Higher Ground

On Twitter last week, following the death of the Queen, Jeremy Clarkson wrote “One of the things I’ve noticed in these last few hours is that so very many people on Twitter are truly awful human beings.” Shortly afterwards he followed this with “Twitter is a handy and constant reminder that socialists are disgusting people.” As most of you will be aware I have been permanently suspended from that platform for expressing opinions and airing quips which did not go down well with the righteous minds of the brave new world.

It has long been known that left-wingers, who get to set the agenda, tend to be more highly educated than right-wingers, who merely win the spoils. In a typically lazy, left-wing manner, education is equated to intelligence, whilst success, often earned by sheer hard work, is seen as somehow linked to being less well intellectually equipped. And it is true that many wealthy winners in life practically gloat about their lack of education not holding them back.

Clarkson himself reminds school leavers annually that he was not a high achiever. This year it took the form of a tweet from a luxury yacht: “Don’t worry if your A level results are disappointing. I got a C and 2 Us and I’m currently holidaying on this boat.” And in this example pithily puts down the notion that education is the pinnacle of human achievement; you can’t feed your family with degrees and diplomas.

Educational success, in many ways, is just a measure of how readily one is able to absorb a particular narrative and follow it to a conclusion, regardless of its value outside the classroom. Whereas your normal, everyday entrepreneur tends to get easily bored and forever seek new ideas to exploit. A lesson not quickly grasped may benefit from greater application and more diligent studying, but may also be not worth learning in the end.

Perhaps this is why academics, in the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge can also be susceptible to inhaling the heady vapours of ideology; in the past religious, in the present political. And while the duffers, the also-rans in the A* stakes, are busy taking any job that pays the rent, their learned contemporaries pursue avenues which lead to long decades in disciplines of little real value to the world.

Once, universities thrived on offering valuable sciences and engineering, medicine and management, but in recent decades the humanities have become the academic vehicles of choice for those who probably ought never to have gone on to higher education. This recent Spectator article suggests it might be time to turn the tide. 

For my part I have seen the declaration time and time again that those on the left are more intelligent than those on the right. But this claim, it seems to me, relies on a particular definition of intelligence and one characterised by an occasional inability to be mentally agile, to think outside the box, to adapt and thrive. Instead it relies on the dogmatic clinging to tired old tropes, reinforcing groupthink and trotting out long-established arguments.

Much like religion, if you need an origin story and enforcers, with scholars forever justifying the improbable; if you need to keep on developing your themes and reminding people of why they joined your movement; if you need threats of excommunication – or as we now call it ‘de-platforming’ – maybe this is less a sign of intelligence than indoctrination.

Meanwhile those you despise, those lower orders of the right, own the houses you rent, the businesses you work for, and run the country you so regularly disparage. They get up in the morning and go to productive work to create the world you live in. The left may think they occupy the intellectual high ground. The right are happy to let them believe that. Does ‘educated’ really mean ‘intelligent’ in this universe?

Listen up!

Heard on a podcast: Nadia Whittome, MP, talking about Labour and what they want. Turns out it’s decent homes for all, well-funded public services, fairness, security and the chance for everybody to prosper. She then rather betrayed her shallowness of thought by adding that, in contrast, the Tories [boo, hiss] wanted to sow hatred and division and send poor, desperate asylum seekers to Rwanda.

Brava Nadia, the next election is in the bag, for sure. But perhaps, for balance, she might want to listen to the wishes of natural Conservatives (not the current, soft-palmed LimpDem version, obviously). I bet they are security, trust in the police and the courts to be fair and even-handed, prosperity for all, and efficiently run state-funded services. After all, why throw away a well-established manifesto? The Tory voice may then have gone on to say that Labour has a naïve view of the world founded on Marxist dogma and a certain amount of suspension of disbelief.

The point is, of course, that both sides want substantially the same aims but just have different views on how those aims may be achieved. But when it comes to knowing their enemy, both sides could do with a good read of Sun Tzu and a generous slap on the head. Slagging off the Tories is how Labour think they appeal to their base and pitying Labour’s need for victimhood is how the Tories appeal to theirs. But what about appealing across the board?

Nigel Farage’s success – for it was a monumental achievement in the face of all that was levelled at him – was, by any measure, remarkable. 12.6% of the votes went to a party that many were afraid to even mention for fear of being reviled by the parties they had abandoned; abandoned because they no longer felt represented; a supposition which we later found to be absolutely true.

