Mediocre, at best

 Haven’t you just had enough of mediocrity? Strive hard, practice, and keep on going when all is against you. “If you want to be the best, if you want to beat the rest” Roy Castle sang on Record Breakers as he tap-danced and played a multitude of musical instruments to enter the hallowed pages of the Guiness Book. Athletes, actors, musicians, authors… all must have the winning formula of talent backed up by knock-down-surmounting resilience and stick-at-it-ness to succeed.

Architects, engineers, carpenters, bricklayers, and as many other occupations as you can mention have to go through training and assessment, gaining qualifications and experience. And still, in order to do well, they have to care deeply enough to maintain their standards, compete for work and stay ahead of the herd. Hell, even the mugs auditioning for reality shows or hosting Tik-Tok channels have to bring something to the table which holds value for the clientele.

But not so much for politicians. Where have the big beasts gone? Where are the supposed representatives of the electorate to be found? Why is there not one single ‘name’ in British politics who can be admired, rather than just endured? Sunak is just a tight-trousered lightweight, Hunt is lacklustre and uninspiring. Starmer is a man full of adenoidal rhetoric but absent a single policy, likewise his partner in Crime, Gromit, I mean Wallace… I mean Reeves. Rayner? Don’t make me vomit. And William Wragge? The snidey little poove suddenly embodies all the feebleness of the current Tories.

Michael-fucking-Gove has become a dribbling imbecile, embarked on a mission to inflict misery on the very people Thatcher would have lauded. And David-sodding Cameron has this very week been licking the anus of the orange gorilla over the pond. Everywhere, politics is infested with gutless cowards, aimless imbeciles and parachuted-in ‘safe’ candidates who understand nothing, do nothing and stand for nothing. What are they good for?

Eat up your greens, sit up straight, practise until you can, then practise some more until you’re good at it. The message from every decent parent to their offspring is as it always was; work hard, stay decent, grow, work, save… and plan to amount to something. What must the ageing parents of our current crop of trough-swilling political fucktards think of their legacy? Meanwhile other parents see a bleak future for their progeny: home ownership a distant dream, secure employment a virtual impossibility. As for retirement, death may soon be the only reliable way to ending your working life.

Well, I have had about enough of all this. I’ve had my ups and downs, but I have always got back up, dusted myself down and fought on and upwards. But what’s the point now; what is there left to work for the next generations? What is the purpose of this country now we can no longer feed ourselves, fight for ourselves or even reasonably order ourselves without fear of censure, or worse, from those who rule from on high?

What example has been set by modern governance? Incompetent by design, they pretend to stand on manifestos they have no intention of honouring, they cheat and lie and then elevate themselves to the upper house with a slap on the back and a pension for life. They disgrace themselves then utter scripted non-apologies and carry on, barely feeling that bump in the road, all the time in thrall to loftier interpretations of their purpose.

For many decades people have said of their politicians, “They are only in it for themselves,” and few MPs have even attempted to deny this or demonstrate otherwise. Hiding behind the diktats of higher powers – the EU for two whole generations – they claim that nothing can be done, and they ignore the entreaties of the jobless, the homeless, the sick. Even if you are in work and have a roof over your head your security is perilous, yet still some get ever richer on the proceeds of causing all of this to happen.

Nobody is looking out for you any more, as they once were. Nobody with the nominal power to change anything has any intention of doing so. All that matters, it seems, is to appear to fall in line with ‘International Law’ and supranational consensus. But it is neither the consensus nor the will of the people to do follow those lines. I honestly think that a seismic shift in the national ambition is needed and that it cannot possibly come, any longer, from above. It is either every man for himself – anarchy – or bloody revolution and a new republic. Anything to rid us of the sheer awfulness of the mundane.

Partly Political

I would have a lot more time for socialism if those making a living from peddling it were instead actually practising what they preach and doing something about the lives of those they claim need to be rescued by it. As far as I can see, socialism for all of its 170-year history has signally failed to improve the lives of those who vote for it. Meantime capitalism, the system by which pretty much all trade exists, has increased material wealth for all, but generated some, on-the-face-of-it grotesque, imbalances.

Maybe it is a simple fact that humans are not very good at making impartial decisions and equitably sharing out what we have amassed. In true ‘more equal than others’ fashion, socialist politicos are notorious for jumping housing queues, getting planning permission for favoured religious buildings and creating nepotistic dynasties throughout the public sector. Meantime, more than a few Tory MPs have been mired in scandals involving huge financial privileges granted to friends, family and powerful benefactors.

