Friday 28 November 2014

Make a wish

Tarquin, Malcolm and Seamus were near to death. Their attempt on the Paris-Dakar record had ended in disaster and far from the intended route, their vehicle a mere burned-out wreck, they had set out on foot to find help. The signal fire had failed to bring rescue and no aircraft had been seen in three days in the clear blue skies above them. Out of food and near-delirious, they had decided that their only salvation lay in their own endeavours and ignoring all advice to stay with the dead and smouldering truck, set out on foot.

Twenty-fours later the water was gone and reduced to crawling, they dragged themselves across the hostile and unforgiving terrain, near to collapse and certain death. Suddenly, between his fingers, plunged deep in the sand, Tarquin felt something smooth and hard. He pulled out an ancient and sand-blasted oil lamp and held it out for the others to see. Malcolm grabbed hold of it and squinted against the harsh reflection of the sun on its burnished surface. He passed it to Seamus who rubbed it on his sleeve. In the sudden flash that occurred all three were blinded and clenched their eyelids shut.

When they opened them they beheld a shimmering, floating proto-Arabian apparition. "I am the Genie of the Lamp!" the vision proclaimed "And I grant you three wishes." Surveying the gibbering threesome, the genie added, "One each."

Tarquin was the first to speak. Through parched lips in a stiff Home Counties accent he said "Oh, what I wouldn't give to be at Henley Regatta right now, my darling Bathsheba on my arm, swinging her parasol and the pair of us skipping along, sipping cool, cool Pimms from a tall tumbler. Marvellous!" And before the others had time to react the genie clapped his hands twice, said "It is done" and - poof - Tarquin was gone, presumably to inhabit the very scene he had just described.

Malcolm was startled at first then impressed. He turned to the genie and declared, "See, me, Genie, y'ken. Whit I'd like is tae be on the bonnie bonnie banks of Loch Lomond with a pretty wee lassie by mah side and a bottle of good Islay malt tae go with a hearty meal of neeps and tatties and haggis, to the rousing skirl of the pipes. Can ye fix it, mon?" The genie gave him a wry smile, deciphered the request and clapped his hands. With a puff of smoke worthy of Ali Bongo at his best Malcolm was whisked away to fulfill his wish. The genie turned to Seamus.

What are YOU wishing for?
Three wishes? 

"What?" said he "Is it my turn now?" The genie nodded and waited... and waited. Seamus screwed up his face, furrowed his brow with the effort of thought. Long minutes passed and the genie, despite having the patience to live in a buried bottle for thousands of years began to grow restless. He tapped his feet, examined his finger nails and in the end demanded Seamus give him an answer. Seamus looked up at the floating figure, looked around him and declared, "Well, you know, it is awfully lonely here without the other two..."

Thursday 27 November 2014

Sorry for the lack of service...

I'm just too busy and too damned tired right now... normal service will be resumed when I get my mojo back.

I think Ed Miliband has it.

What a prize bellend!

Friday 21 November 2014

You won't like him when he's angry

Well, it’s been a torrid time for Ed Miliband of late. A mini rebellion in his own ranks, Bacon-sandwich Gate, being twatted every week at PMQs, his every policy ridiculed, his every appearance hooted at and a minor celebrity picking apart his tax stance in one embarrassing exchange. It must be time for yet another relaunch and yet another round of get-tough sound bites for the popular media. But a mild-mannered man can only take so much, so, on hearing of the collapse of the Labour vote in the by-election and with Emily-racist-Thornberry's resignation, today was the last straw.

He stormed home to Primrose Hill and in a manner approved by pickup artist Julien Blanc gripped Justine by the throat and demanded “Why? Why me? Who is responsible for my party being decimated, demoralised and ground into dust?” Justine, choking, gasped, “It’s Ed Balls. He’s been briefing against you!” Ed stormed out of the house and demanded his chauffeur take him to the Balls household. Throwing open the door, Ed walked straight past a distraught Yvette Cooper and over to the piano where he placed Ed Balls in a stranglehold and demanded, “Was it you?” Arms flailing, Ed struggled free and pleaded, “No, no, it wasn’t me… it might have been Harriet.”

Before Mr & Mrs Cooper could say another word, Ed turned on his heel, his anger burning bright in his red cheeks and he stormed off to scour the children’s playgrounds, paediatric wings and orphan’s homes for the errant Deputy Leader. Eventually, still furious, he found her contemplating a PIE and immediately launched into a tirade of abuse as she backed away into the corner. “How fucking dare you, you bitch!” he screamed at her, his normal reserve buried deep beneath wave after wave of volcanic fury. As he reached for her throat Harriet managed to shriek, “It wasn’t me! It wasn’t any of us! We even had a hashtag, #WeBackEd

“Who then?” demanded Ed “Who is behind all this?” The variously battered and bruised shadow cabinet slowly came together and after a few minutes decided at whose door to lay the blame for all the Labour Party’s recent troubles. “We believe,” ventured Oily Umunna, “we believe the root of all this evil is…” He paused. “Well, come on,” said Ed, “spit it out, man!” Chuka looked at his feet as he mumbled, “Nigel Farage.” The room fell silent.

