Mass Debate

As referendum day draws rapidly nearer, the claims and counter claims of the two sides and their hangers-on defy political gravity. Every new ‘fact’ is claimed as evidence to simultaneously support remaining in the prosperous country of Future-Europe yet also flies the flag for farting in its face. The EU brings prosperity, the same EU hampers prosperity. Open borders are controlled by being in yet also remain gaping wide open. The level of cognitive dissonance displayed by some in the debate must surely warrant investigation or at least an entry in the Guinness Book of Records.

At times it veers into the comical with each side trying to outdo the other like some Eurovision Four Yorkshiremen sketch. In the latest televised debate, passions are running high as David Cameron finally takes to the stage to debate against Nigel Farage. He does so with trepidation, having resisted the call thus far and - wary of appearing weak - he launches into his time with a re-hashing of the Remainian mantras.

“We are stronger in Europe,” he repeats, for the thousandth occasion.” The EU lets us trade with the rest of the world and strengthens our home security. By cooperating with our European allies in a reformed European Union we can secure a more prosperous future for our children and our children’s children.” The crowd duly applauds.

Nigel Farage stands at the microphone and sighs. “You see, what we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is a man who has nothing to lose. All the big names backing the Remain camp are wealthy individuals and businesses or political opportunists who see the EU as a means of feathering their own nests and keeping the little man down. We need to leave the EU, take control of our borders and be a free, independent confident nation again.”

Cameron rebuffs: “There we are again with the little Englander line. Mr Farage wants us to pull up the drawbridge and retreat from the world. I say again, leaving the EU would be a leap in the dark when the alternative – staying in the Union and driving meaningful reform – means we can have the best of all possible worlds. Britain alone would be powerless to alter the tides of history and defenceless against global movements of antipathy. The treasury report we commissioned last month shows that every household will be £4300 a year worse off if we leave the EU. Is this what his side wants?”

Farage “Outside the EU we will be free to make our own trade deals with the rest of the world. Free of the stifling red tape of Brussels, free of the Common Agricultural and Fisheries Policies, free to make this nation great once more. What Mr Cameron is proposing would make Britain just another subservient region of the super state called Europe.”

Cameron: “Again, what he says is simply untrue. We have obtained special status in the EU whereby we can control our borders, we will never adopt the single currency and we are exempt from deeper integration into a European Federation if – and here I find Nigel’s conspiracy theories quite alarmist – if, indeed, there even is further and closer political union. The facts are on our side. History is on our side and remaining in the EU is the right thing to do, the right thing for Britain and the right thing for the stability of the free world.”

Nigel steps back to the microphone and takes a deep breath: “Right. Britain has always been a strong, independent, trading nation. We can become so again. Outside of the EU we can rebuild our society, regain control, restructure our economy and compete against the best in the world. Everybody who needs work will be able to have a job, no child will leave school insufficiently educated, nobody will need to beg for food and we will protect our sick and helpless. A mighty new Britain will rise like a Phoenix from the ashes of our European misadventure and we will once more become a mighty, world-bestriding force to be reckoned with.”

Cameron stands up and interrupts: “Nigel, you are talking bollocks.” The audience gasps to hear such intemperate language from the PM. Nigel turns to look him in the eye, glances back at the audience to make sure they are with him and smiles. Cameron has walked straight into his oratorical trap. He replies, coolly, “Maybe I am, Prime Minister... but you started it.”

Happy Joy Luck, Comrades!

A recent report found that the rate of dementia in men of a susceptible age is less than all the horror stories predicted. A decade ago we were told of the ticking Alzheimer’s time bomb that would devastate the state of old age and bring unbearable pressure to the NHS. Not only has that doom prophecy proven false, the onset of senile dementia is actually 40% lower than expected. Perhaps the wisest thing Nostradamus ever did was set his vague predictions in the distant future where the gullible of a certain bent could, by squinting and being selective with interpretation, fit a prophecy to an event.

How is it, people will ask, that the very best medical soothsayers were so wildly incorrect in a forecast that has been used to plan expensive intervention with public funds? How indeed. This is, of course, a perfectly regular phenomenon and relies for its efficacy on the general tendency not to worry too much about the truth; better yet to just let such sleeping dog predictions lie. We are, of course, still awaiting our colonies on the moon and the cure for cancer but most of the output of futuristic think tank thought is long forgotten.

But there is another option; fit the current ‘facts’ to the retrospectively adjusted past. They say the victor rewrites history to suit the narrative and this has been happening for years, but why be so blunt when instead we can use the current news to drive change? We can fit the future to the present, rather than fixing the past. Veteran reporter Martyn Lewis said recently that negative news is disempowering. We don’t want to hear bad news - it makes us ill – so we should instead be focusing on what has been called ‘solution journalism’. (Or, for Labour perhaps, 'final solution' journalism.)

