Drama Queen

I’m from a deprived generation. I wasn’t lucky enough to be born into a mining community; I wasn’t lucky enough to be brought up to believe I deserved a job for life. I never inherited the right to harbour hatred for anybody who managed me, or for anybody who achieved success outside the confines of collective action. And I never did master the art of looking down on anybody who believed he could get by on his own merit without the permission of a shop steward.

Outside of the hive you have to do it all for yourself; there is nobody else to blame. But at least you don’t have to undergo the indignity of being spat on because your grandfather was a scab. In some caring communities the sins of the fathers will be visited upon the sons and bitter memories are long and twisted. I didn’t have the union to fight my corner, but I also didn’t have the unions to tell me and mine, forever and after, what to think and how to vote and who to hate.

When a company I worked for went into decline, or when I was made redundant or made up my own mind to leave, or on the one occasion I was constructively dismissed, I neither expected nor received assistance. It was my life, my decisions, my responsibility to accept the consequences, good or bad. It’s called freedom and it’s a good thing, but to some people it appears to be pure selfishness.

To Labour, Mick Phillpot was a product of Thatcherism. “Greed!” shrieked Glenda Jackson, among others blaming the actions of every bad British citizen on the legacy of somebody who left power over two decades ago. This is the same opposition who snarl and spit at whatever the coalition proposes to rein in thirteen years of Labour profligacy, which ended just the other day. Of course, not a single Labour MP ever claimed dubious expenses or took lucrative seats on boards; no union leader ever earned a salary way in excess of those he represented, or demanded free living for life and as we all know, Lord John Prescott fought tooth and nail not to be ennobled.

Always with the shouting and the spittle, the Left, always the apoplectic outrage. High drama. No wonder they attracted an Oscar winner to their ranks. It’s a wonder she isn’t rolled out to rend her garments in public more often. Perhaps they could erect a small stage for her at the funeral next week, where she can give her Ophelia... to an audience of none. Those staging their own little protests will selfishly try and disrupt the occasion. But their hysterical ranting will be drowned out by the quiet dignity of those they despise so much.

Glenda in The Commons Yesterday

Maybe this is the fundamental difference between Left and everybody else. The Left live in frenzied denial of human nature and treat every manifestation of it with visceral loathing as a thing to be suppressed, subjugated and legislated into change. Whereas everybody else accepts the animal that we are and then we shrug and try to rise above it.

Ding Dong!

Oh my head! I love party politics! I was up all night partying and singing the song I was taught at my mother’s knee. It was a riot. The song goes “Ding dong the witch is dead...” I don’t know any other lines but neither did any of us in halls. I should explain: I’m at university studying Politics and Philosophy because that’s the way to get a really good job and earn loads of money, which the Mighty Ed has shown is ‘the Socialist way’.

The Champagne’s flowing because somebody called Mrs Thatcher died yesterday and the whole world can now be free again. We don’t really study her at uni because there’s no room in the syllabus for such a divisive monster, according to Professor Owen, or Eóin or however it’s spelled... or pronounced.  But I know she was super-horrid because my mum told me all about her. Of course, my mum doesn’t really remember her – she was only a kid in school when I was born - but she passed the knowledge down from my gran.

Gran is very wise – she is 48 after all – and she made sure I was prepared for any argument with a hated Thatcher supporter by telling me the facts! Everybody knows that facts are much more important and much more effective than just bigoted opinion. So here I give you the facts about “Fatcha” The Factcha, if you will:

1. When Fatcha was in power education was free. This was ridiculous because it could bankrupt the country and back then it meant that any idiot could go to university. Well, that started the rot for sure and you can see that legacy even today; I look around me and see a bunch of brainwashed idiots – especially the engineers who seem to want to get on and do stuff all the time, instead of talking it through for hours like we do.

2. Immediately after the Second World War, when it was desperately needed, she personally went round all the schools and literally stole the free milk from needy children, one by one. Straight out their mouths, like. As a result, half the adult population grew up with brittle bones and rickets and stuff. The hateful cow! Of course, they are all long dead now, so nobody will ever hear their story.

3. Because Arthur Scargill, the brave freedom fighter and most popular person in the country, was winning the War of the Mines, she deliberately invaded Argentina by colonising The Falklands – which are a group of islands off the west coast of Scotland – and made friends with General Bill Grano, the sick man of Europe, who then closed the British Leyland factory and put eleven million people on the sick.

4. Then she set fire to the coal mines, demolished the steel mills and flooded all the Welsh valleys and in a disgraceful show of guilt caused billions of pounds worth of hard-working people’s taxes to be sent to try and redevelop those areas. The nasty, spiteful bitch wanted everybody to find work, instead of living off benefits which is their right in a compassionate socialist country. And all that stuff caused global warming, so it’s her fault we have German wind turbines everywhere now.

5. She believed that everybody should provide for themselves if they can and we should only care for the old and infirm and children and ‘the less fortunate’. How hateful is that? On our course we are taught how everybody is better off when we all care for everybody else, because ordinary people are pretty thick and need to be told what to think. We are all ready to take offence and intervene on behalf of people too stupid to be offended themselves. She believed in low taxes, small state and self-determination when any fool can see that if we all shared everything out and everybody worked for the state we’d all be equal. I mean, it stands to sense, doesn’t it?

6. Every bad thing that has ever happened to any person, any company, any industry or any region; Any bad thing that has ever happened to any country, to the planet, to the weather and even to the universe itself is all directly attributable to ‘The Big Bang’ which is how Margaret Thatcher started the expansion of the universe, which is ‘a bad thing’, probably. I think that’s proven fact.

