Snakes in the grass...

What’s that I hear? The Labour Party is in disarray? Who would have thought it? Ten decades after its birth for all the honourable reasons this is now a party without a mission, except possibly a visceral desire to drag us back to their glory days of post-war euphoria and an end to… and end to what, exactly? For all the former might of the trades unions, the poor are still poor, at least partly as a result of thirteen years of Labour government from whose shadow we seem to be finally emerging. And by many measures the poor of today are far less satisfied with their lot than before they expected so very much. Such a cruel trick, to dangle aspirational baubles in front of people’s eyes only to snatch them back just as they come within reach.

So no wonder this week’s Prime Minister’s Questions seemed to be devoted entirely to the NHS. The only thing left in the boy Miliband’s armoury and it went down like a five-bob whore; a deeply uncommitted and unsatisfying performance, all over so quickly and leaving only the aftertaste of shame. The NHS is the fourth largest employer on the planet and so vast is it that its internal momentum is as incapable of reacting to one-term government quick-fixes as a super tanker is of performing an emergency stop.

And of course, despite the fanciful, bleeding heart imaginings, the NHS is far from broke. It consumes a vastly disproportionate amount of our national resources because of its cumbersome bulk. But for every confected sob-story of waiting lists and supposedly preventable deaths, for every genuine grievance brought to the dazzling glare of publicity, there are a thousand perfectly satisfied customers. And unlike many countries throughout the world nobody dies just because they can’t afford healthcare.

Labour did nothing to tame the monster, so what makes Ed think their sentimental worship of the sacred National Health cow will convince voters otherwise? As he spoke in the Commons his cabinet cringed behind him. Not a thing to say on the economy, the cost of living crisis forgotten, and employment figures making a laughing stock of their pretend-job guarantee, Ed was way out on his own, banging on about the NHS. Again. Meanwhile his party briefed against him in snippets of leaked reportage.

And then at the end of the week they let him talk about business – something he knows nothing about – to businessmen, who know quite a lot about it. Their verdict? Ed knows nothing about it. Forgetting, perhaps, that business people are also ordinary men and women with views on international trade and partnerships and exports and balances of payments and politically rigged marketplaces, he once again misjudged his audience and their interests. It is not just Unite who favour a referendum on the EU.

But wait, how did this happen at all? Wasn’t this supposed to be Labour’s NHS – the only thing we have left – week? Dan Hodges certainly thought so and rolled up a copy of his Telegraph blog with which to beat the errant Miliband from behind his own lines. The real horror though, is that as disorganised as they are, as poor a one-nation leader-figure as Ed is, there is still a chance that Labour have enough people too stupid to realise that if they vote Labour they’ll get a man they’ve already decided isn’t up to the job they would vote him into… and then what? A Miliband government would be torn to shreds in weeks and maybe they secretly admit to this.

Daddy was a Marxist so, yah, 

I know all about business...

Could it be that Ed’s team is playing a longer game? A leadership challenge now gives too little time to regroup behind a new figurehead; besides which, who is there left? But putting Miliband in number 10 is too dreadful to contemplate unless you’re a big fan of collective bargaining and one out, all out. Also, the longer any government is in power, the less popular they become. So maybe the strategy of Labour’s real leaders is to sit this one out, let Ed lose and thus give themselves another six years from now to think up a policy. Let’s face it; it’s taken them four years to come up with absolutely fuck-all. 

The Losing Side

I may be wrong - it happened once before - but I don't get all the politicking around David Cameron's so-called ‘surprise defeat' in the Commons yesterday. What I saw was a prolonged debate with plenty to think about, followed by a vote which was – if there was any surprise at all - much closer than I expected. The narrow result of 285-to-272 against the motion reflected a persuasive performance by David Cameron rather than, in my view, any support for Ed Miliband or his muddled message. If our Parliament truly reflected the mood in the country the outcome should have been more like two-to-one against.