“Right,” said Ed, “I’ll have the fucker. I’ll rip off his head and shit down his neck. I’ll use his knackers for door knockers. I’ll tear him a new arse, rip his guts apart and stamp on his still-beating heart while eating his kidneys. That nasty racist nut job won’t know what’s hit him!” And with that he strode out, jumped into his car and commanded the driver to head for Rochester. Arriving in town it was the work of a few minutes to track the source of revelry down to the pub nearest the campaign headquarters.

Ed marched up to the doors, threw them open wide and stepped into the party. Boozy, red-faced ‘Kippers suddenly stopped as they felt the cool breeze and stared into the stormy face of the Labour Party leader. Silence, into which Ed boomed, “Bring me Farage!” A whisper went round and quickly fell silent again as a tweed-jacketed figure in mustard corduroys turned around from the bar. “Wotcha!” he said and raised his glass.

“Are you Farage?” asked Ed, “Are you the man who has demoralised my party and laid waste my vote? Are you the man responsible for the total collapse of morale in Labour and the near demise of this once great movement as a political force? Are you the man who has ridiculed me and made a mockery of the Miliband name?” he demanded. Nigel took a drag of his cigarette, flicked the butt to the ground and casually trod on it. “Yes, old boy, I believe I may very well be. What can I do for you?” He held out a hand to shake.

Ed's game face
Grrrrrrrrrrr!

Ed straightened up to his full height, carefully centred the knot on his tie, smoothed down the rumpled front of his shirt and strode purposefully forward until he stood a mere foot away from Farage. Ignoring the proffered hand and taking a deep, calm, measured breath he looked straight into Nigel’s eyes and said, “Well, could you just stop it, please?”

Thursday 20 November 2014

Out-Klassed

What is wrong with people? Well, according to some airhead moron on Radio 4 the other day it seems we harbour the pernicious social disease of – are you ready - Unconscious Bias. So bad is the epidemic that the BBC is way ahead of the game and forked over handfuls of your licence fee to be re-educated earlier this year. Now it appears big businesses have fallen for the snake oil chicanery and are investing heavily in ‘experts’ to deliver this kind of bullshit.

“So,” she said (Of COURSE it’s a she – Diversity Consultants are too irony-blind to even notice the utter bland uniformity of their practitioners.) “So, imagine a gay man.” A pause for effect followed by, “Now imagine he is eighty years old… and married.” At this point you could almost picture the upper lip of Jimmy-John Humphrey-Naughtie curling and quivering. “Then picture him as Japanese,” droned the drone. “If you had to alter your mental image during that process then it indicates that you have an unhealthy and potentially fatal unconscious bias.” Or some such bollocks...

Had I not got work to attend I was sorely tempted to run my car into the nearest lamppost and end it all right there and then. What? You tell me to imagine a gay man and you think the first person I should think of is not Boy George but George Takei? It takes some powerful effort of indoctrinated mind-control  to overcome all natural human instinct and play the non-judgemental automaton game. Because that is what the practitioners of this idiocy are trying to create; an army of counter-instinctive, creepy clones incapable of distinguishing talent from toss-pot, creative from crack-head. If anything the pursuit of the unicorn of diversity is more than likely to stalk only the cart horse of crap.

Then we will have the society the left truly deserve; the sort of delusional, quasi-religious mob morons who at the relevant signal will gang up on a sensible member of their own species daring to challenge a sacred living god… in this case Special Ed Miliband. When Myleene Klass took Ed to task over his knee-jerk, tax-everything, policy reflex you would think that while most people laughed, even the most diehard Labour supporters could only resort to the facepalm counter-reflex. (Couldn’t you just see that in church – Ed in the pulpit reading the scriptures and the congregation slapping their faces in response?) But no; astonishing as it seems, some people are so stick-of-rock Labour that they went on the offensive against Ms Klass with a petition to remove at least a part of her earning potential.

Oh, the irony of also reducing her tax bill. But some on the left are so blinded by their own unconscious prejudices and class/success envy they simply cannot face the truth of difference. Why can’t we have elitism? Why shouldn’t somebody who succeeds pass on to their own their wealth, their drive, their ambition? If we have a world where it isn’t possible to get ahead where is the incentive to even pull your own weight? Socialism, taken to its logical end can only ever result in a low mediocrity where any initiative is punished, any spark snuffed out.

When you put it like that I just want to smell you...

