Any Questions?

Just because an idea is, or can be made, popular, it doesn’t make it either achievable or true. Among ideas that sound wonderful are: give everybody a meaningful job or a meaningful life, for that matter. Pay everybody enough not to want for any essential need. Stop people being cruel to other people. Educate all children so that a real university place is an option. Let women control fifty percent of everything (instead, presumably, of the mere 90% they already control). End slavery, homelessness, starvation and climate change. Oh and prevent lovely fluffy kittens from growing up to be grumpy cats.

On Any Questions last week I heard repeated the idiot mantra that the refugee crisis was as a result of the first world’s inability to counteract climate change. As if droughts and floods and famine were all our fault. Really? Even if you take the bible largely as the work of fiction it is, there are still historical records of droughts and famine, wars and pestilence in the old world as well as the Old Testament. You’re surely not going to blame all that on global warming? The audience responded warmly to every knee-jerk left wing simpleton response while resolutely staying silent whenever a pragmatic view was offered.

The lefty commentators on the panel were quick to brand every current government policy as being entirely ideological. Everything the hated Tories are doing – including all the things Labour promised to do – is a dogmatic attack on the poor. Austerity is not a case of living within our means, rather it is some calculated right-wing plot to starve everybody to death. Presumably the obesity epidemic is an allergic reaction to hunger? In the idiot world we have created I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody actually posited that as a rational explanation for the explosion of plus-sized infants.

To judge by the audience’s juvenile lapping up of nice-but-dim rhetoric the propaganda has done its job and spurred on by the crowd-mind they cheered ever more fanciful fictions of the harm caused by ‘the far right’ by which I imagine they mean David Cameron. Is it so inconceivable that Conservatives want a better world, too? And that their proposal to get everybody to build it together is as worthy, if not more worthy than compelling one half of the population to forever pay for the other half? But no, if it’s ideology you want you need look no further than the left who have clung fiercely to their little red books and the foolish refusal to recognise difference.

You want equality? Come and get it...

Equality, they cry, unaware that every heavy-handed piece of equalities legislation creates not wings for the underdogs but millstones for achievers. Just as socialist redistribution of wealth tends to make everybody poorer, shoehorning everybody into a one-size-fits-all jelly mould increases the sum total of mediocrity. You want women to be equal? Then stop whining about there being seven men and only two women in the new passport design; although they have a point – they should at least have included Margaret Thatcher. Oh, but that’s the wrong kind of woman, isn’t it? I suppose they mean people like ‘Dr’ Jack Monroe... although apparently she’s not a woman any more. Confusing isn’t it?

Fight for the right to what?

I was in my mid-twenties during the miners’ strike; a young Yorkshireman newly married and striking out to make a career, a home... a life. I’d been brought up to expect no help from anybody by right and to have to make my own way, whatever path I chose. I chose to accept that advice and get on with it. The backdrop to my childhood was the rotten and decaying world that our dalliance with socialism had wrought. Strike after strike, the derision of European neighbours and the emergence of dependent classes who seemed to believe they should be able to live off the state forever – cradle to grave.

The people who led the miners and their ilk may have been misguided, blinded by the ideology of their adored Soviet Russia but they were, surely, made of stern stuff. They wanted to work and they worked bloody hard; hard as nails, I thought. Then the other day on the radio, following the announcement that there would be no inquiry into the Battle of Orgreave, I heard things that made my blood chill a little. The miners’ leaders and all the big union firebrands regularly used stirring words stolen from history to eulogise about their ‘noble’ struggle against the oppressors. Fighting the good fight you could imagine Tolkein-esque warriors buoying up their troops before battle, resurrecting the words of Shakespearian heroes. “Comrades!” they cried, “We will never surrender!” and the roar of the crowd made the flat caps look less ridiculous.

Now, however, those caps are merely being wrung. On the trusty old PM programme those miners once again gave voice. But now it was the reedy, whining voice of losers who appropriated the vocabulary of others. Boo hoo, they sobbed, not fair and one after another, speakers got up to bleat out ridiculous utterings of defeat. “We ‘ad us cummyooniteh ripped asunder by t’Torehs!” they wept “Thi suffered, did t’bairns; we ‘ad us lives destroyed…” And on and on it went so that after the report I was almost ashamed to hail from Yorkshire where men were once men. These men weren’t the sturdy stock I’d formerly supposed they were; they were just another bunch of entitlement seekers.

Then there was the case of Professor Sir Tim Hunt, hounded from his job and life’s work because some people can’t handle a few words. He made an attempt at humour which fell flat and has now lost everything for what are being called ill-judged utterings. Did he hurl bricks at police? Did he aim a fist or a fence post at a scab? Did he threaten to kill or maim or rape or malign? Of course not, for all of that would not even attract an inquiry; his crime was far worse – he annoyed the feminists, who everybody knows can never see humour where there is an opportunity for attack. And in the face of a trumped-up suspicion of sexism UCL gave him no option but to resign.

The poor, starving, oppressed, huddled masses...

