Keep it simple, stupid!

Be nice, they say, be kind. I don’t doubt that those who have “Save our NHS” and “Fight the cuts” in their Twitter bio, usually accompanied by a string of hashtags trumpeting those causes and rendering said bio meaningless and all but unreadable actually believe… er, something. Twitter abounds with these noble folk, fighting the cause of ‘social justice’ from their council flats and old folks’ bungalows. Some of them, no doubt, are actual activists getting out and about to help in their local community. The majority, however, are simple keepers of the absurd and contradictory faiths of various forms of leftism.

But the simple facts of life are these: However you do it – inheritance, investment, business owner or employee: tinker, tailor, soldier, baker, rich man, poor man, welfare-taker  – you need to make a living. If you are poorly educated (blame who you like) and have grown up with a hatred of any kind of authority and have never been pushed, or mentored, to rely on yourself and if you are so inclined, there is a living to be made on the Old King Cole. The dole was never intended as a choice – it was a stop-gap measure, a genuine handout – to keep you alive between jobs. Because (and this is a basic human truth) nobody owes you a living. There are in fact no such things as ‘natural’ human rights. In nature, he who survives, wins.

Keep. It. Simple. That’s the key to success; all the best ideas have resulted from repeating simple formulae that work. The most complex systems are amalgamations of essentially simple, if numerous, principles. The biggest buildings are just pretty piles of bricks. To the socialists you’re just a brick; everybody is. Even the Prime Minister is just an enormous brick. So, to the ‘caring’ left we’re all better as bricks in a wall; as part of the great big human machine.

But somewhere, through a succession of administrations struggling to look effective, it became expedient to hide from sight those making no contribution to holding up the wall and set them adrift on a raft of welfare payments designed to conceal the truth and present a positive spin to the world… and to the dwindling turnout of voters. Some bricks are less equal than others. Of course, any metaphor runs out of steam at some point and I reckon we’ve reached it with the bricks, but you get my point. When we had the means to do it, it was simply cheaper to keep you doped up and docile, courtesy of the state, than to pay the ruinous cost of training you and containing you and creating work you were capable of. But now, after several generations, it is uncertain whether some of you will ever be capable of making your own living. What’s to be done?

Well the simple truth is that no politician, whatever their colour, wants anybody to suffer or die. In fact every politician would be delighted if everybody could be happy and rich. That is an absolute given. Anybody who believes otherwise should take a long, hard look at themselves, because they have fallen for a line of unhelpful propaganda. Both ‘sides’ want health and prosperity for all; they only differ in how to achieve it.

On the so-called right the belief is that everybody has the responsibility to make their own living, by any legal means and if we do so there should be enough left over to prop up the halt and lame when they need it. On the so-called left... well where do we start? Flying in the face of all evidence is the equality agenda, with its outright fictions about the parity of ‘worth’ of individuals. Then we have the potentially contradictory notion of diversity, making us all equally differentiated from everybody else, while maintaining the lie of equality. Then we have the absurd notion of a complex system of taxing you, giving you some back through tax credits and then giving you certain benefits and subsidies whether you need them or not.

On the right the exercise of choice seems fair – you can choose to use the schools, hospitals, housing, etc. that you wish and if you can afford to pay for it you can have the best. To the left, however, such privilege is seen as ugly and elitist and downright unfair, so everybody must use the services provided by the state. If, as they maintain, there is plenty of wealth to go around, these provisions would be the equal of anything the private sector has to offer, but as the news daily reveals the sacred NHS appears to be killing with its over-supply of caring kindness. And state schools have been under-educating for generations.

Today’s biggest news item is the ‘national crisis’ of obesity. It's an enormous problem, apparently. To the right it is a simple case of personal responsibility and a balance between eating and exercising. To the left, obesity is a modern-day ill, caused by a complex and impossibly intertwined set of influences for which costly science alone can provide an answer. The state must spend ever dwindling funds to deal with the issues of body image, life chances and the damage to self-esteem with consequent cost to the nation of these valuable human resources. Odd though, how when very little food was available the entire nation was slim. (Maybe we should get rid of those evil food banks?)

The good life?

It seems to me that whatever you think of left or right it is entirely up to you to make your own living with what wits you have. While you are wondering whether to opt for the simplicity of self-reliance or the complexity of the nanny state you might, by way of research, want to watch Benefits Street tonight and ask yourself if that’s what you really want.

A bit of balance...

Okay, one or maybe two of you noticed I'm sometimes a little hard on the Lefties. I think I've always acknowledged that they don't necessarily mean harm, to themselves or others, but harm arises from their misunderstanding of what sort of an animal your actual 'yooman bean' is. Give a man a benefit and he’ll take it as a right; give a man a welfare state and he’ll soon be a slave to it. 

So, I thought I should maybe restore the balance and have a go at the right for once. Before I begin I should explain that the right wing, if indeed there actually is one, is a tiny minority in Britain, which is why it is so hard finding one to point at. To most ‘the right wing’ is represented – courtesy of the old National Front - by a tattooed skinhead restraining a slavering attack dog. To my knowledge the only place you find anybody that far right is in Labour’s heartland sink estates. 

There’s no point in having a pop at them – they are caricatures of a certain type of über-scum (if that isn’t a contradiction in terms) for which contempt is too kindly a disposition. They represent nobody with a brain cell and would be happily expunged from existence without disturbing the conscience of anybody with one.

So, who are this Right, that The Left are so readily enraged about? I think they mean people who vote Conservative, in fact I don’t believe any other group of people exist who fit the bill. We have no extreme parties of any significance in the UK, so let’s have a pop at the Nazis Conservatives instead. Here goes.