There is no debate any more in the UK. Parliament has no more a plan to listen to the voters than it has to cycle to the moon… or listen to the other side. Discussions in the house are reduced to name-calling and one-upmanship which, while these are long established techniques to wind up the other side, without substance are meaningless and petty and turn ever greater swathes of the electorate away from politics.

It has long been my contention that the majority of the population broadly agree on what outcomes are needed, but that almost none of us have the first practical idea how to bring it about. We repeat slogans and soundbites, we cleave to positions we have never really thought about. If you are poor and feel deprived and somebody tells you this is because the Tories took all the money and bathed in it, why wouldn’t you hate the Tories? And if you are in a decent job, receive no state benefits and are all the time besieged by rhetoric that demands you surrender ever more of your hard-earned to feed the feckless, why wouldn’t you look down on those who vote Labour?

The two sides of this divide appear to have a vested interest in maintaining the illusion of division when in reality the gap between left and right is quite small. But we only ever seem to hear the extreme positions – usually promulgated by the extremists on the opposite side. Much as with the trans-malarkey, which statistically affects virtually nobody, all the oxygen in the room is used up by activists and the moderate voices are not heard.

I long since gave up hope of seeing proper, in-depth discussions of the very real concerns of the population, conducted with empathy for the opposing view and with the intention of arriving at a solution. Instead, we get these adversarial shouting matches which end in acrimony, the only beneficiaries of which are the commentariat who now get to write searing indictments of each side’s argument. And what of the poor and homeless, the immigrant invasion, the cost of energy, the parlous state of education…?

For what it's worth, this is where I am, yet 

the left would call me a far-right extremist.

We have not made progress in any direction other than that vision of the New Labour government, which was to transform the UK into a broiling, bustling melting pot of competing cultures. Presumably, there was no plan of how to manage the utter turmoil into which it has thrown us; we would adapt and integrate and be grateful, I imagine. Well, we haven’t. It is getting worse, and the political class seems to have become ever more detached from the reality on the ground.

It doesn’t much matter who takes the helm as the next Prime Minister, the job they have ahead is monumental and will take more than the evidence suggests they are capable of. But something has to be done. The Tories don’t have the answers, but neither does the Labour Party. And neither do the rag-taggle gang of chancers in all the little parties, but if they don’t really listen to each other, when a party which speaks with a single coherent voice comes along, no matter how abhorrent what they say, they will sweep the board. Listen up Westminster, when your palace becomes a mosque your chattering voices will be silenced forever.

Sincerely yours?

Can there be anything more sick-making, for level-headed, stiff upper-lipped Brits, than the sight of emotionally insecure people spontaneously breaking into tears as they sob their soundbites into recorded history. Wall to wall wailing has been breaking out across the formerly civilised world in response to a charisma-free septuagenarian being declared the 46^th President of the United States.

There is something embarrassing about mass outpourings of emotion. Those huge funereal crowds, rending their garments and gurning for the cameras. We used to be amused by the ululating natives, the quaint piccaninnies with their emotive ways, but now the piccaninnies are us; at least, they are some of you. And while those of us who eschew such public frailty still look on bemused, we fear we are a dying breed.

Politics and power used to be the preserve of sober men and women. Pragmatism used to be the guiding principle of governance, with the rousing of passions reserved for tub-thumping occasions. A speech in the house, a hustings, a public debate, a call to arms and so forth, these were the rare times the lip might tremble and character be revealed.

We need character – and characters – in public life, but we need consistency more. We also need backbone and tenacity and leaders who are unafraid to be unpopular when they need to be. In this respect Boris Johnson is no Donald Trump, being master of the emotive u-turn. And although Trump inspired some dangerous passions, in people you wouldn’t necessarily want to be neighbours, I don’t recall a flag parade of sopping wet handkerchiefs on his 2016 victory.

Trump’s message, for all his faults, was America for Americans. Biden’s appears to be America for whoever wants it. And people are weeping for this? As Biden himself might say. “come on, man!” Yet even here, where a Biden victory may spell some difficulty for us as a country, people on the left are blubbing on air like they just received an all-clear from a cancer scare.

But sober and pragmatic and realistic and reasonable are boring, while joy and anger and fear bring a rush of blood to the brain. Reason rarely wins over emotion and this is the power of the left. Forget trying to explain – everything is far too complicated – instead, seize on a single smouldering nugget of fury and apply the bellows. Fan that flame until the anger it engenders is impossible to resist, then set the mob alight.

Maybe I am being unfair, but it does seem to me that leftist politics is emotionally driven and appeals to people who are dreamers, rather than doers. This is possibly why we don’t see very much of notionally right-wing mobs. The right wing, such as it is, is busy running things, putting food on the table and actually paying for all the things the leftists demand but can never provide for themselves.

They won - why cry over it?

If immature passion was what drove the world, what made it function, then the left, having once been elected, would never be out of office. But they always run out of steam. People realise they can’t eat emotion; they can’t keep warm by really wishing to be warm and they can’t build structures with sentiment. These are campaign tools which attract a certain sort; the sort who often lack the ability to realise their dreams. I have no doubt that leftists are sincere, but like leftism itself, sincerity never built anything.

Right Again

Remember, when you were a kid, if you repeated a word often enough it just became a noise; a meaningless sound that you could make but no longer conveyed any meaning? The same thing happens with meaningless hyperbolic usage which decrees that all news events are billed as tumultuous, and leaders are furious, or stunned. A resignation from cabinet leaves a government in shock, in crisis, and the PM responds in fury. If it was your kids using this sort of language you would laugh, but it’s not the kids, is it?

When Margaret Thatcher dragged the axis of British politics back towards the centre, towards what most people really think, the left screeched in fury [see what I did there?] and called her Hitler, when it was actually ex-Labour voters who put her into Downing Street. Disillusioned by the unions’ failure to get Britain working, with their muscle flexing strike action and combative language, they turned to somebody who spoke directly to them.

Be aspirational, own your own home, inspire your kids to do better, strive to be independent of state aid, earn and save and have a happy retirement and be able to look back and recognise what you had achieved for yourself. Nobody should be able to order you to strike, or insist you vote for a particular party. Britain had, for centuries, been a truly free country and nobody was called right wing merely for wanting to get ahead.

But since then we have drifted ever leftward and accepted, almost without any resistance, curbs on our freedoms, principally our freedom to say what we think and accept the consequences. There is a fatal flaw in being centrist and that is a reluctance to see ourselves as victims, and as a result we have no appetite for mass demonstrations, or to push our perfectly reasonable beliefs onto others. But on the left, the appetite for revolution grows stronger even as time continues to reveals evidence whatsoever for socialist success.

Looking out for number one is a trait of all species, but only one species gives it a name. They call it ‘far-right’ and every news station prefaces every story about any character not of the left or centre as far-right. Thus, non-communist agitators are far-right terrorists, institutions that represent the tax-paying classes are far-right think tanks, and anybody leading a party that advocates free speech is a far-right politician.

This morning it’s the ‘far-right AFD Party’ in Germany, presumably because they include the name of their country in their party moniker. Patriotism is not an attribute recognised by the left; unconstrained by borders, the left just hates anybody who isn’t them. The left in the USA are gleefully anticipating Donald Trump’s Covid death, or else claiming it is a political ruse to avoid debate. Either way, it looks to me like the left behaving exactly as they accuse the right, or centrists, of behaving.

To anybody with a sense of perspective the repeated use of ‘far-right’ has become a meaningless background noise, signalling only that the following debate, news story, discussion, interview comes pre-packaged with bias. Even to be impartial now is deemed to be a form of political activism, by which tortuous route the meticulously even-handed Andrew Neil is now labelled by many on the left as a far-right enemy of reason.

The far right - improving your lives.

So, yeah, call me an extremist for not wanting to pay even more of my hard-earned into a rapacious system which only ever wants me to give more while watching them piss it straight into the economic drain of black-eco-gender matters. See, I’m no monster, but I really don’t give a shit that you are unhappy with your lot in life. Live and let live was our mantra; if you think that is far right then your problems are way bigger than you imagine.

Never let a crisis go to waste

If you believe a map that is doing the rounds at the moment the latest outbreaks of the virus appear to afflict mainly Labour voting areas. Being full cognisant of confirmation bias, I nevertheless say, of course, what else would you expect? The leafy suburbs of prosperous commuters, now working from home and continuing to earn a decent living, give ample opportunity to isolate. Why, I have never even had a conversation with the neighbours, let alone any wider community.

But if you live cheek-by-jowl with the consequences of your chaotic social activities it is little wonder that you resemble a virus playground. Born into poverty, into a world where everybody you know has some familial connection with you, how else are you expected to navigate your life. The man who sleeps with your mother is not your father and the sisters and brothers you grow up with are only half-siblings. Your ‘aunties and uncles’ may or may not be blood… but they are probably not very far removed.

