Where do we go from here?

 Is there anything in this country which isn’t broken? And is it any better anywhere else in the west? Education appears to be churning out malfunctioning clones with despair as their default setting; will they ever get a job, be able to afford a place to live, have a meaningful life? If they observe what is going on and develop opinions which run counter to their peers, will they be labelled as extremists?

And what of learning from your mistakes, especially as today mistakes may well land one in jail. The world has become divided, bitter, antagonistic and downright dangerous. The phenomena of ‘quiet quitting’ and demanding workers rights before ever doing a day’s work have eroded the social contract between employers and their staff. The ever-increasing demand for some nebulous meaning is a drag anchor on ever arriving at true meaning.

Keir Starmer is about to introduce legislation to further prevent people from developing as rounded human beings, enshrining in law that employers must not make demands on their workers that fall outside some poorly understood framework of acceptability, to be decided, presumably, by politicians such as himself and the deranged Angela Rayner.

He cites productivity as his incentive, yet has no experience whatsoever in producing anything of tangible value, claiming that working from home – the skiver’s nirvana – is every worker’s right and that actually turning up to work (presenteeism) is a driver of poor productivity. In the new fantasy, Angela in Labour Land, it is indeed achievable to believe six impossible things before breakfast.

The ideas of earning respect, rather than deserving it without question has been abandoned. The idea of work as its own reward has been left in the dust, presumably because to learn this, one needs to actually apply oneself to work, and lots of it. The gradual acquisition of skills, likewise, appears to have landed in the ‘too difficult’ in-tray; if gratification isn’t instant it isn’t gratifying any more.

No, everybody under the age of 40 (and some old fools, too) wants to be seen, to be lauded, to be desired, to be the envy of the rest. Travel, once the broadener of the mind, has become narrow, egocentric and a mere vehicle for the expression of individuality with every individual posting the exact same message on social media and all following the latest fads. (“Yes, we are all individuals!”) And what on earth is a social media influencer, anyway? What is the point of them?

I genuinely worry for the future of the west when the fewer children who are brought into being will be the product of narcissists and serial failures, the flotsam of a society adrift on an ocean of mediocrity and instant fulfillment of the shallowest of urges. Where is the pride in a job well done; where is the reward for hard work and persistence? And when everything stops working completely, to whom do we turn to fix it? Stop the world, I want to get off.

Where are all the heroes?

In 1940, Lt. Com. Gerard Broadmead Roppe, sacrificed his ship and his own life in the commission of his sworn duty to fight the German menace. Such was his bravery that this action led to him being awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross, the commendation being recommended by the German Captain against who he fought. Outgunned, out manned and outmanoeuvred, Roppe nevertheless fought on when he could have cut and run and saved himself.

In times of crisis, history pivots about the actions of a very few, determined, principled and sometimes reckless individuals who put duty before self, duty before reputation and duty before their own inclinations, in order to do the right thing. Would that we had more such people but, as Winston Churchill observed, a few can make all the difference. So where are they today? Because, make no mistake, we are in a time of crisis. No, not Brexit, but bigger even than that; our entire system of governance is in a mess it cannot solve.

It has always been the case – and frequently observed – that lickspittles, sycophants and all forms of grovelling yes-men have been elevated beyond their worth simply for giving up all principles to suck up to their masters. Such men – for it is mostly men, after all – have been rightly despised, but wear their shame lightly. Some even flaunt their undeserved privilege when they would be better advised to retire altogether from public life. Peter Mandelson springs readily to mind.

And then there is Adonis. LORD Andrew Adonis; a once-elected local councillor who has made no known useful contribution to any part of the national endeavour still pokes his beak in where it is neither wanted nor heeded. The inventory of names that should go down in ignominy is long and growing. In a just world people such as Heseltine, McDonnell, Clarke, Soubry, Grieve, Hammond, Swinson, Bercow and on and on would disappear into eternal oblivion the second they leave office, but you just know they are going to keep on making appearances long after their duplicitous public days have ended. (In Adonis's case he now wants the world to celebrate his finally recognising what we have all known for ages. Yeah, yeah... whatever.) 

