More Fool Us

Spotting the April Fool story in the day’s papers was always good sport, but these days you might be excused for imagining that every other report, on any given day, is just taking the piss. Very much so with the Wera Hobhouse sponsored Worker Protection (Amendment of Equality Act 2010) Bill which appears to have been waived through Parliament while the government was too busy applying sticking plasters elsewhere.

The amendment would impose a legal duty on employers to protect their staff from harassment by other employees and now also by members of the public. In law such harassment means “unwanted conduct relating to a protected characteristic” (i.e. age, disability, gender reassignment, race, religion or belief, sex or sexual orientation) where that conduct has the purpose or effect of “creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment”. This would include being offended by overheard remarks.

The idiots really are winning. This ‘Sneaks Charter’ would bring about a rash of actions without merit to further clog up the already overburdened legal system. And how hard would it be for two colleagues to arrange some specious insult, witnessed by other staff as a basis for suing their employer for damages? This is the sort of nonsense that should have its proposers put in stocks for judgment by the public, who are never currently consulted.

Critical Race Theory, the idiotic insistence that people who have never owned slaves owe anything whatsoever to people who have never been slaves, the notion that one can change gender by a simple declaration, child-centred teaching practices, recruitment for diversity… all of these are symptoms of a grand madness that has afflicted the developed world and will bring about its downfall. Are our leaders just fools now?

 Take that diversity in recruitment issue; a recent report decries the finding that fewer than 20% of  engineering undergraduates are female. So what? Do we see similar wails and gnashing of teeth when we discover that hardly any ‘men’ give birth? And isn’t that the very point? While there are some exceptional women in engineering and the sciences – and hurrah for them – why get all pissy about something which the supposedly uneducated populus can explain in a very short sentence?

 Naturally, the report authors also seem unduly concerned that in a country with a white majority population our engineers seem to be predominantly white males. Outrageous, they seem to say, we thought we were well on the way to eradicating this toxic species. It is almost as if they have never encountered an actual human person; that they have never considered asking them what they think; that they believe polls designed to elicit pre-ordained results are the only source of truth.

It has often been said that MPs should not only live in their constituencies, full-time, but that they should have held an ordinary job for some qualifying number of years. Not a think-tank internship, nor a special advisorship (And how come so many spads are so very young? It’s like the cult of management consultancy whereby actual experience is trumped by having gone to the right university.) I’d go further and ban graduates with an Oxford PPE degree from entering politics until at least the age of 40, with those years spent grafting in the dirt among the rest of us.

Not just April...

That such stupendously worthless legislation spouts like vomit from the over-indulged mouths of the monumentally privileged and feted suggests that the overhaul of Westminster is long overdue. The House of Lords is, likewise, crammed ever more full with useful idiots. And the media aids and abets their vandalism of the national psyche at every turn. It is little wonder that popular revolutions often begin with the slaughter of the intelligentsia. For all their supposed learning, they would be fools indeed to think that time is not coming.

First in line

All ready for Brexit? Prepare for the worst but hope for the best has been one of the government slogans in the lead up to you-know-what. Remain’s slogan seems to have been: ‘Hope for the worst and do your damnedest to bring it about.’ Me? I’m what you may term an optimistic pessimist; I’m with the government on this one. Overt optimism always brings with it the risk of serial disappointment, especially when young, impressionable and with sights set on the moon while firmly shackled to terra firma. Far better, I find, to be tacitly pessimistic, strike the right note then be pleasantly surprised when things actually work out.

Perhaps it’s just the British way, when you think about it; let’s face it, planning a picnic in England more than two days in advance is folly personified. As is expecting all your luggage to always arrive with you on the first day of your holiday. Learning to gracefully thank Aunt Ida for the identical pair of wrong-sized socks for the third birthday in a row is an art that comes more easily to we phlegmatic island dwellers than it does to, say, the Latin hotheads of warmer climes. See, no matter how hard we tried we could never give ourselves wholly to being European.

Really, a positive attitude – even tempered with some cautious pessimism – goes a long, long way, especially when setting out in a new direction. Dragging your screaming, obdurate offspring where they don’t want to go, for no reason other than they decided they don’t, fomenting a screaming, embarrassing public argument, is a rite of passage many young parents are familiar with. Divide-and-rule then comes into play as one half of the parenting unit wants to relent and the other to forge on. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could negotiate with the recalcitrant ones and agree a common way ahead, instead of forever sniping and bickering at each other?

It comes as something of a relief, then, to hear of today’s launch, at midday, by a hard core of Remainers. A new start, they say, a campaign to – albeit with some reserve pessimism in hand – back Brexit all the way to its conclusion. It’s not so much total capitulation; they will challenge whenever they see the government backsliding (because, of course, Labour is no opposition at all) but in general this is a welcome change from the last nine months.