Whereas skilled professionals tend to have a social life that extends way beyond the immediate family, with acquaintanceships regularly sacrificed along the road to success; house moves, job moves, etc, the lives of Britain’s working classes are often lived entirely within the tribe. From school into work and a social life lived very much within a small geographical area, it is little wonder that such huddled communities have their own history and their own folklore.

Labour knows this and exploits a fierce tribal mythology that says all your problems stem from the hated Tories and all the solutions lie with Labour. Despite Labour strongholds serially failing to improve the lot of their constituents – often presiding over the corruption and decline which accompanies such nepotistic structures – it is still Boris Johnson who personally kicked the forkful of food from your mouth.

It is no surprise that certain Labour MPs have been exposed as gleefully exploiting the pandemic for political ends. And it will be no surprise that it will work, and the denizens of our crowded cities will return Labour MPs at the next election; there is so little the Conservatives can do about it. When generations have experienced the same privations, regardless of who was in power, why would they vote for people they have been brought up to see as rapacious ogres? Labour MP Jess Phillips even said as much; that in her family Tories were just regarded as evil.

Even if the current government were to pursue a ruinous policy of showering riches on these unproductive communities it would just be seen as naked bribery. As unpalatable as this message has become, ultimately it is not the job of government to make you rich or healthy. Or happy. Only you can ultimately do that. But if you have been brought up to expect failure and embrace mediocrity, it is unlikely you will participate in any new economic opportunities.

No. You will huddle closer together, tell yourselves that the Tories hate you and ignore the injunctions to socially distance, to maintain vigilance. But what other choice do you have? You will have to go to work to make ends meet – no WFH for you – and the virus will run riot through your ranks. It will just become another episode in your long history of being stuck at the bottom.

The next Labour manifesto - same as all the rest.

The chances are extremely high that you will survive, develop immunities, and carry on breeding. You will blame any suffering on the Conservative government and carry on with your miserable lives convinced that a Labour government would have done things entirely different. But as harsh as it sounds, your plight is neither caused by the Tories nor can be solved by Labour. Only you can do that… but will you?

Shut up and start talking!

Depressing. That’s the state of national debate when, if you come out for either side you are instantly derided as offended, triggered, woke or worse. Every riposte has a counter, every argument a clever rebuff; it almost feels like each side has a committee convened to take apart every stance and find a way to remove its sting. Express amusement at the latest gender-bender nonsense and you are either a fascist pig, or else you are, somehow, a weeping snowflake. What? I was having a laugh with like-minded people, you berk. Burst out of your bubble, comes the reply.

Somebody has always coined a handy and usually derisory epithet to describe you, regardless of what you really are. And what are you, anyway? When ‘lefty-liberal snowflake’ and ‘neo-liberal Nazi’ coexist what does that say about plain old liberals? How do genuine liberals feel about this? (And more to the point, I have yet to read a consistent description of what a libertarian is, as opposed to what he thinks he is.) When Laurence Fox did what he did last week the Twittersphere erupted with lefties losing their shit and righties poking fun at them for it. But here we are, days later and now it’s the lefties saying the right are losing their shit and they are being precious snowflakes for doing so. It is the political debate equivalent of “You smell!” “No, YOU smell!”

And none of it gets us any closer to working out how we continue to function as a society. From my angle, those who see offence in every off-colour utterance every departure from the sacred script of diversity and equality are the unhinged ones, but what about seeing it from their side? By attacking every perceived ‘woke’ fragility we distance ourselves from ever understanding where others are coming from. Likewise by their opposing everything which is not in their own script as fascism, they let the actual fascists (all eleven of them) off the hook.

Seeing racism as inherent in white skin, speaking of the fallacious white privilege that few of us will ever feel, waging war on the fictitious far-right, the left are making a mockery of free speech by insisting that we must never speak of these things. But the 1% ‘rule’ is utterly ridiculous. If one of your great-great-great grandfathers was a doughty ‘Blackamoor’ you may now identify as black… even though you are 31/32 white. Oh, come on, this means you are literally erasing white ethnicity before our eyes.

This is monumentally stupid and reduces every argument to ad hominem fallacies; the message must be corrupt because the messenger is a moron. And he is a moron not because of any demonstrable lack of intelligence, but simply because his message is off the reservation. When you can’t believe news, from almost any source you have to fall back on what you know. But when you won’t believe any news except what reinforces what you believe, what you know is worthless.

At some point the country really has to begin the process of rebuilding the national dialogue and to do that, both sides have to – and here’s that awful word – compromise; we can’t afford to do otherwise. So, in that spirit, I’ll start. Without capitalism we would be horribly poorer, but under capitalism there are winners and losers; we have to look after the losers. Socialism has no real mechanism to improve prosperity for the losers, but is enormously successful at caring about doing so. The old centrist parties seemed to understand this and I suspect that Johnson’s administration does, too.