Sure the doves are out, chanting victory and singing outside their tepees, ululating in joy and hugging the hell out of any tree in range, but nobody except the BBC is hugging Ed Miliband today. I expect he is waiting for his summons to Len McCluskey’s office to find out if he keeps his prefect badge for another term.

Yet today’s papers are full of views that this spells the end for Cameron. I really don’t see that. Why? He didn’t do what history suggests Tony Blair did and take the country into an illegal, unwinnable war on ‘sexed-up’ evidence. If anything, Cameron’s term in office may come to be remembered as the time that Britain finally gave up wanting to play world soldiers and got on with democratically rebuilding its own nation state. I only say ‘may’ because I believe there is still much to do.

There may be many reasons for Cameron to stand down as party leader, but I’m not convinced this was the decider. I’ve not been a great fan, but his performance yesterday was, I thought, impressive in huge contrast to the push-me-pull-you antics of Mr Ed. It is reported that some Labour MPs ended the day still unsure as to what Miliband’s position actually was.

So it seems we’re not going to war in Syria any time soon. That should be a decision to celebrate. It seems the much-vaunted but always abused ‘special relationship’ may be in doubt. Good. It seems like a victory, albeit a narrow one, for democracy; at least our version of it. And if democracy won on war, we might just have a chance of it winning in peace; it’s about time. Maybe now we can get on with deploying a bit of democracy at home and sort out our far more important relationship with Europe.

I wish you'd won.               I know. Loser!

Ed Miliband is today being bullishly myopic, claiming a victory and calling for Cameron to consider his position. Be that as it may, I know which of them looked like a leader yesterday and which looked like a bewildered youth way out of his depth. There definitely was a loser yesterday, but I don’t think it was David Cameron.

Traitors' Gate

The burgers are made from horsemeat, the welfare bill is astronomical, the NHS costs more to to run than most world economies and some people are subsidised  by others to live in houses far larger than those others could ever afford. So-called 'Green' energy policies are worse than outright theft and their criminal inefficiency is paid for by everybody with an energy bill yet benefit only rich landowners and massive foreign conglomerates and the latest figures on longevity suggest they will not last out the decade while we have shale gas enough for hundreds of years right here, right now.

We can't deport foreign-born criminals and content ourselves with giving them houses and benefits for life instead. We are not allowed to speak the truth about immigration, crime, cultural ghettoes, invasive Islam or black-on-white hate crime because to do so makes us the criminal. And while we are powerless against the invasion of organised Roma people-trafficking gangs our judiciary will jail an English somebody at the drop of a hat for using a profanity in a built-up area.

Our children are illiterate, our roads are a mess and as the life and aspirations are slowly squeezed from the wheezing, skeletal, walking corpses of those who remain to work and pay taxes to be plundered to fund yet more state lunacy, Ed Miliband deploys his one and only tactical political weapon; the call for yet another public inquiry... into every thing, every day.

Well Ed, I already held the inquiry. And it turns out the blaming finger of fudge is pointing firmly in your direction. You and Balls and Brown and Blair and Wilson and Scargill and Rompuy and Barroso and Marx and Stalin and the shitty Sovietisation of a country that once had the world at its feet. Your brand of toxic socialism has robbed the United Kingdom of dignity and self-belief. You sold our gold, you hobbled our national character and you gave away all that was worthy, leaving us with a cringing population of infantile, politically correct, state-dependent weaklings.

In every corner of public life you have willing dupes, useful idiots and cheerleaders for destructive diversity who will sell their integrity for a footnote in the history of a regime which so despises humanity and individuality that it seeks to make mere objects of us all. Once total control of the population is in the hands of the state, all the things you deride as 'right wing' will come to pass. Eugenics, genocide, torture, incarceration without trial, thought-crime, war, famine, disease and slavery will be seen as normal tools of government, because these are the only ways left when you are in open war with the sheeple.

