Political Piles

To get to the top of the political pile it is not enough just to have talent, drive, ambition and an influential sponsor or three, you must primarily have faith. In traditional Tory circles the correct belief always was that people should stand largely on their own two feet… or daddy’s broad shoulders. On the left the followers of the doctrine must believe unequivocally that they know better than everybody else what is good for the little people; those poor, downtrodden human cattle who are simply incapable of escaping their moribund destinies without the over-zealous assistance of the card-carrying faithful.

It comes from a place of unrequited love, this conviction; a passion to right the wrongs and slay the dragons of oppression, cut free the chains of enslavement to uncaring masters and deliver the wretches to the sunny uplands of equality, fraternity and liberty. In the gospels of the church of Labour the horny handed sons of toil will roister with their comrades, singing gallant songs of derring-do, of the struggle joined and overcome. The reality, sadly, is one of killing with kindness.

Singing Onward Comrade Soldiers has led us to a nation of state-dependent zombies suckling from the teat of welfare in its many forms. Instead of people making a living, they are given one without a commitment in return. Housing Benefit, Child Benefit, Council Tax Benefit and Tax Credits should be entirely unnecessary, but people are so wedded to the idea that the state must provide that they can’t understand how their lives would be so much better if these crutches were the exception rather than the rule.

To maintain the addictions the left like to toy with the language, bandying around words like cruelty, poverty, inequality, need, entitlement, deprivation and so on and shouting racist or homophobe at anybody who dissents. Labour even deployed adverts a decade ago, telling people to claim their tax credits as a right! It’s free! It’s yours! Nobody has to pay for it except those who have too much already! Language is everything in this arena and in the war of words the devil has the best weapons. The language of self-esteem beats the language of self-reliance every time – who doesn’t want the illusion of heaven on earth?

To succeed as a Labour politician you also have to be capable of denying what you see with your own eyes – progressively lower wages, visibly increased and uncomfortable immigration, the stretching of services and the lowering of standards of both living and behaviour. And just in case anybody with a functioning memory should try to air a recollection you must master the rewriting of history, conveniently airbrushing out the appalling squalor wrought by your own policies every single time you've held power. The cognitive dissonance must scream like tinnitus in all but the most indoctrinated of brains.

In Labourspeak borrowing is now called investment and increasing the national debt beyond any hope of repayment in a lifetime is referred to as balancing the books. Hampering teaching by the need for multiple language interpreters is enrichment. Foreign criminals are all endangered asylum seekers and the mass importation of unskilled, criminally low-paid workers from the poorest parts of the European Union is celebrated as the triumph of diversity.

One political arse looks much like another

This week, fearing an outbreak of clear vision and unclouded minds, some on the left have been trying to claim that race should be kept out of politics. Race is a proxy here for any discussion about immigration in what is euphemised as ‘unhelpful’ terms. That is, if you see a problem then have the audacity to point to it you are a heretic. It's like dealing with haemorrhoids - the more you scratch the itchier they get. And red or blue, those piles are really irritating. Maybe it’s about time we all denounced our faiths and became political apostates. And bollocks to the lot of them.

What are words worth?

“Lessons have been learned” Where, once, honourable men found wanting would have fallen on their swords, now the catch-all ‘lessons’ serves as a deflection, certain that the attention will soon go away and those culpable, whatever injustice has been perpetrated, will be free to carry on just as before… with higher salaries. In the past few years we’ve learned lessons about immigration, about policing, about ‘institutional racism’ about climate, er ‘thingy’ (nobody knows) and all sorts of fluffery, none of which lessons appear to have been put into practice.

Authorities “deeply regret” without actually making reparation and recognise “failures of leadership” while steadfastly keeping said leadership in post. Rotherham council’s chief executive even acknowledged that child protection services “…fell some way short of today's standards…” I have no doubt they will soon announce an intention to engage in “reviewing our procedures”  This isn’t even Newspeak, it is non-speak; a fear to ever tell the truth, admit blame or lift a damned finger to put things right. It is lying codified; packaged for retail and sold on masquerading as action.