Events, he suggests, should be reported more positively and constructively and instead of just laying bare the facts as they are known, journalists could offer helpful solutions to the misery inducing problems those tricky facts bring. So, hey, a tsunami may have just swept away hundreds of homes on a Haitian shoreline but on the positive side, watch out for some fabulous opportunities to buy seafront real estate at garage sale prices! Or, the economy is tanking but at least this should deter the number of immigrants who want to come to Britain... eventually. And the trains will only ever be late because of the right kind of leaves on the track.

As a commentator observed, this approach risks journalism veering perilously closely to becoming PR, media spin for the promulgation of centrally approved stories. In 1984 the chocolate ration is ‘increased’ by the ingenious device of altering last year’s chocolate ration figure to around half of today’s and presenting a decline as a doubling. Last year’s terrorists become this year’s freedom fighters and grubby events of the past are given a thorough hosing down and sanitised for current consumption.

There are no problems, only opportunities. You may be out of work but the jobless figures could be presented as a count of the growing number of optimists out to realise their true potential. Kids may no longer be able to read and add up but this is a good thing, preventing them from ever discovering the joylessness of critical thought. And now that Hillsborough has been disinfected and all traces of unpleasantness expunged we can see that everything we ever believed about the football supporters of the eighties was wrong. They were all blameless angels and you are a hater for thinking otherwise.

The next twenty years' headlines

Yes, the news of the future will only ever be spotless, scrubbed clean news. No more death or war or famine, just endless shining solutions for a brighter tomorrow. Dour, negative reporting of disasters will be consigned to the dustbin of history – and not any old rusty, fat-streaked galvanised dustbin hiding dirty secrets and surrounded by wasps, but the Brillo-pad scoured, gleaming wheelie bin of joyful past carnivals. They must think we are all going senile.

Rocket Surgery

In science a theory is said to be true just so long as it resists attempts to disprove it. In politics it often seems the opposite is the case; where a scientist would yield to the conclusions of new evidence a politician would simply alter the evidence. Or, better yet, make the new evidence fit the old facts, or vice-versa depending on the current narrative. Thus, bizarrely, junior doctors are striking, but not over pay they say, even though the principle reason the union will not agree the new contract is in fact money. 

Isaac Newton, on observing that the apple fell to earth set about formulating a theory to explain it. He noticed a relentless and unwavering cause and effect and determined to find out why. Had he discovered that actually the apple fell earthward only 95% of the time he would have to have concluded that his theory of gravity was incorrect and set about finding another. In politics, however, although you may still begin with a theory, that theory is rarely borne out of observation but out of prejudice, a gut feeling, a desire for a dream to be true... or possibly just plain old, common-or-garden insanity.

Science done properly should involve a willingness to change your mind when the facts shift; to adopt a different position when the weight of evidence goes against your early hopes. As it is impossible for humans to be totally dispassionate, many a favoured theorem must have been abandoned with a heavy heart in the light of more complete knowledge. Politics, however, adopts an entirely different approach; where science is about enlightenment, politics is about 'frightenment'. It is more like religion than science, seeking to bend opinion to a narrative regardless of any verifiable truth.

Had a political Newton seen, or thought he’d seen, an apple fall sideways just once and concluded this was the more desirable outcome he would have lobbied support for the legitimacy of the phenomenon, coercing people who had no opinion either way to support his view. Anybody objecting, especially on the basis of their never having seen sideways falling fruit, would be branded dissenters and driven from the forum. Apple trees would be uprooted to prevent anybody directly observing ‘unhelpful’ contrary events and should it be said that pears, for instance, invariably fell downwards it would be pointed out with a patronising sigh that pears were obviously different and that only the naïve could claim such a lazy equivalence.

Striking junior doctors, for all their professional intellect are political sheep, just like the teachers and other unionised masses. And just like the millions who will be driven back into the EU pen having been shown a fabricated lie about life on the outside. That grass, they will say as they point beyond the barbed wire, is a bit too green for the likes of us, falling for the EU ‘science’ that economic gravity only works if we all join hands. Like bad scientists the alchemists of the EU insist that those economic lead boots will become gold only if we keep on wearing them.

Onward, to Europa!

The more the electorate can be coerced to go along with the outlandish and unverifiable claims of those committed to a future where there is only one country called Europe, the closer we will get to shutting down all debate. UK government bad, Brussels government good. Real, undeniable facts are thin on the ground these days. But who needs facts when you have Euroscience? It ain’t brain surgery.

Jackanory

At the turn of the century – oh what a long time ago that sounds – I was disappointed but hardly shocked to discover that the still fledgling internet had already spawned a collaborative enterprise in fraudulently reproducing scholarly work. American students in particular were setting up file-sharing sites where you could download an academic assignment and pass it off as your own. They say there is nothing new under the sun, of course and who amongst us has never copied their homework from a friend?

