Banging on...

The press is full to bursting with precious, self-fulfilling depictions of hate. All around us, Britain has ‘suddenly’ become a terrifying place to live. Brexit is to blame, they say, because until June 23^rd 2016 Britain was ‘the most tolerant society on Earth’, welcoming with open arms the glorious diversity of multiculturalism. Then, overnight, the brownshirts took over, looting Jewish businesses, painting yellow stars on the front doors of Jewish households and herding the Jews into labour camps under armed guards. Oh, wait...

The usual suspects have been writing for months now about fictitious surges in hate crime, to the point where this fable has gained traction. And now every naïve occasional contributor to the Guardian-led morality press has his or her story to tell about how they have personally observed the extremes to which our society has been dragged by the ignorant, racist, seething Nazis of the Brexit-voting underclasses who have tried to sabotage a thousand years of civilisation brought to us, of course, by the French. Without Europe, Great Britain is just an island of wode-wearing savages to them.

In painting this picture they are assisted by various EU officials, doing their level best to threaten punishment on our disunited kingdom and suggesting that negotiations be carried out in French to maximise our disadvantages. And as Canada concludes that the EU is impossible to deal with and other countries line up to offer support for the simplicity of trade with the UK, more and more worms crawl out from the wainscoting of our own mother of parliaments. They are, it seem, frit.

Both sides have their own narratives, of course. On the Leave side it is one of subjugation to a foreign and unfriendly power and subsumption to a future uniculture celebrating nothing so much as uniformity and conformity and supressing free expression. But even in seeing the EU as an evil empire, we wish it no great ill, indeed the more prosperous, the more they will spend with us. You see, we are pragmatic; let’s leave and settle our own affairs without having to please many masters.

But there is something in the mindset of those susceptible to socialism that needs to be fed with dread. They cling onto stories which tell them of the small-mindedness of Brexiteers and how those feeble intellects must resort to violence and hatred of the other. And they really believe this guff, as they tell tales round their campfires in fashionable suburbs where the Union Flag never flies. But it is all bollocks, isn’t it?

They should travel with open minds to the regions lost by the British long ago. To the former industrial towns which now in parts resemble the downtrodden wastelands of the third world. They should view with de-rosed spectacles the migrant ghettoes where integration was never even considered, let alone attempted. They should speak – and listen – to the deep-rooted local inhabitants who have found themselves displaced by the ideology of diversity. And they should check the timelines of these events.

Set course for Little Britain?

Far from there being any sudden change, this creeping rejection of Britishness and national pride has been deliberately supported for years. And those leave voters you despise so much have been side-lined for the best part of half a century, without any meaningful incentive to adopt the EU ‘solution’. There has been no sudden rise in hate; it’s been simmering away for decades. So before you decry this imagined explosion of bigotry and loathing and try to blame it all on Brexit, don’t forget, you started it.

Wake up call

Nothing has given me quite so much pleasure this last fortnight as watching the never-ending procession of back-to-back hissy-fitting starring ‘the young’. With all the wisdom and foresight possessed by those whose experience of life post-mum & dad is a four-year degree in Unemployability Studies from a former second-rank polytechnic and a ‘gap-yah’ funded by the parental bank they just know their entire future has been stolen from them by their evil grandparents. Their god-damned, racist, Nazi grandparents who hate them so much they have ended all future prospects of travel, employment, happiness, peace, love and strawberries all year round.

This has greatly angered ‘the young’ so they have taken to social media with garment-rending cries from the heart. They have gathered in the streets with misspelled placards demonstrating their incomprehension at the difference between Europe and the European Union. And they have demanded democracy – on their terms – by insisting that those who voted against them, the old people, should be denied that same democracy. If they had any concept of cognitive dissonance they would be queueing round the block for therapy, insisting that the state pay to treat their traumatic stress disorders, but fortunately their education has dulled their ability to reason and think for themselves.

Somebody once told me that, after the age of twenty-five, you can no longer blame your parents. By the time I was twenty five I had been a homeowner for three years and I was married. I don’t recall ever expecting anybody to give me a leg up. I had heard of mentors, but never actually met one; I just assumed that once you left home that was it, you were on your own. But these days it seems the trainer wheels stay on for decades, with graduate training schemes and carefully plotted career pathways picking up the nurture baton previously passed from parent to tutor.

Seriously, at what point do you begin to do it for yourself? You want to walk the high wire? Then obviously you start low, build your confidence, have your mum hold your hand. Then you progress to height and use a safety net. But at some point you have to leave the net behind and take to the yawning chasms of the Grand Canyon with nothing but a pair of chalked pumps and a balancing pole. Go on, get out there... just get on with it.

It goes down to the difference between left and right again, doesn’t it? On the right I should expect the basics to be there, then for the way to be clear for me to make something of my life. A simple but effective fact-based education system emphasizing fundamental skills such as reading and comprehension, mathematics and science and a bit of guidance on what is out there. On the left, however, there is a demand for a fully comprehensive, step-by-step guide to life itself and an expectation that whatever you choose you must never be judged, you can never truly fail and if it all goes tits up that safety net will always be there. In little over a decade net dependency on the state - those who take out more than they put in - has risen from 43% to 53%. This is not a healthy model.

That's it snowflake, let it all out...

When you’re very young you shouldn’t need to ask. Soon you learn that expressing your needs is enough to have them fulfilled. But there has to come a point where you realise that no matter how hard you cry, help isn’t coming this time. You have to either modify your needs to adapt to your circumstances, or actually do it for yourself. It’s called growing up and it seems to be occurring later and later. A good many of those on the streets demanding that somebody else fix their world are long overdue that awakening.