Get Mad

The newsreader dropped an octave and in a husky voice, on the point of breaking and punctuated by dry sobs, she intoned the news. “It is twenty-four hours now since Jasmine, the nation’s sweetheart, went missing. A candle-lit vigil was hastily convened last night after she didn’t respond to the usual entreaty, ‘puss puss puss’ to come in for her supper. By this morning, some three thousand tea lights were being watched over by a crowd which overwhelmed Trafalgar Square and the steps of the National Gallery were adorned with flowers and tributes from well-wishers.”*

She paused a moment, bowed her head and clasped her hands together as if to offer a silent prayer. A single tear slid down one cheek, captured in close-up and broadcast to the millions who were simultaneously planning how they would mark their loss. The regular public sharia beatings, the gassing of protesters and the jailing of free speech advocates went unreported save for the coded columns in subversive, minor, former news publications such as the underground Mail and Express pamphlets, secretively distributed and often only passed on by word of mouth among trusted friends.

When did we become such a nation of crybabies and religious appeasers? In the last week we have seen wall-to-wall wailing over the losses in the Grenfell fire and the Manchester Arena bombing, yet the fifth anniversary of Lee Rigby’s brutal murder has been treated gingerly, so as not to cause offence. The BBC in one news item even referred to the Manchester Arena event as ‘an accident’. And in recent weeks there has been a push for increased legal powers to police ‘hate speech’ and criticism of islam. Blasphemy laws, in secular Britain?

And yesterday, of course, Tommy Robinson was sent to prison where, no doubt his life will be under threat, for a breach of the peace. It appears he has breached the terms of his licence, but he was simply doing what he is cheered on by many of us for doing and highlighting the otherwise unreported monstrosities committed by the hidden community concealed behind the very visible massed aggression which the government insists on portraying as a persecuted minority.

What happened to the stiffness of our upper lips? The black-shrouded, grieving widow was an aberration, her strange, ethereal, inability to move on the antithesis of Britishness, yet tolerated in true British fashion. But now it’s as if we must all join in the tortured misery and self-flagellation in the pseudo-scientific notion of closure. This isn’t closure; it’s a perpetuation of a snivelling inability to grasp cold reality. When 96 year old war hero Jim Booth faced down an attacker armed with a claw hammer he shrugged off what the press has to call ‘an ordeal’ with the superbly British response that worse things happen at sea.

Nothing has changed...

It’s time to ‘man up’, surely? It’s time to take to the streets in protest, to rattle a few cages and to unseat a few so-called leaders who neither lead nor offer solutions. It’s time to stop getting maudlin, to give up the widow’s weeds and shout out ‘enough is enough.’ Standing proud? Standing together? All this vigil nonsense is neither; it is hollow words to cover up the reality that we are standing against nothing; we are giving in. Well enough. Don’t get sad, get mad. Then don’t’ get mad, get even,

(*No cats were harmed in the making of this blog.)

The Diana Gene

In 1997 the United Kingdom had a mental breakdown. Grown men who had never had a thought for anything beyond their immediate circle of acquaintances and narrow fields of interest turned into foreigners. You know the kind of foreigners; the ones we used to see on the telly, ululating and self-harming in grief at the funeral of a family member. I remember how it used to make me glad to be British; to stoically bear tragedy and loss and to go on and get the job done “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs...” I watched the wailing fuzzy-wuzzies with unconcealed disdain and a sense of, yes, some superiority.

Pith helmet, bristling moustache, rigid upper lip, sleeves rolled up and getting on with it; and that was just the women. The Boys Own Paper images of Tommy Atkins and his comrades cast from a similar mould, if it ever existed, is long gone and now Britain has truly become the mongrel nation many in our governments have long yearned for. Expressing grief is normal. Doing so en-masse and in public and so loudly and pathetically unreservedly is, well it’s not how things ought to be done; it’s not cricket. When that self-obsessed royal clothes horse died the process of turning the UK into the Middle East began in earnest.

The mass importation of people who neither looked like nor thought the same way we did was done with no concern to the effect on the indigenous. Positive discrimination was practised freely and openly in the name of the new idol of diversity, bringing unquantified and unqualified and too-rapid a change into how our public services operate and who they operate on behalf of. A blind eye was turned toward transgressions all who objected were berated and labelled as simple-minded racists. It appears to have worked; if we all originated in Africa, as some believe, the presence of our diverse cousins seems to have awoken the long-dormant mewling gene.