I found this little truism through a number of sources: In academia, to copy from one author is plagiarism, to copy from two is research and to copy from three is considered original thought. I’d credit this but wouldn’t you know it, I can’t find a reliable original attribution. And anyway am I just quoting, or am I copying? Online essay-writing sites have to foil anti-plagiarism software, which searches for matches in submitted work, but how much do you have to change before a passage passes as original? Such sites claim they are doing no wrong; they are not copying they claim, simply providing original work for cash. You may subscribe to the notion that, fair play or foul, the end result justifies the means, but it is still cheating.

How happy would you be that the surgeon with  your organ in his hands cheated his way through school? Or that the engineers who designed the safety features of your car copied their way to qualification? In either of those cases, of course you would hope and expect their cheating to be found out and their abilities to be under constant scrutiny. In exacting professions you have to be pretty good to foil the system. The same is not true for all disciplines, however and in many fields of work you could fraudulently gain your status and never be found out. Economics, politics and the broad and unspecific field of social ‘sciences’ spring immediately to mind as mountebank-rich environments.

When marking student assignments it can be depressing to realise you appear to be marking the same work over and over again. Matching two identical submissions, in the same format and font is pretty easy to do. When they are crafty enough to change the original format and rearrange some of the words it is a relief that, although you know they are all copying from the same approved source, they have at least made some attempt to assist your collusion in granting them a pass grade and their signature declaring ‘all-my-own-work’ part-indemnifies you from blame; 

Marking multiple submissions of largely the same material is the lot of educators at a level where independent thinking is neither expected nor necessary. But from the leaders of the supposedly free world? When Barack Obama was campaigning for re-election he was fond of saying to business leaders “you didn’t build that” insisting they acknowledge their debt to greater society and not claim all the credit for their work. Good line; I wonder who wrote it? Who knows, it may even have been Obama himself.

Tell us another...

But his little diatribe against a British exit wasn’t all his own work at all and the sticky fingerprints and marginal notes of the pro-EU establishment were clearly all over it. He sought to tell a fable of an imagined future outside a country called Europe; a sorry little tale of trouble and woe. I'll tell you a story about Jack a Nory... but whose story is it?

The Man who would be Queen

I see the man who wasn’t going to intervene has intervened. And he chose the Queen’s birthday to say that her days and those of her ilk are numbered. Can we get a big slow hand clap for Barry over here? Over here; what is that fool doing over here? While some are enraged by his interfering comments, many of just sigh as we hear and see yet another tool of the establishment doing what the establishment expects him to do. ‘Leader of the free world’? Obama is no more a leader than one of the Queen’s corgis; a lap dog for Europe, rolling over to have his tummy tickled.

‘Twas ever thus. One reason the president’s past is shrouded in mystery is a long line of faddish policy changes and kow-towing to the real powers behind the American throne. Sovereignty outdated? Only because you crave it but you can’t have it, pal. I wonder how much people like this are really paid to do and say things that ordinary folks hold in such contempt. Anyway, his time is over and soon he will be replaced by another willing dupe or democrat – same thing – who will do her best to emulate sovereignty while wishing the demise of others. Barry will be free to pursue other ‘interests’ and go where the wind blows him.

Talking of which as a follow up to Dreams From My Father, there are plans to release a memoir penned in honour of his mother and much speculation has arisen as to the revelations and juicy secrets contained therein. One such is the tale of the day he came out...

While in college the young future president had set out to experience all that life had to offer and his search had led him to try a wide range of sexual practices. During this exploration of self and others he had eventually decided he was gay; well, it sounded such fun. After a few exploits with other such broad-minded young liberals he decided to try another life-shaping experience, take the plunge and tell his mother. He found her, as was usual, in the kitchen cooking dinner.

Sitting at the kitchen table he let out an exaggerated sigh, and said: "Mom, I have something to tell you - I'm gay.” The temperature fell a few degrees and time stood still. His mother made no reply or gave any response save stiffening for a second after which she continued stirring the pot. The kitchen clock re-started and ticked loudly. An awkward silence reigned for a few moments and Barry cleared his throat, about to repeat his admission. Before managed to say another word his mother turned to him. “So, now you’re gay?” she asked and Barry nervously affirmed his predilection.

His mother turned back to her cooking. She stared into the pot of stew and continued stirring, then beckoned him to come closer. She held out the spoon for him to taste in a gesture of matronly understanding and Barry, understanding the ceremony of the moment duly took a taste. She turned to him. “So, you, what, make out with other guys?” He nodded, a little bashfully. She continued probing: “You put your thing in their... you know?” He nodded again. “And you put their thing in your mouth?” Again he nodded, whereupon his mother whirled around, whacked him hard over the head with the spoon and yelled, "Don't you EVER complain about my cooking again!"