And even after all that, there could still be a small vestige of forgiveness if you could genuinely claim that you'd done it in honest ignorance of the consequences, in search of a better future for all. If you had the balls to stand up and admit you were wrong, say you are truly sorry and beg for a chance to atone. But you can't really do that, can you? Because every little nail in our national coffin has been lovingly hammered home in a deliberate policy to deliver us, trussed for slaughter, to the nation-devouring abbatoir of the world socialist republic that owns your craven, treacherous soul.

Doesn't matter how often you say it...

So, when you're banging on with your distracting, rabble-rousing chatter about the fictitious 'bedroom tax', when you're basking in the Commons belly-laughs at your plagiarised punchlines during PMQs and when you go home to your comfortable home, paid for by your ungrateful treasons against the country that sheltered your Marxist ancestors, think long and hard about how you will escape vengeance. I hope your dreams are nightly disturbed by the possibility that one day you and the rest will be brought to the Tower through Traitor's Gate, to have your severed heads exhibited to the free and independent people of a New United Kingdom.

Oh, that feels better. Have a nice day.

Been mad for fucking years...

The one thing you can guarantee about statistics used by politicians is that they are flawed. Usually simply wrong, sometimes falsified and fudged to prove something they don’t actually prove, but more often they are just interpreted and deployed polemically. Better still, why bother with any real statistics at all? Just quote vague numbers and hope to provoke a visceral call to arms. Thus does Ed Miliband talk about ‘the biggest unaddressed health challenge of our age’, which he says ‘blights millions of people's lives’.

Millions, Ed? How many millions of people do you adjudge to be actually mentally ill, rather than a bit down in the dumps?  On LBC Radio today he talked about a One Nation approach to mental illness; about putting it at the TOP of the political agenda. So, what are you saying, Eddy-baby? That the economy, immigration, the EU, education et al should take a back seat to lunacy? That we’re a nation of nutters? Well we did suffer thirteen years of Labour rule after all.

Then, with a conjurer’s braggadocio he brandishes a bouquet of fragrant, tragic, magic numbers to back up his claims; that mental illness costs the NHS an extra £10 billion and the wider economy £26 billion a year. So in his estimation the total cost of dealing with mental health issues is more than our military defence budget? Where do these numbers come from and how in hell can you quantify something quite so nebulous as mental health?

He attacks Jeremy Clarkson and Janet Street-Porter for ‘belittling’ sufferers and making light of suicide and depression. Naturally Jezzer does what he does best and comes back with,  “I'm not sure he's right in the head.”Gotta love JC! But Janet SP is bang on with her analysis; we give in all too quickly to that which most of us could resist, deny or shrug off.

Depression is very much the slippery, difficult-to-prove malaise du jour for those who wonder why happiness eludes them. Some find Buddhism, but who has the time these days? Of course I’m not going to deny that real depression exists, or that it hurts. I've been there. I've curled up in that foetal ball and wept myself to sleep. I've felt all alone in the dark, worthless and wounded and wanting it all to end. I've longed for somebody to tell me it wasn't my fault and here, take your lithium and all will be well.

But it wouldn't be well, would it? Just as diagnoses of ADHD have been encouraged by the makers of Ritalin, the nutjob industry is keen to sell counselling and tranquillisers to desperate housewives and needy under performers in all walks of life… You’re not fat, you’re disabled. You’re not thick, you’re ‘special’. You’re not mediocre, you just have low self-esteem. It's not your fault, you have an addictive personality. Mostly self-pitying bollocks. So now, you’re not just stressed out, you’re proper poorly; Pop a pill, Popeye and join the wacky races...

The lunatics are taking over the asylum

Taking a public stance against anybody denying the scale of this partly imaginary problem is just another opportunity to engender faux outrage. Insensitivity is the favourite thing to get sensitive about these days. So I expect a bit of hate for writing this. Why, only last night I got blocked for saying much more gently what I'm saying now; that much of the problem lies with a too-ready tolerance of anything and everything and once again it's a case of the minorities dictating to the masses. I think you'll find that's the opposite of democracy and Miliband is quite sane enough to exploit it for knee-jerk votes.