We no longer have to assemble in garment-rending mobs to loudly and openly mourn though; now we have the internet to do it for us. And all it takes is a tiny little trigger to get the tears flowing and the high-pitched shrieks synchronising into a cacophony of awful, self-pitying, stream of demands for relief devoid of reason. The border numbers released a few weeks ago had over half the country demanding controls on immigration. Now, however, the pictures of Aylan Kurdi have flipped opinion among the weak who are now demanding we fling our doors wide. People who normally don’t care much about anything and can happily spend hours revelling in video violence have come out of the woodwork all weepy when confronted with images of things they don’t normally have to deal with. Where is the common sense, the level head?

And across half of Europe it seems to be spreading. You would think, now that islam has shown its teeth, its infection of Europe would be curtailed. But no, now it’s adopt a Syrian week. I’m sure they are perfectly decent people, like the hard-working Pakistanis and Bangladeshis before them, but what of their kids? Will the agents and apologists of IS prey on their frailties and create another generation of ‘nice boys’ who turn into British born jihadis? It is foolish to pretend it will not happen. And what then? Will we just shrug and say something about it being the price we pay for decency?

New Towns Commission - Housing crisis? What housing crisis?

Emma Thompson says Britain’s unwillingness to take in Syrian refugees is racist.  But are we not just afraid of repeating what we have seen in front of our eyes? She says “If these people were white, European, that were coming from some dictatorship in Bosnia. If they were coming I think we would feel quite differently about it.” On the same day Richard Delingpole on Twitter said, “It's a brave or stupid man who speaks the truth while the current wave of immigration self-flagellation is going on. I'm not that man.” If self-defence is now racism isn’t it about time we all adopted a healthy respect for those who dare speak out?

Ghosts of Christmas

Christmas comes but once a year. As I ran the gauntlet of waddling men in trackie bottoms dutifully trailing their strident current partners, revealing sweaty arse cracks as they lurched along, half-supported by their bulging shopping trolleys, even as their own trolleys lost the fight with gravity, little did I know that all over social media a gathering storm was, er… gathering. As embittered fathers tried to control errant kids their rabid mothers foraged for a vegetable that most people only ever regard as a penance and for no known reason. And thus engaged in the hunt, all were ignorant of the events about to unfold many miles away.

It’s the time of the year when everybody is reminded of our mortality as ancient celebrities pop their clogs to be lionised by the media despite never having done a single original thing in their lives. Mediocre, yet long-lived actors, famous for a brief flowering in the seventies, singers with a single hit record, itself a cover of a greater talent’s work. But eulogise or despise them they had their time in the light and are thus fair game for criticism, so even when the Joe Cocker jokes were flying few were genuinely offended.

But, in the bustle for baskets piled high with biscuits which are only ever munched on Boxing Day, when the good ones have all run out; as chaotic couples telephoned each other from adjacent supermarket aisles, desperate to secure one of the last several thousand tubs of goose fat; as frantic families fought as if for their lives to procure the festive feast they truly believe they deserved; as all this was going on, in Glasgow some people they had never heard of were about to lose everything to fate.

People die every day, in their millions. Some of them suffer unspeakable and lonely misery, some of them perish in floods and earthquakes; a few even choose to put themselves in the firing line for a cause. And some, a small number in comparison, succumb to sheer accident. But unless it is somebody with personal significance to me, I refuse to be cowed by the bleating grief-seeking masses who want to turn every parochial calamity into a national tragedy. And when did it become an actual crime to not adopt this self-imposed, self-righteous rending of garments? What was in it for those who turned on the idiot who tweeted a joke too soon? I blame Diana.

For what it’s worth, my thoughts are never going to ‘go out to’ or ‘be with’ those in whose personal tragedies I simply have no involvement. It doesn’t make me heartless, it merely shows I have a more refined sense of empathy, focused on who is important to me and not turned on by whipped-up, mawkish sentiment; I refuse to be defined by my readiness to cry to order for people I will never know. Peace on earth and goodwill to men has to include – just as with freedom of speech – those with whom we disagree.

Santa's little accident...

But you know the truly most offensive thing about the Glasgow incident? For the first few hours, everywhere you looked, the BRITISH online media were describing the bin lorry as a ‘garbage truck'. Now there, surely, is something we can all rally around and join in the unanimous condemnation of. Now, get back to your own Christmases and stop worrying about everybody else’s.