Instead, these equality and diversity goons would suppress our natural biases, our ability to pick the best side to play for, our natural tendency to pursue opportunity and success and replace it with a dull monotony of uniform; uniform action, uniform thought, uniform poverty, misery and a beige world of bland. The only people getting rich would be the party apparatchiks flying the calico flag of indifference and calling it multi-coloured, calling it diverse. Well listen to this you stupid, lefty mongs - I've thought about this and I can tell you, here and now, that there is absolutely nothing unconscious about MY bias! 

Monday 17 November 2014

Band Aid? It’s First Aid we need.

Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he’ll be gone the entire weekend. Joking aside, as tired as the old aphorism about giving people the tools to look after themselves is, it is nonetheless a verifiable and logical truism. Man cannot live by charity alone and it is not a kindness to insist that they do. For all the [questionably] higher motives of the resurrected Band Aid troupe the recipients of their largesse would be far better off in the long run if they were given the means rather than just the money. Feed the world? Let the buggers feed themselves.

This principle was, until recently, almost the definition of Britishness; keep yourselves to yourselves, look after your own, but come together when necessary to build the barn, reap the harvest… or repel the invader. But tradition and traditional structures mean nothing to the ‘progressive’ left; in their attempts to advance the bizarre ideology of enforced equality nothing has been sacred, nothing has been immune to destruction. Break down the family unit, debase the principle of self-determination, make everything subject to state regulation and make the state the sole arbiter of decency and fairness.

On what grounds can Labour and the left continue to try and claim the moral high ground when so much of what they have done is so clearly contrary to what most ordinary people would regard as sensible and morally just? Here are just a few ways in which the extraordinary hypocrisy of the left manifests itself:
  • Lay charges of bigotry, racism and xenophobia at people they have an unnecessary and irrational hatred of.
  • Use hate speech to control what they have decided is hate speech, namely individual expression.
  • Engineer a low-wage, private sector economy then dare to vilify and punish those whose taxes pay to prop it all up via the ludicrous tax credit system.
  • Elevate non-jobs to a status beyond the reach of reason and impeachment, paying public servants wages that would attract bricks through windows if they were bankers.
  • Deny companies the right to employ those best able to do a job in support of an equalities agenda which forces quotas and inefficiency and actually results in lower employment.
  • Claim to work for the ordinary citizens while pursuing policies which directly harm those same citizens’ life chances.

The left flag-wave for an ideology that has only ever caused harm, given enough rope. Socialism always ends in queues and rationing but the socialist cure for socialism is always more socialism and their excuse is always that it wasn’t true socialism anyway. What works in theory in fanciful heads doesn’t work when mere humans try to follow it. So they have to make more things illegal, constrain trade, tax more, borrow more and as the hurt rises, invest more in the message. Tell people how well they are doing – despite the evidence of their own eyes - and how horrible it would be if the nasty parties of self-determination and aspiration got in.


What we need is a government of men and women prepared to actually roll up their sleeves, take the flak and get on with what has to be done. Not a bunch of Oxford PPE graduates squabbling in the common room over points of political theory. Otherwise in the brave new world of EUcialism there will be no fishing by anybody unless they have undergone a course in Fish Empathy and Diversity, adhere to strict rules enforcing the equality of fishkind and most of all, harm no fish. In other words, just as with Band Aid, expend time and energy talking about the problem but ultimately achieve nothing. Teach a man to fish then prevent him from going fishing? Gutted.

Friday 14 November 2014

Ground Zero

“Zero-Zero” was the key message in Ed Miliband’s latest – some say the tenth – relaunch speech. Does nobody read his speeches before he delivers them? Oh yes, of course, EVERYBODY reads them before he delivers them because they are ‘leaked’ to the press beforehand as a matter of course. Why? Why would you hand your opponents the opportunity to pick through your thoughts and dismantle your cavalry charge before you’ve had the chance to saddle up? Into the valley of death rode the six hundred… and we all know how that ended.

But surely, a headline slogan of zero-zero at a time when Labour’s poll ratings have slumped and Miliband’s is the lowest, for any leader of any party... ever, can only look like a death-wish aspiration. The ineptitude of politicians to organise such apparently simple events as piss-ups in breweries reminded me of the story, a few years ago, when scientists at NASA developed a gun built specifically to launch dead chickens at the windshields of airliners, military jets and the space shuttle, all travelling at maximum velocity.

The idea was to simulate the frequent incidents of collisions with airborne fowl – bird strike - to test the strength of the windshields, fuselage, engine intakes and superstructure. As a result, airborne safety improved considerably and when British engineers heard about the gun they were naturally eager to give it a go. In particular they wanted to test out the windshields of a new design of high speed train and quickly got in touch with NASA, requesting they send them all the necessary kit.

