Shuffling about

Re-shuffle? I can barely be bothered to shuffle in the first place. Out go some personalities, some names we knew, in come some women to make the Tories look a little bit more like Labour. Is that the big plan behind Dave’s Dollies? Dear god, I hope it’s more cunning than that. Labour is spinning it as a shuffle to the right, even as Ed Miliband lurches to the left. What is this, The Timewarp? Strictly Come Dancing? Dancing on NICE? And the Eurosceptics are doing the Hokey-Cokey – in, out, in, out, shake it all about. That’s all we need.

But Michael Gove out of post and having to go on air to sound like he was happy about it? Come on, Cameron, have the decency to treat us like at least some of us are not products of socialist education policy? With the rabid old Marxist trout, Christine Blower, clapping her hands with glee that all she has to do now is hobble his replacement – play the sister card, comrade – and the temporary halt in the decline of educational standards will soon revert to its dumb, downward course. You do realise ‘The Tories’ that soft education yields Labour voters and future state dependents? All of which brings me to the real theme of this blog; the Pension Myth.

We’re in the state we’re in because of rampant, unchecked, naked, ugly, venal consumerism. “Buy, buy, buy!” we are enjoined. “Why, why, why?” we reply. Because the more you buy, the bigger the economy, the more people in work and the more tax we take. And despite whatever you may think about contributory National Insurance or ‘paying your stamp’, it’s out of current taxes that your pensions are paid. Therefore, goes the thinking, as the distribution of population by age becomes more and more top heavy, we need more and more workers paying tax to prop up the system.

Consumerism, by the way, isn’t the same as Capitalism; Capitalism is the way humans have always traded, consumerism is a cheap trick to make people believe in instant gratification. A car you can’t afford, a mortgage you can’t repay and every kind of useless frippery simply because you have been given access to obscene levels of cheap and unchecked credit. It suited all favours of government for a while and was especially highly valued by ‘things can only get better’ New Labour. They didn’t get better though, did they?

See, the whole point of technology is increased productivity. If one man can do the work of a hundred by using a combine-harvester, the whole village can be fed by all of us working far less. If computers allow instant multiple communications we don’t need armies of typists and publishers and postmen to deliver the word by ‘mandraulic’ means. If a nuclear missile can wipe out thousands at a stroke, what’s the point in a land army? In theory, as we get cleverer a smaller population of workers should be needed to keep the retired in adequate sufficiency.

Except where’s the incentive to be merely satisfied? If, instead of always preaching ‘jam today’ we preached ‘live within your means’ maybe there would actually be jam tomorrow. In a high productivity paradigm we should need fewer drones and more technicians, but the educational output of several generations of idealised, live-for-today low achievers with high aspirations means we can’t even grow our own drones successfully. And the immigrants we employ instead do NOT as a whole help to pay for the pensions, instead sending as much of their minimum wages home as they can, along with the benefits we insist on paying them.

It’s not a greater number of dumber kids we need, it’s a sustainable number of cleverer ones. Axing Gove may look like a cunning vote-gleaning plan but non-Tories are visceral in their hatred of all things blue and will never vote for Cameron anyway. Former Tory voters may, however, turn away from a party that appears to have tossed aside tomorrow in favour of today. Who’ll pay for our pensions in future? Hah! You think we'll still be able to afford pensions?

G.C.Ee-ba-gum

Michael Gove is quite right to backpedal a bit on his education reforms. While I would have preferred a full-scale reversion to rum, sodomy and the lash, like in my school days (Or was that the Royal Navy? All that grog tends to addle a chap's memory, what!) I can fully see how a child reared today on one of Britain's Socialist battery voter farms might not be able to handle a wholesale injection of harsh reality. That is not, I hasten to add, a reference to the sodomy bit (although I gather that may become a compulsory part of the curriculum if the damned Lefties get back in).

Up here in Yorkshire we will be introducing our own regional variation of the National Curriculum, tailored to the lifestyles and opportunities available to us Up North. Why? Because we bloody well want to, so think on. Concentrating on the essential Three Rs - Reading, 'Riting and Riving about - our students will be required to also undertake a number of vocational subjects, with practical assessments in fettling, furtling and ferret-fondling.

Following the decline of traditional industries like wheel-tapping & shunting, clog making, hatless moor roaming and going to t'foot of our stairs, pupils will be encouraged to attend after-school clubs in a variety of subjects, such as "IT", where fish & chips, sausage & chips, egg & chips, black pudding & chips or chips & chips will be prepared and served... at teatime.

We will also introduce a regular curriculum-widening programme of guest speakers.Of course, in t'good old days we'd have had access to such luminaries as Jake Thackray, Fred Truman and Thora Hird, but I expect we'll get by wi' Kiki Dee, Geoff Boycott and Alan Bennett. If, of course, they can be arsed. We may have to lay on a chippy tea to seal the deal - that's where the IT department comes in you see; joined-up thinking, tha knows.

So, together with enrichment activities such as signing on, staying signed-on and getting on the sick, the mobility scooter proficiency test and the shut-it-cos-nobody-likes-a-grass class, our students will enter the world of work leisure fully equipped to deal with the trials that life may throw at them. They'll know how to negotiate a better deal from Sky and how to set the timer to record Jeremy Kyle so they don't have to suffer the hardships their parents endured, getting out of bed before noon. And they'll have an arsenal of techniques for throwing their ATOS assessors off the scent.