“Unfortunately, on this occasion, you have not been successful” is the trite phrase which greets an inadequate today and the utterly useless “did not achieve” has to do the difficult job that only the word FAIL can properly do. Some people need to be told they are no good at a thing; that they should stop wasting their time and that of others in struggling to master a skill for which they have no aptitude. But no, in the all-must-have-prizes culture, failure is all too often dressed up as partial success and abject failure is pretty much always somebody else’s fault. "Society is to blame."

We no longer have bosses and workers, calling them ‘associates’ instead and the average chain pub now has more ‘assistant managers’ than it has pint glasses. Barrista? Behave; coffee, white, two sugars please… and stop with all the fucking about. The sculpted foam on top of your over-priced indulgence is emblematic of form before function and this Emperor’s New Clothes trick perfectly mirrors the way those who seek office rarely do so for the reasons they say. What you see is not what you get and it is rarely worth the price.

So, you can shove your “misplaced racial sensitivity” and shelve your “mistakes have been made” where the sun don’t shine. Until you stop calling this gruesome invasion ‘multiculturalism’ and convening obfuscating focus groups run by party apparatchiks to prevent yourselves hearing what people have actually been telling you for years in plain English, nobody in Britain will have any faith in anything you have to say. Actions speak louder than words? Prove it.

NewMaths

Did I miss the memo saying this month is opposites month? 

David Cameron takes credit for negotiating a cut in the EU budget, which results in the UK’s contribution actually increasing. The government reduces the absurdly generous subsidies for wind power, which causes a rush in applications and thus yet more bird-choppers are approved and the cost of everybody’s fuel bills goes inexorably upward. And the one hundred and fifty-three people who might possibly benefit from so-called gay marriage now constitute a majority. I'm confused; everything seems to be the wrong way round.

Another divisive example of Britain’s political hall of distorting mirrors is the eternal problem of the NHS. As more and more money is poured into the bottomless pit of healthcare, it has become clearer after the Stafford hospital scandal that the more we spend the worse it gets. Yet the Tories who say they desperately want to make it both better serve patients and be more affordable are derided as monsters whilst Labour under whose guardianship it become a self-serving, totalitarian state of its own are somehow clinging to the moral high ground. 

These anomalies seem absurd until you appreciate that we are truly moving with the times and using progressive new algorithms. The Met Office seemed to adopt the policy years ago; on the basis that people don’t really listen anyway the weather forecast has to be carefully parsed for its true meaning. Thus predicted snow translates as wet, sunny becomes overcast and ‘a bit breezy’ translates into hurricanes across the south. 

Under Ingsoc the Ministry of Truth does its level best to keep us on the right track and employs the dumbed-down politics of tribal loyalty to achieve those aims. Thus, whatever you know to be true, any attempt to reform the biggest healthcare system on the planet is a cue to boo the nasty Tories, any effort to curb the excessive salaries of self-appointed local authority officials is, yes, a cue to boo the nasty Tories and a suggestion we live within our means and actually earn that living is an attack on the very fabric of our sacred Welfare State.

To surrender your mind to that state is, of course, the whole aim of Ingsoc here on Airstrip One and just as with Newspeak, Newmaths is the key. Newmaths recognises the continuum theory of numbers, that all numbers exist on a wheel; you travel far enough in one direction and eventually you return to the where you started: 1, 2, 3, 4... 1. So, vote Labour, you get Socialism, yet vote Conservatism and what do you get? An almost identical Socialism. A vote for the LibDems is, of course, a ticket to Room 101 for re-education where you will be taught, as Winston Smith was, that two plus two equals five; you don’t just say it, you really see it.

So there is no such thing as left and right in UK politics, yet Labour activists manage to refer to policies and people as being on the extreme right, apparently unaware that the further right you go, the more left you become. Right plus further right equals Fascism; a perfect example of extreme left-wing ideology. Newmaths; with work, it will set you free. Double the chocolate ration, comrades, means half the chocolate ration but although you can see less chocolate you truly believe you've won. And if we say it's beef on the packet it's beef in the packet.

More spending = less spending. Getting to grips with the deficit = a bigger deficit. Being tough on benefits = more spending on welfare. When I was at school we did Chinese Maths. I think the politicians learned it too - they can only do takeaways.