Beware the numbers!

Lots of political capital (or should that be political lower-case?) has been claimed at Jeremy Corbyn’s inability to remember a made-up number on Woman’s Hour yesterday. The listening public, however, have probably forgotten the numbers already, as they should because all the numbers used by all the parties involved in this and every other general election are largely works of fiction. Nobody cares about the actual figures, their only significance is as a proxy for competence – can’t remember your own numbers, goes the logic, can’t be relied on to govern.

The Tory strategy of giving little detail in the way of numbers is both more realistic and yet just as negatively indicative of competence. What do you mean, you don’t know how much it will cost or where the money is coming from? Come on you must know! But, of course they don’t; nobody does. In the same way you don’t know what you will earn next year nor how you will spend it. You could get a substantial rise, but then your car might expensively break down. You might lose your job, but then have a horse come in on long odds. Hell you might even win the lottery, but then suffer a terminal illness. Nobody knows; the big lie of politics is that there is certainty.

So which way do you play it? Safe hands or bet the farm? Safe is boring, but then so is voting, in the eyes of many people. They may prefer a steady hand on the tiller, but placing a wager on the socialist miracle of state ‘investment’ (borrowing to the limit) might yield spectacular success in the short term, as it often appears to, but then the cold calculus of debt repayment inevitably turns up to ruin things. Ain’t credit cards a buzzkiller?

As for where the money comes from, every type of taxation is a stimulus to invent creative ways of escaping liability. Increasing corporation tax will lower company profits, either by clever accounting or by moving companies elsewhere. Land taxes and rent-capping will distort the property market still further and even fewer will be able to afford to buy, worsening the housing shortage and increasing stress levels and putting greater strains on the social care and mental health budgets, decreasing overall productivity, affecting credit rating and ability to borrow... on which plan your entire offer was made.

Making promises you can never keep is a singularly dishonest way to panhandle a vulnerable electorate, so desperate for a magic bullet they will believe anything; anything is better than being told the truth, that the only way out of poverty is hard work... and a bit of luck. Promising free stuff is effectively exploiting poor, ill-educated people. It is putting the disadvantaged at greater risk further down the line, burdening future generations with the debt of your desperation. It is everything of which Labour continually accuses the Tories. Who’s the real nasty party?

We need to talk about Khalid

We have a problem in the west, a problem which is not, of itself, going to go away. It is a problem that divides society, with a form of Stockholm syndrome gripping half the population who are unable to name and discuss this problem and act as fifth columnists against the rest who believe they see clearly the true nature of the threat. We cannot begin to tackle what is wrong unless we can have a serious debate about – and let’s not be coy here - the muslim problem. If we want any form of ‘solution’ we have to be willing to discuss it and we have to be willing to see it through.

For people born before the nineteen-eighties the visible changes in our society are genuinely alarming. Mosques on every street corner in some areas, calls to prayer, women concealed in black shrouds, men strolling around in ethnic garb every day, not just on holy days. Every supermarket selling muslim sanctioned food to all, regardless of their beliefs and values. Muslim majority schools, the local population of young people overwhelmed by Middle Eastern breeding levels. Continual pandering to muslim sensitivities at national level and imams appearing all the time on the media as if this was perfectly normal; Christian church leaders are silent by comparison.

What was once a police force is now reduced to a service; apologists and protectors of the faith, publicly accepting gifted korans days after the faithful have brutally killed on British soil. That is a gesture of their confidence that the police will do as bidden and an open affront to the indigenous. If even the police are afraid of islam, what chance does that give the rest of us? The followers of allah are told they are superior to all others; they preach jihad and the conversion or subjugation of the kaffir to their will. If you don’t see the threat, if you rally to support your muslim communities, you are already lost.

At the moment, but two solutions are proposed: submission or expulsion. But isn’t there another way? How is it that, in the twenty-first century, people are still in thrall to the teachings of crazy, solitary men who wandered off into the desert for days on end and had ‘visions’? Isn’t it time to seriously question the writings of men clearly afflicted by early onset dementia? God, whatever you call him, did not write this stuff and just as the Old Testament is taken seriously by a few marginalised fundamentalists maybe it is time to take the rabble-rouser mohammed out of the islamic equation.

You see the problem yet?

The religion of islam must reform or die in the west. You want primitivism, then go where the sharia is practised nationally. You want the rewards of living in the west, then become civilised or be expelled. The message from our government ought to be that and only that; our leaders need to name the problem – islam – and demand that it clean its own house. The small number of secular muslim voices raised against the islamists is not enough; your whole church needs disinfecting and if you won’t do it yourselves others will have to do it for you. 

National Treasure

A Labour supporter and NHS flag-waver appearing on BBC’s The Big Questions on Sunday morning spoke enthusiastically about fiscal multipliers; the notion that government spending can stimulate the economy. Yay, spend! But this ignores the simple fact that basic economics is about how we individually and collectively allocate scarce resources with alternative uses. In this respect, money is not a resource but an exchange mechanism allowing us to avoid barter and directly trade labour and materials we possess or control for other labour and materials we desire.

His argument is that if we plough more money into the NHS this would pay more people who would then spend locally, thus stimulating other businesses, all miraculously making profits from that original injection of capital. But where do those businesses source their raw materials? And how many in the local economy are saving for their own, nobly selfish needs and how many are sending money abroad? Come to that, how much of NHS funding goes to buy goods and services from overseas? All of this is a drain on that funding, making the miracle of fiscal multiplication less likely.

Providing government assistance for an area overcome by natural disaster, or local industrial collapse, buying time for the local economy to get back on its feet is one thing, but sooner or later the assistance has to stop, or risk that society becoming dependent on the charity of others. Unfortunately, once that welfare tap has been turned on you need to keep opening it ever wider. (See whole swathes of formerly industrial regions whose old fester and whose talented young leave) Yes, but, the argument goes, the NHS is different; better health in society IS a form of profit, providing healthier workers, who live longer, with fewer end-of-life costs. This is a noble and moral belief, but is it true?

When we decide how to spend our money we effectively ration our consumption to keep within our means, foregoing one good for another where necessary. Those who use the least amount of NHS services are generally the wealthiest, opting to go private, only when they actually need to, on their own timetable. Yet they pay the most into the pot. At the other end of the scale the vast majority of those who use state-supplied medicine contribute nothing to it. Dressed up as ‘need’, those who contribute little gorge themselves on the free stuff. More free stuff, less incentive to ration its consumption.

The NHS. Doing as well as expected...

The NHS is an almost perfect model of what happens when the state tries to organise anything. There is no real price mechanism to allocate resources, just an ever-expanding need, a capacious maw that always needs feeding. For as long as there is an NHS, the Labour Party (for which it is a deity) will ceaselessly declare that we have six-hours/three-weeks/two-days, etc to ‘save’ it. But no matter how much this emotive pleading appeals to the hard-of-thinking we must never forget Mr Micawber’s sage advice.

"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds, nineteen shillings and sixpence, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."

Physician, heal thyself.

Finally!

Katie Hopkins and LBC have parted ways. The malicious left are, in their loving, caring, kinder politics manner, gleefully infesting social media with group hugs, tears of joy and hopes that she dies in agony, from bottom cancer or suchlike. Of course, the vile Hopkins is guilty of the most nauseating, most violent, most despicable of modern offences and she has brought censure on herself. Stalin, Mussolini, Pol Pot... such despots always meet a sticky end, love triumphing over hate when they are strung up by a baying mob.

What did Katie do to attract such opprobrium? She dared to articulate what millions feel they cannot. She voiced the genuine feelings of a majority who are not cowed by political correctness and a fear of denouncement. She stood up for reason in a world which seems devoid of it at times. And she faced down the howls of knee-jerk demands to silence her from the very quarters engaged in suppression of freedoms in the west. And she will be back, because she’s right.