Meanwhile, the self-styled child-crusaders against the imagined dark forces of Tory/Mordor/Nazi evil are plotting to further their agenda by hijacking the sheeple’s marches against the equally fictional ‘austerity’, spreading fear and hate as only the far-left can. Don’t any of these people understand the importance of self-worth? They are not fighting for the welfare of people thrown into abject poverty; they are fighting for the right to have their every decision made by the state in return for a cringing reliance on its charity. The miners, the feminists, the austerity activists are emblematic of all that is wrong with their brave new world. But for all their bluster they are not fighting for freedom at all, they are insisting on slavery. Useful idiots indeed.

I must protest!

The holiday island of Kos has become a refugee ghetto with penniless Syrian asylum seekers sleeping in the streets and generally bringing down the vacation vibe. Southern Italy has been swamped by wave after wave of migrants fleeing Africa and seeking to suckle at the generous nipple of an alien continent. In Nepal, we have largely forgotten about the plight of the thousands put out of their homes by the recent earthquakes. And even without exceptional circumstances millions in India and China live in conditions that truly define poverty. It is business as usual for Planet Earth and it’s not pretty.

From our heated homes, watching enormous televisions, our shiny cars parked outside as we go about our relatively stress-free existences it is hard to imagine lives spent in merely subsisting. Where would we be without our phones, news on the go, entertainment at our fingertips and instant communication for the sheer hell of it? Our world is full of things we just don’t need; hipster coffee shops, fashions, toys for grown-up children, designer-this and designer-that, fripperies to amuse and keep us from thinking beyond the next fabricated social event.

We tweet about it, we snapchat it, we blog and share and generally immerse ourselves in a world so rich with possibility we don’t even see what we have and take our immense good fortune for granted. And yesterday the Queen opened Parliament with a package of measures that are intended to take our progress still further. Casting off the shackles of the LibDems the Tories at last have a chance to get on and finish the job. The promise is jobs and training and help for businesses and further advances for our truly first-world nation. Unlike most of the world’s population we are fortunate indeed.

Yet all of this appears to have escaped the notice of the rag-taggle band of ‘anti-austerity’ warriors determined to protest the right of the legitimately elected government to govern. Democracy, with all its flaws, is probably still the least-worst way of organising society, so the rights of these privileged but short-sighted and ultimately pointless people to stamp and scream and hate their useless parents in public is a price we willingly pay. If Labour had won we would be back to rule by minorities such as this; no vision, no overarching strategy, just lots and lots of ‘initiatives’ and a hotch-potch of competing ideologies, interests and hobby-horses for the idle.

It's just not fair!

Watching the coverage of the ambush of Douglas Carswell, snarling irony-free faces contorted with hatred as they spat ‘fascist’ at him and threatened violence, I saw nothing but privileged children kicking out. As they filmed their little piece of distorted history on their ubiquitous smart technology and waved their mass-produced banners no doubt they thought they were fighters for some nebulous notion of social justice and not the spoiled brats they truly are. Austerity? What austerity?

Greeks bearing left...

So Red Ed’s ever helpful colleagues have decided in the wake of the not very surprising Greek election outcome to lurch further left and lead a popular people’s revolution. Really? Maybe they have forgotten that Greece is not the same as the UK. For instance, our economy is not utterly borked. Furthermore it is our economy and that of Germany and France that is, as always, paying for the mistakes of ‘junior’ partners in the EU debacle. Anti-austerity Party? It’s laughable because it is largely the misguided pursuit of socialist dreams that unbalanced the UK and made it necessary to engage in the minimal levels of so-called austerity we have lived with for the last few years.

Nobody is starving, nobody is neglected – at least no more than they were under Labour, under any government, in the last fifty years. There has been class-war-based strife in every decade of my life and no matter who was in power, the other side – the last election losers – have claimed they are ‘destroying’ the country. This is the sequence as I have experienced it: Labour get in, borrow and spend, bribe the electorate, promise them the earth, then run out of money, at which point the Tories return to Westminster, tell some unpopular truths and grab hold of the reins again. Meanwhile Labour activists bleat and moan and agitate about austerity until, just as we are getting back on track they have managed to convince enough people that the medicine is nasty. Repeat ad infinitum.

The Greek election outcome is not exciting because it heralds any new (golden?) dawn for Greece. There will be no resurgence of the proletariat; there is little but trouble ahead for the beleaguered country. But what IS exciting is how the next few months will play out as Syriza discover that the schoolboy politics of revolution do not impress the adults of the EU who dole out all the pocket money. Where will Greece end up when they forego their next bailout? When they renege on their debts will the EU expel them? And if not, will they come to an accommodation? Either way it will cost us all and Labour will be cheering on the little man who won’t pay his way – try refusing to pay tax and see how they react then.

None of that cold reality matters one jot to Labour who love to shout about Tory ‘ideology’ while all the while supporting dogma so dog-eared even the communists abandoned it years ago, along with the millions of people they butchered in the name of progress. Countries like Greece joined the EU so that they could benefit from sharing the prosperity of sensible mature economies, not so that those economies could reject their restraint in favour of a socialist free-for-all. Birthplace of democracy? Graveyard of civilisation, the way it’s going.

Well, if Russell's backing them...

So for me it’s grab the popcorn, pull up a pew and sit back to watch how some proper mental, not-joined-up thinking can grind a country into the dirt far faster than any level-headed government. Beware of Greeks bearing gifts, they say – this may just be the gift that keeps on giving.