But what do I care? In words from everybody's favourite Dark Side, "I've been mad for fucking years, absolutely years, been over the edge for yonks, been working me buns off for bands... I've always been mad, I know I've been mad, like the most of us...very hard to explain why you're mad, even if you're not mad..." Mad? I'm livid!

Braveheart

It's a brave man who burgles. So said Judge Peter Bowers in contempt of his own court as he failed to jail a recidivist burglar the other day. It would be a brave one who tried to burgle Batsby Towers all right. It was certainly a brave decision by Judge Bowers who apparently believes prison doesn’t work. Maybe he should have the opportunity to judge for himself – a stretch inside might be just the job to protect the rest of us from our own judiciary. 

But maybe he had a point? Maybe we should look to more positive ways of dealing with crime? After a glorious year in which Britain has rediscovered its appetite and ability for sport, we should be taking a leaf out of the athletes’ book. I give you Sporting Justice, in which both sides – the sinned and the sinners – get a fighting chance for a satisfactory outcome. The sport I have in mind is shooting. 

It has long been open season on the victims of crime, with angst-ridden, guilt-mongering Lord Longfords blaming anybody but the criminal. Now it’s time to declare a Glorious Twelfth on criminals. Don’t jail them; let them loose on grouse moors along with the judges who would merely have them tagged. 

If it sounds a tad barbaric it's nothing compared to the level of barbarism perpetrated on householders robbed blind and sometimes assaulted in their own homes. Victims are often traumatised by these ‘brave’ marauding souls and go on to suffer fear, depression and withdrawal for many years. So there’s nothing barbaric in my book about the perpetrators being given a sporting chance of avoiding a swift execution of sentence. 

On your marks... Load, aim, fire!

Sporting chance? Of course - they can run, can’t they? And a moving target can be pretty tricky; I reckon a handful every year will escape entirely… but they won’t be quick to burgle again. 

The Talking Eds have been blathering on about “predistribution” of wealth, a concept they’ve had all summer to come up with. (We’ve had it for donkeys years by the way lads. It’s called capitalism and it is achieved by having a small state.) But they’ve given me an idea. In justice how about, instead of getting criminals to make restitution to their victims, we engage in “prerestitution”? 

It’s very straightforward. The police already know who the burglars are, so why not cut the judges out of the process altogether and let the coppers mount dawn raids and shoot them right where they shit? It would be a fucking brave burglar indeed who attempted his antics in the face of that.

Solar Senility

The Ides of March are almost upon us. Beware.Waking in a cold sweat I stop breathing and listen. I swear I can hear them climbing the walls, crawling over the roof. Legions of slithering milibands and other creatures, who would harry and harm a man. I pull the blankets closer and begin my new morning routine, visualising my stores and counting the hours before I have to go out for supplies.

I listened to the wireless again yesterday. There are reports of suffering from all over the country; helpless people crying out for deliverance. Some are having to do without their chauffeurs and nannies, or having to keep their car for a third year. Some are even being asked to work for their living. It's terrifying. I radioed out for help, "Can you hear me, motherfucker?" I asked. No reply.

Nope, no good. I reckon it's the solar flares. I've been cooped up in here for days now. It's so long since I heard or saw another human and now I'm running out of soup. I like soup. Soup is good. It protects you from all manner of things... but now I'm running out.

The horror.

For all I know, civilisation is on the brink, or over it. I had a power cut the other night and strange, alien noises started up outside my window. An unholy clamour of sirens, alarms... the dying howls of long neglected sentinels. They persisted for a while but then they stopped. It's silent out there now, but I dare not look to see if the danger has passed. To do that I'd have to scratch a hole in the black paint on my windows and then 'they' would be able to look in. For all I know they are listening right now... I'm glad I'm not paranoid.

It's time to act. I need to get away before it's too late. I need more soup. I'm going to leave the safety of my blankets, put on my hat and venture outside.

 I fear I may go mad if I stay here any longer. (link)