Arrangements were duly made and the British team assembled trackside to test out the train during an unmanned trial run. In the distance, but rapidly approaching, the new train appeared as a tiny dot, getting larger by the second as it sped towards them at around 150 miles an hour. The chicken gun was aimed, loaded with one of the corpses helpfully supplied by their American friends and as the train came within a hundred metres the fowl was launched directly at the windscreen.

The engineers watched, horrified, as the chicken hurtled out of the barrel, crashed into the supposedly shatterproof shield, smashed it to smithereens, crashed through the control console, snapped the engineer's backrest in two and embedded itself in the back wall of the cabin.

Alien spacecraft identified
Ground Control to Major Wrong!

In a state of shock, the head of the British team dispatched a telegram to NASA to inform them of the full details of their experiment and its catastrophic results, along with a request for help. NASA's response was just three words, "Defrost the chicken."



[PS: Since I wrote this, Nigel Farage has responded to Ed's trash talk and challenged him to a live debate. Miliband has wisely turned him down; his troops dreamed up excuses for this, but in truth he wouldn't stand a chance. Advice to Labour regarding their leader? Defrost the chicken.]


Thursday 13 November 2014

All change!

Forgive me, Blogger, for I have sinned. It has been many days since my last rant; I have committed a sin of omission. (Been busy, innit?) Now, where do I start? Did we, or didn’t we ‘halve’ the EU demand for more of ‘our’ dosh? Did we, or didn’t we have a debate on the European arrest warrant? And did we, or didn’t we regain powers to limit benefit receipt by new immigrants to this country? (Hint: We didn’t, we didn’t & we didn’t) Events over the last week or so have only confirmed, to any who would listen, that Westminster is so firmly in thrall to Jean Monnet’s  Federal European Project that without some form of revolution Britain will soon become a mere collection of European regions, if it isn’t already.

But I no longer want a referendum. Michael Portillo is right; the euro-sceptics will lose and then we will be fucked for at least another lost generation or two. But despite hollow promises to reform the EU the intention of all three of the main parties – beyond a very small number of rebels – is for us to remain in the European Union, whatever their ultimate plan for the demise of European nation states. The Conservatives are bought and paid for and Labour has long lost its validity as the party of the working man. Ed Miliband clearly showed that, siding with the CBI over Europe. Why would the CBI not support a movement which gave it unfettered access to the cheapest work force, knowing the state would take up the slack of those unwaged as a result?

And what of the likes of Russell Brand and Owen Jones? Juvenile politics based on wild dreams and unsubstantiated theories, waved on by the flags of a million foot-stamping children who think the world is just not fair? Of course it’s not fair; have you seen humans? Their faux revolution is perfect for the established parties because while it gathers no real momentum and has no policies to speak of, its muddled supporters – the radfems, the loonies, the greens, ‘da kidz'; the fucking idiots in the ‘V’ masks – while they are not squabbling amongst themselves know deep within their anti-corporate souls that UKIP is their enemy because the people who sell them their ‘barista’ coffee, customise their iPhones and sweatshop their tee-shirts have told them so.

Not the bankers. Not royalty. Not the business leaders. Not politicians. Who is going to lead us, anarchists? No, dear Holmes, once you have eliminated the usual, you are left with the inevitable, which brings us to UKIP themselves and the fact that nobody realising quite what they stand for is one of their biggest assets. What UKIP really stands for is very simply ‘none of the above’. The traditional parties’ response to UKIP’s popularity surge? To repeatedly call them ‘populist’, opportunist racists and fruitcakes. Nigel himself could not have dreamed up a better campaign. With every dispossessed voter roundly insulted for even considering the switch is it even surprising that this rebellious surge has not been halted?

Those polls that everybody likes to disregard when they arrive at the ‘wrong’ conclusions? Well, the public on the whole doesn’t have an informed opinion on anything very much until the polls themselves tell them what to think – it’s like propaganda, don’tcha know - and while nobody expects UKIP to have any of the answers to any of the problems, with each upward notch their support grows. You don’t have to be politically engaged to see that nobody knows how to fix the NHS, border control, wages, rents, energy, trade, transport, foreign policy, law and order and any of the other issues that successive government have failed to satisfactorily order, but there is one answer that nobody has yet tried. Leave the EU and see what happens.

It only takes one to topple the lot.
Once one falls, they all fall.

The mere fact that the Europhile failures who have led us for so many years are so desperate to cling onto their posts is evidence enough, in the eyes of many more than just potential UKIP voters that something has to change. In Britain’s parliamentary democracy, such as it is, long-term incumbent governments eventually get thrown out, if only from sheer boredom at the monotony of it all. Why should it be any wonder that people are finally directing their ire at the longest incumbent government of all, the one blamed by every British government, for at least something, since its inception? I don’t want a referendum; I just want out.