I’m not asking the left to get behind Boris Johnson. Neither am I asking the right to completely trust him with all the policies they want implemented. But while you are at each other’s throats and while Her Majesty’s Opposition is incapable of voicing a single coherent syllable of effective opposition, how about a bit of a truce between the rest of us until we can see where this new government is actually leading us, as opposed to where we have already imagined it might? I’m not holding my breath.

That's Entertainment

Inform, educate, entertain – that’s the purpose of this blog. Oh and to let off a bit of steam, have a rant and generally lay down documentary evidence for my forthcoming hearing at the twenty-first century witch trials. Now that it is becoming illegal to even hold a personal opinion, much less express it, the day is drawing nearer when ‘being mean’ will be a capital offence. An ancillary but nevertheless important purpose of the blog is to occasionally ruffle some feathers.

And oh, do those feathers ruffle easily; I do love it, though, when I gently trigger a malcontent. All it takes is to type, say, ‘Enoch was right, you know’ and here they come. I get called a racist, a bigot, a hateful excrescence, a stain on humanity and deserving of a long and painful death. Or else be wished a life of such loveless misery that I must surely entertain thoughts of dispatching myself from this earthly realm, ideally via a botched attempt which leaves me fully conscious and in agony for hours. The left do vitriol like no others.

Woah there fella, ‘the left’? Do you think the left are all gibbering imbeciles with no mind of their own? Do you think ‘the left’ as you so dismiss them, comprise nothing more than zombie cultists, eagerly lapping up the crumbs from Jeremy Corbyn’s philosophical table? Are you so blinkered as to believe ‘the left’ do not understand the economy, human nature, honour, national pride and selection on merit? Do you think people on the left are incapable of having an original thought, or are entirely involved in occupations which offer no value to society?

To which I reply, “You said it” and “broadly accurate”. To those on the left the economy can be harnessed for the good of us all. A laudable ambition, for sure, but experience has shown that planned economies generate market inefficiencies. Attempting to appeal to people’s sense of restraint will fall on deaf ears when shortages arise; the first thing most people do when a supply of a good falls is to stockpile it, thus hastening its disappearance from the shelves. Left-wing economic practice is hopeless at meeting demand.

To those on the left, the law can be applied evenly and fairly to all. In order to do this, every last facet of human action and speech can be regulated, categorised, graded and be given a suitably corrective tariff. “Thou shalt not be unkind!” sayeth the left and behold there came a great tide of legislation on race, association, affiliation and acceptable expression of same. Even thought can be divined from speech and thus proscribed. Left-wing legislation is counter-productive in bringing about peace and harmony.

The left believe there should be no more war and they will bring this about by preventing those most able to limit the death and destruction from acting. We will entreat with sworn enemies and they will see the sense. We will lay down our weapons and throw open our arms and our borders and we will welcome our adversaries into our homes, the better that we can educate them and show them the light. If only they would stop hating us so much. Left wing sentiment is largely responsible for the wave of terrorism sweeping through Europe these past few years.

Yesterday in Parliament

"But how can you give the far right a free ride?" they ask. I don’t. But the supposed far right is no more than a disorganised and widely despised rabble and the supposed rise is little more than a fiction. When you are on the left you think you are among the reasonable; of course everybody who disagrees seems like a dangerous lunatic. But consider this: like the eternal battle between god and evolution, leftism requires an enormous, complex and imperfect set of rules, enforced by armies of officials, bureaucrats, policemen and the like, whereas rightism simple needs those overbearing constraints to be dissolved. When you’re seeking the truth, keep it simple, stupid!

Play up!

It’s like playing a game where only the other side knows the rules; as if the whole stack of Community Chest cards is being kept under the table in a game of Monopoly. But hey, when the reckoning comes I reckon I’m not too bothered by the rules because I’m winning by a mile and the game doesn’t really matter anyway; it’s not real life. There is something peculiar about the game of ‘debating’ on Twitter – Twitterbate - whereby the laws of physics, economics, and simple human decency don’t apply equally to both sides.

For there are but two sides, despite all the pretence at nuance and differentiation. These can roughly be equated to left and right, or if you are playing the game properly and fully engaging in the Cosplay, ‘Heroes for Social Justice’ versus ‘Evil Corrupt Tory Scum’. The left’s chosen monicker – blazoned across their cape - is confused because, nobody really has a firm, fixed idea of what constitutes social justice, except that it is ‘the opposite of everything the Tories believe in’.