Sports Day, up north

A-Levels will include, as well as traditional maths, a number of incentives funded by our community partners.  BetFred will be sponsoring classes in statistics, in particular the odds of your accumulator coming up. Greggs have generously provided the use of their premises on a pay-as-you-go basis for the study of Pi and we are especially grateful for the generous support of Mecca Bingo for our sports programme.

And finally, we will introduce an even higher set of qualifications the R-Levels. Available in social studies only, this unique exam series will concentrate on the challenges presented in getting along with R-mam, R-gran and R-Bryan in a digital world with, for the occasional gifted student, a module on locating the whereabouts of R-dad.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go and sign on.


Editor's note: It has been drawn to my attention that readers of a southern persuasion may not have got the HILARIOUS pun in paragraph 3. The clue's in the chips. Ready? IT = High Tea. There. Now read it again and this time, laugh uproariously. (And yes, the happy congruence with micro-chips and 'bytes' was not accidental - there's a lot of thought goes into this stuff, you see; I don't just cobble it together you know!)

Back to the drawing board

Well, in preparation for my triumphant return to home shores, it’s time to revert to UK blogging themes and get up a good head of steam for next week’s rants. Let’s see... PM inadvertently reveals possible good economic news during PMQs, to the chagrin of the feeble opposition benches? Nope, too flimsy, the Red Eds can wait. Hmm, what’s this about mortgages being harder to get? Old news.

Aha! Nothing like a recurrent theme to get my outrage glands secreting bile at the gush. Nobody with half a brain can deny there is something deeply wrong with British education these days and it turns out that is the nub of the problem; much of the early school intake possesses exactly that amount of brain. As with all social ills, I have been saying this for decades. Here’s the headline: 

“Chaotic homes creating children incapable of learning, says Gove: Teachers report five-year-olds still in nappies who cannot speak in sentences.” 

Before certain women go off on one, just because I am a man it does NOT mean I cannot have a valid opinion on this subject. I've kept my bloggy postulations away from rape, abortion, sexual equality and all those other subjects some of you will not allow men to debate, but on this I will have my say because it affects me as well. If we allow this to continue we will have a nation of sub-human, quasi-sentient, feral scum sucking the last few drops of succour from the few remaining domiciled tax payers. 

In calling for early intervention, the article says “...there are[sic] a group of children for whom the state has to intervene because they will grow up in circumstances so chaotic that [that] they are actively harmed by the failure to be in a nurturing environment [where] they can learn the sorts of habits which allow them [to] become effectively socialised.” 

I’d argue for intervention much earlier than pre-school. We should be intervening pre-life itself. We don’t need a generation of children in state care, we need a class of children not there; those parents simply must not be allowed to breed. You can go shove your human rights fairy tales right up your arse. There is no such thing as natural human rights, but there are very many human wrongs. And we will pay for these particular human wrong ‘uns for their entire life. Banged up, on welfare, on drugs, in rehab, on parole and dependent for their very survival on a combination of state handouts and crime. 

These nasty little bastards are only going to end up in jail anyway so why tolerate their existence at all? If you don't want a burgeoning criminal class (Guess what - too late!) pest control will be far more effective, far more quickly than any combination of 'caring' interventions. What’s that? You’re all too soft and flabby after years of socialism and the fictions of equality and individual worth? 

Can't make an omelette without it.

Then avert your eyes and stick your fingers in your ears, turn your backs for a few years and let the government assemble hit squads to go out and stamp on their heads at the earliest opportunity. I told you before that if we want our civilisation back we need to start with a cull. 

There! That’s better. Batsby is back! Have a nice day.

Carry on up the Khyber

Michael Gove appears to be leading a movement to claw back powers from the EU. Oh, if only this were really true and not just a fanciful dream. Because he's still talking the language Brussels wants to hear, "If this, then that," when he should be talking the language the country wants to hear, "In or out", with the choice having nothing to do with 'them' and everything to do with 'us'.

The official line is much less clear, with Home Secretary Theresa May, saying she is ‘minded’ to opt out of 140 measures governing crime and justice. Well the numbers tell the true story here. The EU has forced onto its member states not a few hundred measures but thousands upon thousands.

This is not some cosy trade agreement which is on the whole benign and UK-friendly. It isn't (and apparently never was) meant to secure the lasting security and comfort of its people. It has always been a giant project aimed at creating a single federal entity and it intends to do this whatever the so-governed actually want. Not so very far from Hitler, the EU believes it knows best, regardless of the evidence of its own eyes and the increasing resistance of its populations.

At the same time Britain is trying to messily disentangle itself, yet again, from Afghanistan. Consider that we have been dabbling in Afghan conflicts since 1839 and maybe you'll see that, sometimes, things take a little longer to resolve than we might like. Good intentions invariably end up becoming a millstone round our collective neck.

The Khyber Pass - between a rock and... more rocks

So, there's no point in tinkering around the fringes of the European disaster zone. Little false victories like rejecting a handful of edicts here and a couple of policies there will still leave us fully shackled to the yoke. Michael Gove is still trying to hedge his bets; give a little, take a little  But when it comes to the EU there really is only one option left - kick it right up the Khyber Pass.