Such people!

So the TUC has done its own ‘independent research’ and concludes we will all be £38 per week worse off after a Brexit? Thirty-eight? Why not £40, or hey, go for hyper-faux-accuracy and call it £38.23? Will we also forfeit the ability to travel without a visa which will cost £15.36 per week for every country in the EU we visit? Or perhaps our life expectancy will decline by one year, three months and eleven days? Or will we experience a 1.3264% increase in the risk of dying from cancer? For heaven’s sake, we can’t even say with any certainty what our national debt is right now, let alone how anybody's pay packet will be affected in a year’s time; who would believe such naked chicanery as Remain’s barrage of precise forecasts of things that are simply unquantifiable?

This was the news that the BBC told me over and over again on my drive to work yesterday. On the drive home there was a section in The Media Show about the success of Geordie Shore. Not being an aficionado of truly appalling excuses for mindlessly staring at the idiot box I was unaware that this piece of televisual ordure, which would seem to be so regionally-specific in interest, is huge. The producer in the interview claimed that with its target demographic (ages 16-34) it is more popular than Game of Thrones. Just to be clear, these people would rather watch a shambolic, fly-on-the-wall ‘reality’ show about self-centred people they can barely understand, than a hugely expensive, lavishly filmed and expensively cast dramatic sensation.

In beginning there was the herd... and then we created society. While people were still foraging in the dirt and running about naked we discovered we could better survive by joining forces. For millennia the family unit and its extended tribes were the source of all our sensations, both basic and extra-curricular. At some point we found time to get bored and eventually we evolved and created entertainment. We then spent hundreds of years getting good at it. Very good. The need to be amused spawned entire industries and advances in technology; theatre, cinematography, special effects... the Oscars and all that getting there entails.

But the process of natural selection often throws up dead ends. While the successful branch of the evolutionary tree strengthens as survival-equiped mutations procreate with each other, the stunted limbs wither and die as their ill-equipped offspring fail to spread their genes wider than their own weak circle of interbreeding. Eventually, speciation ensures the lesser specimens can no longer breed with the successful dynasties; they either evolve into another form or die out. Maybe we are witnessing the dawn of a new sub-species of homo sapiens right now. With their spines permanently curved from hours spent in comfy sofas, welcome to homo reclinus.

These knuckle-dragging, scripted reality zombies resemble nothing so much as the Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons of Huxley’s fictional world of enforced consumerism. Add Soma, in the form of freely available booze, fags and recreational narcotics and you’re pretty much where he thought we’d end up. Could such dull denizens even be bothered to take an interested part in the democratic process? Why should they; they get all they want with little imagination or effort? Brexit may lose out to the sheer apathy of these humanoid sheep drifting from the mindless orgies of 18-30s holidays, to unplanned pregnancy, followed by a life of dreary all-inclusive package deals as wrist-banded temporary inmates of foreign penal colonies posing as holiday resorts.

The missing link...

If science and exploration survive the massive brain-shrinking effect of hyper socialism embodied in the aims of the European Union, will future archaeologists discover under-developed human crania of some missing link and name it Australopithecus gulliblisticus and ponder what cataclysmic event led to its demise? If you are wondering who would believe the TUC’s portents of doom, I think I’ve found them.