Lead by none other than Anna Soubry the working group called, somewhat unimaginatively ‘Best for Britain’ includes other former antagonists such as John Major, William Hague, that old windbag Kinnock and arch spin-surgeon Alastair Campbell. Lord knows, it’s scarcely credible, but it’s about bloody time. Even Eddie Izzard has signed up!

Farage has cautiously welcomed the new group, but has made it crystal clear he doesn’t trust them and will be keeping a close watch from the pub, but Tim Farron, not surprisingly, has said he wants nothing to do with it. To that end he has, bizarrely, managed to co-opt Michael Heseltine into his bid to make the Limp Demics the leading pro-EU force in the land. Quite what impact on the debate the conjoined might of Tarzan and ‘Minor Fart’ will have is anybody’s guess.

Only, you have you wonder, just how long are these uneasy alliances likely to last? I mean, even just two days ago, all the heavies on the 48% side were frothing at the mouth and insisting they would not back down under any circumstance and that Brexit must, literally, be stopped. Maybe they were thinking of putting a fence in its way... or even an actual ‘stop’ sign; we British are suckers for following a sign.

Or maybe we should take it all at face value and actually receive them gracefully into the fold; allies at last in getting the best for all our sakes, now and in the future. We should all back Best for Britain and putting aside our enmities work together for a better Britain and a better Europe. Now, wouldn’t that be more constructive than the fool’s paradise of ever closer union?

An EU spokesman... any day of the year.

Lest you think that this is too good to be true, just wait until lunchtime and see. But, if you really can't wait, go back to the top of the page and check out the first letter of each paragraph. The signs are there and only a complete fool would neglect to read the runes.

Something new?

They say there’s nothing new under the sun. Every generation discovers for the first time the hitherto unknown activity [whispers] ‘sex’ and every generation metaphorically re-invents many wheels. Human society – its morals, its sins, its hopes, dreams, crimes and calamities - and every social phenomenon has its echoes in times past. I was reminded of this last week when I heard on the radio, in the early hours of the morning, the short poem by Bertolt Brecht: Everything new is better than everything old:

How do I know, comrade

That a house built today

Has a purpose and is being used?

And that the brand new constructions

Which clash with the rest of the streets and

Whose intent I don’t know

Are such a revelation to me?

Because I know:

Everything new

Is better than everything old.

It is satire, of course, a play on the plagiarism of novelty and much like reading Dickens today and discovering that the human race has evolved not one pace forward since the days of Victorian squalor. Indeed Dickens wrote at length of the plight of slum dwellers in those unlit streets. The average height back then was around five-foot-five (165cm) Today it is more like five-foot-ten (178 cm). But this simple statistic ignores societal variations; those in deprived areas are more likely to tend to the Victorian average and as social mobility has been lost, whole inner-city boroughs are made up of people for whom six feet in height is a freak of nature.

Everything new is better than everything old. But an old plan in new clothing has resurfaced to take advantage of this disadvantage. The government's Technical Housing Standard requires floor-to-ceiling heights to be at least 2.3 metres, a requirement that has been in place for half a century or more. But developers have realised that with inner-city humans being shorter, housing being in desperate demand and building heights restricted by the planners, a 10% reduction in ceiling heights would allow a whole extra floor in a ten-storey block of flats.

In the guise of something new, the London borough of Newham has been quietly resurrecting an old plan from the early nineteen seventies. Despite the recent tragedy at Ronan Point, planners came out in favour of a trial scheme: In the 'interests of humanity' the developers of Harlow New Town proposed a restriction in the height of inhabitants for precisely this reason so that in the words of Mr Gabriel, a spokesman at the time, the genesis of the idea was the possibility tat they could 'fit twice as many in the same building site'. They said it was all right. It seems that some things old are just as good as everything new.

A Day of Fools

What's in a name? April Fool's Day. All Fool's Day. Says it all, really. There is a multi-national tradition of taking the piss, especially in Britain. And if there's one thing which used to characterise the quintessentially British character it was effortless self-deprecation; a trait that seems to be fast dying out and as the politicos learned last week, if you can't take it you shouldn't dish it out. Who's the fool now? The jury's still out.

See, to see a twat you have to be a twat. To pull off a prank you need to be a cockspank (at some time in your life). And if there's one thing worse than being the butt of a joke it's being just a butt. A big fat horse's arse.

As George W Bush famously said "There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me - you can't get fooled again." (go on, click the link - it's solid gold!)

Everybody, young and old, shallow or profound, lowly or high and mighty can get in on the act. Drop your guard and go with the flow, Joe. Call it therapy

So, don't get upset off if you got caught out - don't get mad, get even... and you've got all year to plan your revenge!

"You have to larf dontcha?"

Happy April Fool's day!