After many years of proposed solutions to the problems caused by an effective submission to islam in the west. After years of ‘nothing to do with islam’ uttered by political clones after every atrocity claimed in the name of the prophet (pieces be upon him). After the inanity of vigils and silences and voices raised against the aggrieved instead of the aggressors, she simply said what many, many people want. An end to it all. Finally. A final solution to the islamic problem. There, I said it too.

The very thing that the islamists want to deny us, up to and including life itself, is our freedom. Time after time after time, they have declared that they see us as less than them. They will have us as slaves, or not at all. They say they hate us they say they want us dead and I say they have the right to say these things. I welcome their openness; it makes everything so much simpler. They want us dead, we want them gone, finally.

Jeremy Corbyn can use terror all he likes, he can blame all of terrorism on the actions of former western governments and he can openly consort with whoever he wishes. Isn’t that the mark of a free society? But what is sauce for the goose, must also be at least a blob of relish for the gander. All calls for suppression of speech must be resisted; one man’s rallying cry is another’s hate speech. I say we should be able to call a spade a spade and not get arrested for racism because of it.

Yes, I accept that this means some people, especially young, radical peace warriors, might have to hear language of which they disapprove. Yes, it means that some people may be so mortally offended they may have to take to their beds. And of course the Penny Reds and Owen Gays and Jon Snowflakes and Jobby O’Briens might have to suffer being pointed at and mocked some more but it’s a small price to pay. It’s either free speech or officially approved speech; which would you prefer?

Call me

The war on terror has once more been visited on our shores and feelings have been running high as the touchy-feely, rainbow coalition of appeaseratchiks hug each other and form protective rings around mosques while the stinking, racist, lower-class lynch mobs eschew candlelit vigils for their own, more direct kind of vigilantism. The police are so busy controlling rampant islamophobia there isn’t a cell free within a hundred miles radius of Manchester.

But other security forces have been busy on our behalf, rounding up random jihadis in dawn raids and swooping on those well-known hotbeds of seething hatred for the hand that feeds them; university campuses, madrassas, back bedrooms in seedy suburbs and kebab shops. By all accounts the tally of arrests and detentions is growing and secret enhanced interrogation suites are being quietly commissioned to deal with the business of ‘intelligence gathering’. Fortunately, those charged with defence of the realm have never bought into the simple lie that torture never yields truth, so widely promulgated by our social justice peaceniks.

I always fancied one of those waterboarding holidays, but it seems that even there the early ISIS bird gets the preferential booking treatment worm, with each potential suicide bomber getting peaceful, solitary, individual accommodation free, at the expense of the UK taxpayer. Some have given up the goodies at the first sight of a dental pick but other soldiers of allah have been harder nuts to crack, so the story goes.

“You filthy infidel pig!” spits Abdul at his interlocutor, as the current is once again applied. “I will never betray my brothers in jihad!” Out comes the wet towel and Abdul splutters as a cascade of cold water persuades his brain that he is drowning. Still no spilling of the beans. As they work on through the night, he taunts them; he seems to even be enjoying the pain. “I long to die for my faith! You will never break me. You will have to kill me, then I will take my reward in heaven. 72 virgins await me.” He pauses to spit blood then grins up at his captors, “Blonde virgins,” he says, “blonde and white and all of them fifteen... like your daughters!”

Eventually Abdul is released after questioning. He wasn’t really tortured at all – this is just the story he intends to tell all his friends once he gets back to his study bedroom in college. But deep inside he believes himself to be a fierce lion of islam, scourge of the west, which has given him everything he has ever known. But Abdul’s reverie is cut short as his life is ended, appropriately enough, by the speeding truck, in front of which he has just stepped. He seems to close his eyes for a second...

Going vestal on yo' ass...

When he opens them again his first sensation is of a bright light and a feeling of peace and contentment. He looks around and sees that he is indeed in heaven and before him stand, as promised, the 72 fifteen-year old virgins, all of them white, all of them naked and all of them with hair the colour of bleached straw. They smile as they walk towards him and surround him. Abdul stares, open mouthed as one of them takes his hand. “Welcome Abdul. We are here for your eternal pleasure... you can call me Larry.”