By way of explanation I ought to rough out what general population Tories believe (as opposed to governmental Tories who are actually social democrats). They believe in self-reliance, personal pride, a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay, opportunity for all, pulling together, pulling your weight if you can and if you genuinely can’t, having your weight borne equitably by the rest. The idea is to lift everybody up; gratitude isn’t necessarily required, but it is at least expected that you show you deserve the leg up.

The left on the other hand – thinking this is somehow fairer – seem to want to pull everybody down. Or if they don’t believe this they are doing a pretty poor job of demonstrating otherwise. Like the ISIS of the west, they far prefer demolishing Palmyra than accepting its existence because it doesn’t accord with their narrative. Hell, they won’t even re-use the raw materials, crushing the work of millions of man-hours into dust to remove any reminder of former accomplishment. History is after all, like the rules of the game, theirs to command and if they want to knock over the board when they are put in check, well...

In order to win the game the left’s rules allow the complete change of subject, venue, the game itself and the repeated denial of their own losing position. A favourite high-ground gambit is to attempt to bring the opposing players into disrepute – shouting Tory scum, racist, profiteer and all that - but if that doesn’t work, other cheats are available. Starting riots, for instance, hoping to distort the game so the spectators are confused enough to believe them when they say they won after all.

It's just not cricket... is it?

So, as the caped crusaders for love and justice and compassion and their own peculiar version of ‘the truth’ (Thatcher!) set about trashing the joint so that nobody else can play; bursting the ball, pulling on their goalpost jumpers and crying foul, the right calmly picks up the winnings and moves on to fight the next battle. Politics? It’s more like a bunch of squabbling kids.

Earth Salt

“Shame on you!” shouted the peaceful protesters at the Conservative Party Conference, “Shame on you!” How dare you seek to bring prosperity and peace and how dare you try to foist any of that nasty dignity upon us? Don’t you know it is our right to look like cave dwellers, to believe in the Earth Mother and eat only what the good lady bestows? Except animals, of course and why would we work for and be led by animal murderers? Meat is murder and work will be the death of us and might is not right and the meek will inherit the earth once you filthy Tory scum have finished despoiling it.

Ah the dear old, queer old left; the salt of the earth, so much so that their preferred habitat ought to be a cellar. I watch with amusement as ever more outlandish charges are brought to bear against a party which, while being very far from perfect are at least trying to grapple with real, tangible, solvable problems. Yes, the Tories are devious and manipulative and will seek to dress up their policies in different clothes but, you know, that’s politics. And at least they have, um, policies, a thing the Labour Party appear to have completely forgotten about as they seek to out-left each other in JC’s brave new imaginary world.

How do they get that way; how do you make a lefty, assuming it isn’t genetic? (Although hereditary leftism is a possibility, given that like moths battering themselves against the killer light a huge number of lefties declare themselves Labour from birth, that it is in the blood. Cut them in half and they have Labour written right through. Somebody should do medical research on them.) But for those who are not born into the movement there must be a process of some kind and assuming they can’t all be mentally deficient, I imagine it goes something like this:

Start from a desire to make the world a better place and begin to associate with the eternally aggrieved. Suppress the gag reflex until you can mouth breathe in their presence and become a vocal defender of freedoms and liberties for the oppressed masses. Get Billy Bragg’s back catalogue for free on Spotify on your smart phone and learn all the words. Perhaps you buy a guitar and sing those songs until you are as convinced as he is that you learned them at the feet of the Jarrow marchers; make their story your story.

Your feet itch, you long to march so you attend a trial protest, just to see what it’s like. You feel the thrill of shouting ‘pig’ at the police with impunity and rush through some narrow streets away from the cordon, later telling your circle on social media how you were kettled by the agents of the fascist state. Start slowly, but steadily build your confidence until you can one day spit, hurl bricks and scream “Tory scum!” without any doubt in your red, red heart and dismiss as hate any voice that dares to question your credentials or your mission. Add salt for that bitter, bitter taste and relinquish forever the ability to imagine an act of humanity perpetrated by somebody who voted for living within our means.

Where Labour lost it.

For balance I should also elucidate the way in which righties are probably made: Watch with dismay as your old friends start dressing like street dwellers. Try to understand their convoluted, colander-like arguments and attempt to intervene by injecting facts into the conversation. Give it up as a lost cause, shrug, get a job... grow up.