harm being advised to cynically bring the Johnson government into disrepute.

Notwithstanding the fact that BoJo is perfectly capable of doing that all by himself, you all need to take a long hard look at yourself because a Cambridge study has apparently revealed that instead of being reassured that all these agencies, that all these actors are united in combating the pandemic, the British public is said to be the most fearful in the world about the possible outcomes. It is little wonder when the press gleefully reports our rising death toll as the worst in the world! Alarum! Alarum! Throw out your dead and lock your doors!

But as a few remaining sane figures have pointed out, every country collects and reports its data differently. It will be many months, if not years, before anything approaching a direct comparison can be made. You know all the variables: deaths with or deaths of, deaths in the community included or not, what about care homes, what about relative timings, lockdown or not, population density, disproportionate effect on different parts of the demographic? And then there is the variable experience of testing, including it not being entirely clear what current testing has actually achieved other than present another target for the press.

Some people have stuck to their obsessive support for everything the government has done, while others have clung rigidly to the idea that whatever the government has done has been wrong. This suggests that regardless of how knowledge of the pandemic grows these people only see the situation through the lens of their pre-existing political affiliations. But there are also the ‘floating voters’ who have changed their tune at each announcement, rather like Indecisive Dave from the Fast Show. 

I say again, I have literally no means of judging other than my own experience. Right now I am unconcerned for my safety and I genuinely don’t know if that insouciance would have changed had we not locked down. And because we are not in a lab where we can reset and run the experiment again under different conditions, nobody else does, either. I have no answers; if you’re honest with yourself neither do you.

Be Careful What You Think

There was lots of rage and joy in last Friday’s coronavirus testing figures. Pro government voices were of course, ecstatic that the nominal target had been reached even though they knew not whether it was particularly significant. On the other side of the fence, obviously, the narrative was that the government had cheated, by changing the accounting method. This detail was rebuked later in the day at the press conference where the extra-governmental advisor made it clear that the method had not changed.  None of this matters though, because you will tend to believe whatever your tribe believes, and even if you imagine you don’t belong to a tribe, you do.

No, you really do. One of the more egregious attributes of tribalism is convincing yourself that you are impartial. You think you can spot when others are being partisan in the way they are using and disseminating information, but it is almost impossible to turn the spotlight on yourself. We can all appear neutral and understand and empathise with both sides of an argument from the outside, but as soon as we are on either side, try as we might, we lose that noble ability. Probably not more than a handful of people can do otherwise and I expect they are all mystics, sitting in splendid isolation on misty mountain tops.

It is pretty much hard wired into us to adopt a position and stick to it. But it is possible to shift an entire group’s attitude to a particular issue and have them believe they have not altered their stance at all. What you believe now is what you always believed. That is called propaganda and it is a deliberate act. Everybody thinks they understand propaganda and would recognise it when they see it. But if this was the case it wouldn't work. The fact that it does work shows how little we understand and can recognise it.

Propaganda relies on pushing a limited and uncomplicated message. Keep on doing it and the more you see people you respect repeating the point the more your groupthink-led brain will lead you to accept it. A famous propagandist of the last century had this to say: “The receptivity of the masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.”

If you doubt the effectiveness of simple messaging, consider fashion. You laugh now at the clothes you wore in your teens, just as you laugh at what teens are wearing now. But you all went there. You bought gadgetry which didn’t work. You all signed up to social media, even if you don’t use it a lot. The weight of the crowd is a heavy one to bear and few can resist it. Those who do are either true mavericks, or they are fooling themselves. Can you honestly claim to be a maverick? How’s the rarefied air up that mountain, by the way?

So, before you proffer an opinion about the response to the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Before you give your opinion on whether and how we should suspend the lockdown, how and who we should test or how long it will take to develop a vaccine. If you intend to opine about the state of the economy and the prospects for recovery and whether or not life will be the same afterwards. Before you do any of that, take a moment to have a good long think about whether that opinion you are about to give is actually your own.