Politicians of all stripes are less trusted now than they have been for many years and yet all of this still carries on. MPs who have been imprisoned for fraud, perjury and the like should not even dare to show up again in public, yet they retake their seats on release from jail as if butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths. They are caught out in newspaper stings in such embarrassing circumstances that most of us would change our names and flee the country, yet continue chairing select committees on Standards in Public Life. Or they appear in their underpants cruising for gay sex, but then imagine they can adopt moral stances without criticism.

Whatever you think of the Orange Man he was dead right on one thing; the swamp needs draining; as true an ambition over here as it ever was in the US of A. Forget your big global conspiracies, your New World Orders, the Great Reset and all of that guff. Change at that level is nigh-on impossible for we mere mortals. Much as I hate the term, co-opted as it has been by the Labour Party, change needs to happen at grass roots level.

Every person in public office, from the school board up to the House of Lords, should come under close and highly intrusive scrutiny. It should not be possible to award a contract to anybody with whom you have any connection, or by which somebody you are connected to may profit, without full disclosure, and pending approval from people outside your closed circle of colleagues and friends. And if it is unavoidable that a policy you have championed enriches your nearest and dearest the very least you should do it to retire from public office.

As a start to this swamp-draining, anybody seeking office should be assumed to have nefarious reason and be under such detailed scrutiny that only the whitest of white (and I make no apology for the use of that phrase, you all know what it means an if you are offended then you are also unfit for office) could ever make it through to nomination. And all voting for MPs should be via personal attendance, identity proven, apart for those in exceptional circumstances, for whom ballots should be collected directly by at least two, sworn-in officials of at least two different political allegiances.

Two cheeks of the same political arse

The shenanigans over the pond over the last week should leave us in no doubt that western politics is broken. And the insertion of predominantly Pakistani muslims into so many political seats from which they seem unassailably capable of practising politics in a less than, shall we say, a western democratic manner, should be cause for concern for all. Politicians like to talk about fighting for things; isn’t it time we fought back?

Make do and mend

I was reminded yesterday of the mission statement, whereby virtue-signalling, fad-following company evangelists dream up ludicrously trite expressions which reveal the vast and echoing hollow emptiness of their souls. For every corporate vision you can be sure that a team of gutless, witless HR/PR/VCR types will have been paid good money; money that could otherwise have gone to maintaining or improving the core business.

But surely, they will protest, we do improve the core business... by focusing on the synergies which generate diverse new solutions, incentivising innovation and pro-active intervention in ongoing processes... going forward. Yes, of course you need to have an aim but honestly aren’t you fed up to the back teeth with all this ‘passion’ that companies are selling these days? Passionate about this, passionate about that. Yeah, yeah, we get it... but why not just be honest that all you are really passionate about is profit?

Admittedly, it must be nice to be engaged in an industry where profit is merely a happy outcome of doing something you really enjoy. But don’t rub our noses in it, for goodness’ sake; many people work at jobs which slowly grind them down over many years and these sorts of jobs are not improved – in fact, often the reverse – by the heavy-handed interventions of sociologists fiddling about at the extremities. Few companies were improved by the advent of the HR department and since when did HR become more important than the engineers and producers and front-line salespeople who do the hard miles?

The same is true in politics and thus we get vacuous bigots like David Lammy; greasy pole climbers with barely a brain cell not fully employed in dreaming up offence on behalf of anybody they have decreed must be offended. Politicians were once of the people – one of Labour's great achievements - and had grounding in real, local issues. Sure, there have always been idealists and there will always be those with a greater mission than sorting out the pothole problem, but when it comes down to it, the unglamorous potholes still need sorting out.

But so many MPs now come through the Oxford PPE, Spad, special interest routes that the impression among the wider electorate is that their concerns are as nothing against the great crusades of leftist thought. No cause, it seems, is too insignificant to get angry about and no imaginary slight too small to protest. For those caught up in the maelstrom of self-righteous outrage it all seems real enough, but from the outside you just look like a bunch of children stamping your tiny feet. If you ain’t gonna fix them potholes, we’ll have to do it ourselves.

In times of plenty nobody much cares about what our idiot political class is getting up to; there is enough to go around. But in times of stress – and by all accounts (if you believe such accounts) every budget is being stretched to breaking point and there is nothing in the pot for petty point-scoring. In the war, they were told to make do and mend; this is what is happening in politics now. Our MPs are no longer representing the core business of government; instead they have become the HR arm, forever fiddling with the inconsequential.

Our politics is broken... time to start over

When you can’t rely on elected officials to do their job you have to just ignore them and do it yourself. Cut through the waffle, crack on with the job and challenge every bit of pointless rhetoric posing as noble endeavour. And when after all your efforts to fix your member have proved insufficient you have to go out and make a new one. If you want a government that does what you want it to do, you can no longer rely on the existing political class. It’s time to make a new one from scratch.