For the calibre of such people is quite, quite low. When you sell yourself once you signal to the world that you are for sale; and when you sell yourself low almost any cause can afford you. These are the worms. Snakes, vermin, the rats who leave the sinking ship. Without honour, without sincerity and without trust, such crawling, disgusting creatures are despised even by those they temporarily serve. History is littered with the treachery of the mediocre.

To become a ‘servant of the people’, to become a member of the Mother of Parliaments should require courage, self-sacrifice and an honesty so steadfast that it would shame even the boy who called out the naked emperor. Our leaders should be unimpeachable good guys, yet utterly ruthless when it comes down to taking decisive action. Sadly, we humans are practically defined by our fallibility and those who heroically try to scale the greasy pole are often shot down. It’s those who slime their way up that succeed; what should be a meritocracy is often just a pool of also-rans.

Promoted out of trouble, ennobled to still their mouths, rewarded for lending their vote for favour, these uncharismatic grey men dominate politics. For every towering figurehead there is an army of unremarkable nobodies made somebody. And the EU exemplifies this system, run as it is by unknowns. The only reason we have even heard of people like Junker, Tusk, Ursula von der Leyon et al is because the Brexit process has exposed these night crawlers to the light. Their time will soon pass.

You see only what they want you to see...

But behind even them there is the might of the civil service; the truly anonymous and unaccountable, who really pull the strings. Even the best of ministers has only a temporary and fragile grasp of the brief as he or she tries not to screw up, their main mission being just to survive and make it to the next level of the game. In the world of conspiracy theories we are often invited to ‘follow the money’, but if we really want to know who is ruling our lives we may be better advised to follow the failure.

That A level.

I suppose you have to be, or know somebody, from The Black Country to understand this joke. It goes like this and it has to be told in the local accent. Ready?

"Ah kid's got wun of them A-levels. In carpentry."

"Aa-ah?"

"Aaa. 'Ee put some shelves up and 'ee ses, "That a' level"."

Ba-da-and furthermore-bing! Plenty more where that came from. (I guess you had to be there... or more precisely, here. For clarification, watch Doreen's Story.)

'A' used to stand for 'Advanced'. That is, an advanced qualification capable of being attained by only the better scholars. Now, however, the 'A' clearly stands for 'Average'... if a large proportion of pupils passes them that's what they are, by definition. (One sort of average at any rate - this would need no explaining to a proper 'A' level maths scholar, but probably 'means' nothing to today's A-plus-double-plus-good clones.)

Beneath the A-level stood a solid tier of achievement known as the 'O' (ordinary) level. And beneath that, for those not destined for the groves of academe, the Certificate of Secondary Education, or CSE... the qualification for the thick kids. Not an issue, by the way; more a badge of honour for those who were going to hit things with big hammers, pull stuff out of the ground, or have babies for Britain.

Well, I was there when they ripped it all up. When the progressive  educationalists (I lump the 'ists' together so you can see the full force of my disdain: psychologist, sociologist, therapist, criminologist, apologist… rapist) ripped the still-beating heart out of Britain's proven, highly esteemed fit-for-purpose, education system. So pernicious were the changes that a future colleague of mine was sent back by his father from London to Guyana in order to undergo a 'proper British education' in a former colony that had yet to ‘benefit’ from ‘progress’.

Because ‘progress’ invariably seem to mean ‘regress’. Progress in transport means that the average speed of traffic in London today is a fraction of what it was a hundred years ago. Progress means that you no longer have to rely on a human being to miscalculate your electricity bill – we have machines now that can fuck it up so much quicker. Progress – in the absence of any accelerated human cranial evolution – means that we replace achievement with the illusion of achievement.

So, Michael Gove’s desire to put the ‘A’ back into A-levels has to be applauded, if not actually completely believed. His heart is undeniably in the right place, but he will be thwarted by the liberal intelligentsia who, despite their lofty, egalitarian posturing have wrought nothing but harm to our entire society.

Oh yes, liberal fuckwits, I’m gunning for you. You, with nothing to lose, have experimented with several generations of Britons and now see the mess you’ve left us in? Bereft of decent public education, available to all, it is you who have left the nation in the hands of the kind of career politicians we have today, scions of the very privileged classes – on both sides of the house – that you sought to crush.

 If Michael Gove truly wants to achieve political immortality he should put all his efforts into the very illiberal and definitely non-intellectually-taxing enterprise of fucking the lot of you right up the arse.