I couldn't find a picture of the evil Fatcha, so here's a 

nice one of somebody who looks a bit like my Gran.

So, even though I still don’t really know who she was and don’t care anyway, I’m glad she’s dead. She’s gone and with her go the slaves to her controlling policies. Now, everybody can finally be free again. Free to work together for the glorification of the mother state, from whose wondrous teat we all must suckle. For ever and ever, Amen.

Oh. I found an alternative view here. But my tutors tell me it's all lies.

Opposing Farces

The job of opposition isn't easy... What am I saying - it's a piece of piss! You just run interference and endless criticism. Your job is to discredit the current government, whose job in turn is to prove you wrong and stay in office long enough to actually do anything useful; being slung out after one term is pretty much the worst thing that can happen to any administration because it looks like you were ineffective.

Of course, the usual sequence is one or two terms of relative contentment, followed by a final term where cockiness, sloppiness and a general wearing out of your welcome lets different policies appear appealing to new voters. This leads to electoral defeat and a term or so of jeering from the sidelines while the other lot blame it all on you, reverse your policies and set the whole thing on the opposite swing. Left-right, left-right... but now the choice is only between between left and further left. No wonder UKIP smells like a breath of fresh air.

The government is giving it a go, but with so little money left in the pot it's going to be an uphill struggle all the way. The news that IDS's scheme to get 'neets' into work for more than 6 months hasn't met its targets has naturally been met with derisory sneers by the party that spent all the money in the first place. It's almost as if Gordon Brown's role in the last Labour government was to screw up the economy as far as it could possibly be screwed. As if, because Labour weren't to rule the country any more they'd be fucked if they'd give anybody else a fighting chance. That's politics.

And it's where all socialist cycles bring us. It starts from noble beginnings; the working man, heavily exploited by ruthless mill/pit/foundry/shipyard owners from a bygone age of good old Christian brutality of man towards man, downs his tools, links arms and stands side by side with his fellow. They call each other 'comrade', for this is a war and the enemy are clearly defined. The have-nots versus the haves.

By the 1970s the Trades Unions, Labour's paymasters,  were calling the shots and crippling the country through ruinous restrictive working practices. Enforcing employment by double-manning, working to rule and threatening strike action at the drop of a flat cap. Destroying those very industries while imagining they were defending them. Those who weren't there have no idea how much they owe to the sainted Mrs Thatcher. (And repeatedly reciting, "Fatcha ruined vis cuntry" is a cast-iron indicator that you haven't a clue.)

But it's a war, remember? It's always a war and in war there are casualties and Labour can bear much of the blame. In ennobling the manual worker they were instrumental in building whole towns out of single industries and closing their minds to what might happen when the resources ran out. When those industries became bloated and inefficient and uneconomic, instead of looking to diversify, to educate, to broaden, they simply threw money at the problem and shored up a client state.

When the last Conservative administration fell out of favour the bright young Socialist things had a new messiah in the form of Tony Blair, who reaped the benefit of anti-Thatcherite rhetoric spewed from hateful mouths. With no big industries left, but with a booming economy, built on the back of taxing an entrepreneurialism that wasn't possible in the seventies, Labour set about building a new client base, opening the borders while driving their core supporters out of work and onto benefits.

Labour didn't build this; they tore it down.

If they can't hack coal, they can at least stay at home and do drugs and drink and watch Jeremy Kyle and jeer at their own. Always the same story - throw public money at dodging the issue, rather than attempting to solve it. So now it's a bit rich that Two-Eds-is-worse-than-one is heaping opprobrium on the current administration for throwing money at actual job creation, instead of Labour's traditional job-stifling practice.

It must be a more noble aim, but it hasn't gone well; getting the unemployable into work was never going to be easy, but Iain Duncan Smith has a far more comprehensive understanding of the problem than ever displayed by the Reds and let's hope he has the backbone and the time to see his reforms through.

Ding dong the witch is... Oh.

The Iron Lady lives on to infuriate small-minded people another day. Yesterday a bogus Twitter account @OfficialSkyNews reported that she had died and this false news triggered outpourings of glee and the popping of champagne corks in the households of all kinds of Socialist and in the supposed caring communities who have long harboured a death wish on her behalf.

So much for the moral high ground allegedly occupied by the left. To them Mrs Thatcher embodied the whole ideology of (boo!) Nasty Tory and yet the hypocrisy of their premature dancing on her grave is entirely lost in their irony-free world. Theirs is a world where serious attempts to slim down the wasteful behemoths of state-run services are derided in favour of the ideological approach of over-feeding; killing with self-congratulatory kindness and turning a blind eye to the bloated results.

Watching the BBC2 documentary 'In their own words'  about the 2011 riots, which the Thatcher-haters would dearly love to pin on her, some twenty years after leaving office, it was clear that the looters were acting out sheer greed and self-interest, a human trait that crosses all social divides and affiliations. To continue to blame everything bad in the world on one person when it is largely due to a fundamental flaw in all of us is a pivotal plank of their political philosophy. 

But so strong is the hatred in the hearts of the raving reds that they are utterly blind to the notion that the alternative might have been so much worse. And to imagine for one second that a single thing will change when an old and much-loved lady dies is nothing but a form of collective denial of the facts of human existence. So, put away the fizz and blow out the candles, Lefties. Take down the bunting, get back to work and take a moment to think about what you've done.

You might want to start your journey back to the light here. [<~link]