Boo, nasty! The Tories want to tax you less, spend less of your money on NHS consultants, get better value for money from infrastructure spending and get everybody back to work. They want the country to prosper and live within its means so that everybody can earn an economically viable living wage, the bastards! Nope, that just doesn’t cut it. I’ll try again. 

The vicious right-wing thugs of the Nasty Party want to tear your babies from you and grind them up to make porridge to feed the slaves of the factory owners who will work you until you are dead then take all their money and give it to rich bankers who will destroy the economy and starve your mother out of her care home. Then, when you are all dead they will… they will… Nope. That’s just silly. Now I sound like the worst kind of rabid Marxist Union dinosaur. 

Maybe capitalism is the monster under the bed? But capitalism isn’t really an ideology, it’s just the normal way humans interact. In fact it’s the only way that any system can successfully grow an economy. Unless that economy is going to rely entirely on turnips and tractors and newspeak. Oh. 

Back then, to Conservatism; it’s the way the majority of decent people think, it's just not the way they vote. The definitions or the divisions between right and left (or right and just wrong) are continually shifting and a Conservative of today would be seen as a wet by Maggie and an outright pinko socialist by Harold MacMillan. Today’s Tories have as much distance between them and fat cat industrialists as Labour have between them and tax payers. 

On Friday, Ed Miliband said he was putting Labour where it had always been – on the side of the working man. But I think you'll find it is Conservative social views that have always been modelled on those of the actual working man while the Labour Party, having once been a potent and relevant force for good has been responsible for stifling real aspiration ever since the seventies. 

The smoke and mirrors of New Labour were used to disguise a deep distrust of ordinary British people (bigots, said Gordon Brown) selling us all into a dumbed-down, depressed, compliant European satellite and calling us racist, homophobic, xenophobic Little Englanders if we dared to speak out. If you try to find the right wing, you inevitably end up on the left.

So it was not without a little ironic chuckle to learn that John O’Farrell, Labour’s candidate in the Eastleigh by-election once wished Mrs Thatcher dead and hoped for a British defeat in the Falklands. Despite protestations of youthful indiscretion there, laid bare, is the real nasty party.

The Da-doo-dah Code

So, I had an interesting Twitter conversation last night with one of the few left-leaning coves who follow me. (I’m surprised I don’t have many more – oh well…) He is on a mission to convert me – gawd bless him – from my right-thinking view of the world and embrace his compassionate and bountiful vision of the left. He’s a genuinely nice guy; I’m sure he means well. But…

Among his arguments are that I am “just a tool of the rich”, a “cheerleader for the very people that are raping you” and “one of the cattle”. Well at least he agrees with me about the last one. People are very much like cattle – a few bulls, a lot of cud-chewing cows and plenty of short-lived juvenile bullocks. (That’s steers to my American readers – oh yes I have some… Okay, I have one.)

My guardian angel firmly believes that the right-wing elite operates some darkly cynical mechanik to keep the masses down - not educating them, deliberately creating a welfare-dependent underclass for the tax-payers to despise (although I’m not sure how that helps the cause of either side) and controlling the media to spread its poison.

But, you see, that’s far too complicated, just like religion. It requires an enormous effort of faith to maintain a belief in something that presents no actual evidence. Of course, maybe it’s me that’s wrong, but you’d have to convince me that my wielding of Occam’s razor has been wildly off-target.

Let’s take a couple of points.

Under-educating the masses – I see forty-plus years of removing the rigour of basic education, largely pushed through by the overwhelmingly left-wing teaching unions, leaving students incapable of learning effectively. Being cruel by trying to be kind and yet, despite all that, some still manage to get off their arses and succeed.

Welfare dependency –By removing the stigma of not paying your way in society, the left made it acceptable to sponge off others - and look how quickly the unemployable took to it. Something for nothing? Who wouldn’t want some of that?

Media manipulation – Rupert Murdoch doesn’t actually control the world. Leftists just think he does because The Guardian and countless other branches of the left-wing propaganda machine tell them so on a daily basis. And of course the most pervasive medium of them all – the BBC – is largely regarded by those on the right as a left-wing tool. It’s prurience, not politics, that sells ‘news’.

If the conspiracy theory of right-wing overlords manipulating and controlling on such a colossal scale were true it would require an effort of coercion only hitherto seen in closed, despotic countries or cults. But these days we have the Internet and nobody gets away with anything for long without some little put-out snot-nose blabbing to all the world about how unfair it all is. Boo-fucking-hoo.

Winners and losers, that’s what it all comes down to. Simple as. The winners want to hang on to what they’ve fought for. The losers want it for themselves. Anybody ascribing anything other than selfishness to human motives in general is deluding themselves that we transcend nature itself merely by being the great ape, Homo Sapiens. 

Humans are resourceful and opportunistic and make a living however they can. If the state lets them scrounge, they will scrounge. If the NHS offers wider and wider treatments for more and more nebulous imagined ailments, people will develop those ailments. And if an opportunity arises to make billions out of the hard work of those who will work for subsistence wages, both sides still make a living, however uneven. I just do not see the hand of conspiracy in any of this; like I say, too complicated for mere humans.

So, it comes down to what you want to believe. Do you go for the possibility that hard work and thrift will reward you in the end and that anything is possible – the politics of hope? Or do you go for the low-hanging fruit of egalitarian, re-distributed wealth – the politics of envy?

The rhetoric on both sides is appealing at times and it’s the interplay between the two that broadly maintains the status quo. I could go on for days on this theme, but as far as the electorate’s position goes, I can think of no better simile than Indecisive Dave from The Fast Show: