Useful

An interesting article by Anne Applebaum in the Spectator raises the spectre of right-wing propaganda and invokes the notion of a legion of useful idiots, duped into backing a position which may be contrary to their real beliefs and harmful to their fortunes. The Tories are so addicted to Brexit, she says, that they’re making horrific new alliances in Eastern Europe and don’t realise that they are being taken for fools. Says who?

Given Applebaum’s credentials in this area do we believe her? Steeped in the study of Marxism-Leninism and being a visiting professor at that hot bed of socialist thought, the LSE, is she genuinely warning of a grave danger, or this a cheeky, sneaky foray into propaganda on her own part? Is it mischief, or is it genuine or is it – and here’s the rub - driven by her own myopia? I mean, is it more likely that there are many useful idiots, or just the one?

I’m not for one second saying that she’s wrong. The fact is, I just don’t know. And neither do you. We can’t even rely on our own direct experiences because they are seen through the distorting prism of our own beliefs. Faith, social class, education, upbringing and the political background of our formative years all play a part. Give me the child until seven, sayeth the Jesuit, and I will give you the man. Basically, when it comes to separating fact from fiction in the socio-political arena, we’re fucked.

Who do you trust? Michael Gove, from relatively humble beginnings, should resound with the hoi polloi and was probably doing so until he clumsily leapt aboard the Brexit charabanc only to then disembark in equally ungainly fashion when he saw his bread buttered on a different side. As a result he is political poison now. Boris, on the other hand is clearly out for Boris and Boris alone, nobody doubts it; yet he is somehow more credible as a Brexiteer. He has decided to cling to the charade of being a man of the people when he is clearly anything but. And it seems to be working.

It’s all about perception; and that, of course is the entire problem. Do you perceive that you have more freedom as part of the EU, or are you merely accepting restraint in return for the illusion of liberty? Or do you believe that Brussels wraps its red tape around your liberties and freedom can only come with total independence? Will we be poorer or richer outside the EU? The debate currently seems to be between those who believe they will be richer in and those who genuinely don’t care and would rather be poorer out, so long as they are out.

As Theresa May has been firmly told, there are no half measures. In or out, take it or leave it. We voted to leave, but we are now being told different stories. The older people who did so are now dead. The young demand their say and will resoundingly vote to stay. Remainers enraged at the EU’s intransigence will switch to Leave. Almost all politicians want to keep the decision making out of the hands of the populists... except for the populists. And why does the EU ‘care’ so much about whether we stay or leave?

Seriously though, who knows?

Nobody knows the future and anybody who claims to so do is a charlatan. Our own position relies not on facts, but on belief. So, do we know we are being manipulated and are happy to jog along, or do we not know and believe we have autonomy? Is the propaganda really effective, or does it only affect them, those others, the willing dupes? Or maybe, we are quite happy to let the Viktor Orbáns run the show because it plays into our hands, we who see through all the shenanigans? If you’re not confused, maybe you don’t understand the game at all. Who’s the useful idiot now?

Maintain the lie...

If there was a prize for least relevant global organisation it would surely be awarded on a regular basis to the ridiculous IMF without whose presence the world would function perfectly fine. What is the purpose of this out of date, out of touch, out of ideas cabal of discredited gobshites? Especially when you read some of the shit they come out with: in cahoots with Project Fear they forecast the financial equivalent of cock cancer should the UK dare to even consider leaving the EU; their corrupt head honcho fraudulently escaped a jail sentence; and now they are trying their damnedest to wreck Spain.

Spain doesn’t need a lot of help in that regard, but having agreed to assist in facilitating the invasion of the machete-wielding, robbing, stabbing, raping army of illegal African immigrants, the IMF has taken it upon itself to collude in its cultural and economic suicide by trotting out a long discredited line of innumerate bullshit. Immigration is an unalloyed economic good, it insists and Spain needs another five million vibrant multiculturals just to pay its pensions.

A fundamental rule of propaganda is to stick with the lie. Repeat it, reinforce it, recruit talking heads to promote it, campaign to spread it, but never, ever admit it is a lie. Eventually, so the theory goes, people will accept without thinking that being white is racist, privilege must be atoned for, the Jews did it and ‘we need immigrants to pay the pensions of old, economically spent, racist white people’. After all, they stole your future, right kids?

It’s not difficult to pick apart this lie. For a start, it’s a fact that pensioners are putting off retirement and working longer simply because they can. Older workers often earn more and produce more than their young replacements because of a working lifetime of acquiring valuable knowledge and experience. As a result they pay more tax and without young families to raise, no longer consume resources such as schools and child-based medical facilities. Elders are generally well-behaved and rarely take up valuable police time and contrary to the picture of ageing, decrepit bed-blockers, many more older people are living active lifestyles that would shame some people half their age.

But far from retiring older workers, countries need them to work later into life. It is no longer viable for people to routinely retire in their sixties if they are then going to take a pension for a further thirty years. Working longer can keep people out of social care, medical care and state dependence, possibly for decades; post-retirement decline is a major contributor to poor elder lifestyles. But there is one huge elephant in the room; far from immigrants being needed to pay the pensions, it is the would-be pensioners who are needed to pay for the immigrants.

Maintain the lie. Spain has 3.5 million unemployed; import more unemployable. Maintain the lie. Low-paid workers are a drain on the economy; bring in more of them. Maintain the lie. Multiculturalism doesn’t work and immigrants don’t integrate; keep stuffing the ghettoes. Maintain the lie. Mass immigration increases crime, especially fraud and violent crime; keep ‘em coming. Maintain the lie. The IMF is part of the problem; the IMF is part of the solution. What do YOU believe?

The Nazis are coming!

It’s begun. But don’t panic – you haven’t missed anything. Watch as, day by day, every incident which can’t be pinned on migrants or muslims will be dubbed the work of neo-Nazi groups. Far right extremism is now in open season and any weapon to hand may be used to attack it, real or imagined. Not that I condone extremism of any kind, of course – far from it - but just watch the media feeding frenzy, now that their new target has been officially designated. Went to a fancy dress party as Hitler in the 1970s? Nazi. Quoted Goebbels? Nazi. Read the Daily Mail? Literally Hitler.

Notice that I am not defending Nazism in any way here, but the mere fact that I am not excoriating it, merely observing how others react, is tantamount in the fevered machinations of the politically attuned brain, to tacit approval. You are either a hooded, masked, Molotov cocktail lobbing, free speech trampling, book burning ANTI-Nazi, or you are the actual thing. The other day somebody told me that because I was antipathetic towards the brown-shirt antics of the antifa rent-a-mob, I must therefore be a fascist myself. Why, even  Jacob Rees-Mogg is being dubbed a Nazi sympathiser now.

Why? An old adage says that if you are taking flak it is because you are over the target. Brexit day draws nigh, the desperation is palpable and operation discredit is in full swing. The many contradictory thought strands of distressed Remainers have coalesced and distilled down to this one thing: forget the vague and dithery ‘old people didn’t know what they were voting for’ trope and the ‘believing lies on a bus’ malarkey. If you voted for Leave you must be the worst kind of Nazi because look at the hell you have unleashed.

The sainted souls of Far Right Watch, unblemished in thought and deed and doctrine, are actively searching all stories of violence and finding ways to brand them as actions of the right. Aiding and abetting them are the carefully implanted notions that only white people can be racists and that all Nazis are white. Self-defence by a white man can easily be spun as neo-Nazi violence if the other party can be shown to have the merest tint of BAME ancestry. And only the very bravest, noblest of white people dare speak up against their own.

The irony is not lost on me, however, that by decrying all of islam for their failure to reform the worst violent excesses of their religion the door has been opened to blame all white people for Nazism. The difference, however, is that it is largely white activists, employing the propaganda tactics of the Nazis to label other people as dangerous fanatics. Indeed, Anna Soubry is currently riding that deranged wave in Westminster. 

Brexiteers are, literally Hitler...

Where does it end? I don’t know, but we can all see early how it begins. Be temperate in your language, measured in your reactions, but don’t back down. They are looking to goad you into giving them ‘evidence’ that you are part of the problem they are creating. Don’t let them. And particularly don’t allow yourself to be silenced for fear of being labelled. And just in case their fictions gain real traction and begin to win moral ground, you may wish to consider keeping those jackboots polished and ready for when you have to escape South America.

Nobody knows

Honestly, when it comes to how it all slots together, nobody knows. The news is manipulated, we are told, by the guvmint, the Vatican, the mainstream media, the illuminati (Mwuhaha!), the Freemasons, the BBC and by every political party ever heard of it. At least the politicians are sort of open about what they call ‘spin’ and it’s a very human thing to want to show your principles in the brightest possible light, but we have quickly gone from the so-called Information Age of the nineties to the post-information age… the age of anti-information. Everything you hear, everything you read and everything you see, online especially, could easily be wrong.

Perception has a big part to play; bloggers, photo-shoppers, prankers, polemicists, street-preachers, biased reporters, converts, apostates and plain old deluded fools (How many of those boxes can you tick?) abound, bringing with them the most potent and prolonged campaign of disinformation ever seen. Once it was common to leaflet-bomb enemy troops, spreading uncomfortable lies to shake their resolve. Now we do it to ourselves; for fun. Manipulating online personas to reveal their hidden bigotries is practically the raison d'être of social media at times.

It is said that that religion of nothing-to-do-with-peace practices taqiyya, a deliberate use of deception to disguise its true intentions. But that itself may just be a manipulation of the reality of avoiding religious persecution; although right now there does only seem to be one religion doing the persecuting. Where, they say, are the imams condemning the violence? Why do you not hear us, say the imams and then declare islamophobia. I’ve never liked islam but that was long before the current open barbarity and more to do with its dull, dour monotonous insistence on submission by its adherents and the blandness of life in the strictly muslim countries I’ve visited. Or is it?

But while deliberate misinformation is undoubtedly a real thing the sheer volume of verifiably true bumf now available makes it near impossible to sift fact from fiction. So even if the mountain of particulars is built on factual foundations how can we possibly process it in an enlightened way? Even when people are using real numbers to illustrate their case, other people can use the same set of facts to illustrate the opposite. So while the current government is trumpeting measures the opposition calls ‘austerity’ it is apparently the case that welfare spending rose by £28 billion under the coalition. The truth, it seems, is relative.

When I watch a movie I want deep, dark cleverly interwoven complexity. I want to be taken on a roller-coaster, who-dun-it ride with my expectations foiled as the goody turns out to be the baddy and then turns goody again. I want to be exhausted, challenged and entertained by the sheer thrill of not knowing who to trust. In real life though, I just want to put my money in the slot, press the button and get the Smarties.

Licensed to kill or thrill?

Thus I employ Battsby’s Ambiguity Principal (BAP) to state that for every fact there is an anti-fact, for every truth an anti-truth. Whatever you believe, from whatever source or sources, somebody will infer an opposing conclusion from that same base. Employing good old Occam’s razor and based on my infallible and verifiable truth that we’re not as clever as we think we are, the simplest explanation is usually the best. So remember folks, on budget day if you want to get to the truth, get your BAPs out.

Don't even think it - they're listening!

Yesterday’s blog was about the lengths people go to in order to construct something other than themselves to believe in, something to live their lives for… which they will then convince themselves is also worth dying for. Puny humans! I thought I was pointing my scathing finger at some of the hypocrisy of organised religion and political movements, from a position of extreme scepticism. I’ve always poo-poohed conspiracy theories, largely on the grounds that I’ve lived among all sorts of human beings and I reckon we’re nowhere near as crafty as we think we are. And I always – or at least I thought I did – look at most news stories with a degree of disbelief bordering on the neurotically suspicious.

So, imagine my surprise to be tweeted “Oh you are so, so stupid!” followed by “You believe everything the MSM report. It makes you appear daft!” accompanied by some picture ‘memes’ about government propaganda and manipulation of the media and being a modern slave to the consumer cult. For a fella who wants to retire to a retreat up a mountain, far away from the ludicrous chatter of the idle and ignorant I felt quite deflated. Blimey, I thought, maybe I have been manipulated and the government cups me in the palm of their collective, controlling hand. Maybe I only think I’m an independent thinker and all of my many, many blogs dismissing the gullibility of those who slavishly follow fashion, diktat, religion or blinkered ideology are the result of an invisible urge implanted by GlaxoSmithKline… or agents for the shadowy ‘them’.

So, let me try and understand this criticism because – unless I’m mistaken – the essence of impartial, scientific enquiry is to challenge everything and if my belief that I draw my own conclusions is spurious and I only imagine I have freedom of thought then we’re in big trouble. Because I look at the socialists, the religious, the childish copyists, the X-Factor wannabes and the conspiracy nutjobs down the length of a very long and cynical nose. I thought that I was almost the antithesis of gullible, believing in little I haven’t seen with my own ears; heard with my own eyes._[stet]

But now I know the truth: just like all the rest of you I am a mere tool of the system, a willing fool a useful idiot and an indoctrinated sheep; slave to the machine of state. Every thought I have ever had, every instinct I have ever followed, every factoid I have ever challenged… all just further proof of the extent to which I have been manipulated. To what purpose? To make it appear that there are dissenters, when in truth I am just a part of the plan? Are we all just pieces of the national jigsaw, neatly slotted into place in the big picture? Or am I just saying all this to make it look as if I’ve stumbled across the plot… or is that just what they want you to think I think?

Wait! I see it clearly now...

I’m not going to say my challenger is wrong, besides I’m far too gullible to mount a reasoned defence of my own. If Carslberg did conspiracy theories? Then again, little does she know, that I know that she knows, that he knows that… where was I? But here’s the thing: if my thoughts are not my own, whose are they? I blame that bloody Matrix. (You knew I’d say that, didn’t you?)

The Battle for Britain

Daniel Hannan wrote very recently that we should beware of the scaremongers and he is bang on the money. The forces of ‘in’ have been waging this war for many years and they have a wealth of material all ready to put the fear of god up the little people. A few months ago Channel 4 aired the blatant propaganda of ‘Ukip: The First 100 Days’ showing Britain degenerating into a fantasy neo-Nazi regime after a surprise Ukip victory in the general election. The pro-EU lefties must have been wanking themselves into a froth at this depiction of what, in their shallow, unidimensional loathing of anybody not bowing before the diktat of the little red book, would happen if actual democracy was served.

Then, last week the BBC aired a reframing of history, thinly disguised as a warts and all examination of Britain’s greatest wartime Prime Minister. ‘Churchill: When Britain Said No’ was nothing more than an anti-British polemic giving an unwarranted amount of time to the unsubstantiated opinions of rabid communist agitator David John ‘Danny the Red’ Douglass. He claimed that the man for whose funeral virtually the entire country stopped was utterly hated by those very same people who lined the streets in solemn tribute. Of course Douglass has form and was no doubt instrumental in whipping up hate mobs to burn Margaret Thatcher in effigy after her death. They do so love to hate, the left.

And now another gob-on-a-stick, the Canadian UN envoy, Francois ‘Crapeau’, has waded into the issue of the UK replacing Tony Blair’s blunt-trauma weapon the Human Rights Act with a British Bill of Rights, with the ridiculous statement:  "We have to remember the 1930s and how the rights of the Jews were restricted in Germany and then the rights of the whole German people.” And "Countries that go down the path of reducing the rights of one category of people usually don't stop there." Like the Nazis, Frank? Seriously, you little shit? Curious, isn’t it, how those whose allegiances are to such ideals as world government, common purpose and wielding immense and unaccountable power over billions of helpless citizen-slaves are so quick to conjure up the Nazi comparison.

The trouble is though, it does actually work. So powerful is the notion and so indoctrinated are people – it’s practically all that is taught in history at school, by all accounts - that all you have to say is “that’s how the Nazis started” and the sheer terror of the monsters they might become pushes them to vote for the nearest form of socialism available. Of course British National Socialism could never ever be like German National Socialism, could it now? After all, they bombed our chippies!

Plenty of work in the EU... to set you free.

But make no mistake, the issue of the European Union is already a sub-military conflict with its bureaucratic battles having been fought ever since Britain’s entry through skulduggery and its retention via the disgraceful unbalanced referendum of 1975. Furthermore it is a war waged against us, paid for by us. Every penny supposedly gifted to Britain by the EU and trumpeted as largesse represents a mere fraction of what we pay in; it’s like prisoners not only purchasing their own barbed wire but paying outside labour to erect the fences around them. Brexit? It’s the next Battle of Britain. 

Voting Rights

How can anybody hope to vote ‘the right way’? If Twitter is any guide – and in the new connected world we keep hearing about it must surely be representative of those who HAVE an opinion – it is unlikely. Given that most opinions are deeply embedded, formed from an agglomeration of our background and our experiences and our flocking with birds of similar plumage, entrenched views can be hard to shift. It is doubly difficult given that we filter even relatively dispassionate news reporting through our own biased mindset. But how are we to process the news that UKIP is to be condemned by a cross-party alliance for running a 'racist' campaign?

Really? Farage’s Army is so evil that only a concerted campaign by parties normally at war with each other can possibly stop them? Disaffected ex-Labour and Conservative voters are actually The Nazis now? I seem to recall the union rallies of the 1970s and 80s having far more in common with Goebbels’ dogma chanting mobs than the KIPpers’ cheerful gatherings in homely pubs. And see how easily people believe what they WANT to believe. Reaction to a recent distorted story about Roger Helmer was visceral; the story taken at face value and people expressing disgust rather than incredulity. I doubt that many bothered to read his rebuttal.

So your mind is made up? Forget the policies and concentrate on one emotive thing - opposition to uncontrolled immigration is purely racist and not prompted by any economic argument. Inward migration of low-skilled workers – despite all logic – is unremittingly good, essential even? Odd then, that a newspaper that has often been called racist itself, but has also happily headlined spurious examples of racism, today carries the news that 150,000 EU migrants effectively pay no tax at all and many others are a net drain on UK taxpayers. (I may have pointed this out a few hundred times before.)

As a sovereign island nation we've never been fully comfortable with the notion of being European and even after forty years of EU membership there is a vague fifty-fifty split for IN or OUT, but based on what? For almost certainly the majority of UK citizens it would make no immediate difference but the machine is on the move to claim their minds. The current spin – recently adopted by a variety of otherwise antipathetic ideologues – is that for all those years we have only ever heard bad things and not enough has been done by the pro-debate to illustrate the benefits. This is of course code for “We've had a meeting and realised we may be losing the argument, so we've decided what you need to be told. But sod facts, we know you’re not good with facts; we’re going to stick with unquantifiable emotive stuff like racism.”

Why do I want out of the EU federal projekt? Quite simply because I have little enough faith in our own elected representatives to tell the truth, but at least we have a slight chance of rattling their cages every five years. The EU is largely run – and very expensively at that – by hordes of unknowns, many of them with solid socialist and even communist credentials and with absolutely no interest in the unique concerns of the UK. I want control of our national interests entirely within our borders. And that’s it. A fully accountable UK government; one we can change if they don’t perform.

Snack time in the EU - is this what you want?

So, what’s to be done? The truth will never gain what they now call ‘traction’ so in a dirty war of words, what trumps racism? I’m pretty sure a bit of inventive spinning and media distortion could easily portray Van Rompuy as looking like a low-grade paedophile. And Martin Shulz could be rumoured to be a coprophiliac – a charge oft-levelled at a certain former German leader. With a knowing wink we could say, “allegations are unproven” and thereby firmly plant the notion that a vote for the EU is vote to be ruled by a bunch of Nazi, shit-eating, kiddy-fiddling perverts… and foreigners to boot. 

Oh to be in England now the end is near…

When I used to travel around the world between work tours as an ex-pat oil worker I would take advantage of the bargain prices almost everywhere outside of Europe. Before cheap mass air travel ‘took off’ I could pay for a whole month’s holiday for less than a standard return air fare to the UK. Compared to those who unimaginatively flew back to visit families of whom they were mightily sick after a month, I returned from leave enlightened, refreshed, all-adventured-out and with more in my bank account than when I left. Happy days while it lasted.

The sights, sounds, tastes and norms of alien cultures formed the periodic backdrop to three years of my life in my early twenties before I returned to the familiar and settled down for a while back in the UK. I don’t know why I bothered. The familiar is now not familiar and what was exotic in foreign climes is just plain out of place in Blighty. Men in drab dresses walk down our streets and invisible women clad in dark shrouds congregate outside school gates. Signs are written in a multitude of foreign scripts and our policemen have to be oh-so sensitive, so as not to unduly offend those they arrest.

Perhaps we need some before and after photographs – because you’ve all forgotten (if you ever knew) what it used to be like. The end game of the multicultural propagandists is that your children will never know what being British ever meant. And for those who still have faint memories it’s the reverse of the emperor’s new clothes trick; as if you just don’t want to see what is happening right in front of your nose.

Janet Daley wrote recently in the Telegraph about press freedoms and in particular the way in which the BBC is complicit in presenting an unwaveringly positive portrayal of Britain the way they want to see it. She writes “BBC news output is specifically designed to counter what it sees as ignorance and popular prejudices.” And on the hated ‘right-wing press’: “The BBC approach to news is aimed precisely at those people who read the papers that are hated by its staff. It is intended to offer an alternative vision of reality in which immigration is not a threat to anyone, patriotism is a joke, religious belief (as opposed to ethnic identity) is not taken seriously, conflicting cultural values never create social problems and government spending is inherently virtuous.”

And it’s not just the news. The BBC’s autumn soft crime drama ‘By Any Means’ seems to be predicated on the populist myth that the middle classes are vaguely shady, blithely evade justice and only a dedicated crack squad operating outside the law can bring them to book. Last week’s episode centred around a corrupt, caricature-Tory property developer with connections in government, getting away, literally, with murder. This week the couple under investigation were obvious dopplegangers for a well-known ex-Tory couple, engaged in a caper to cynically rip off a charity

This is the nation’s state broadcaster’s standard cipher for Conservatives, the middle classes, business owners; anybody in fact who makes a net contribution to life in the UK. In contrast their depiction of the lower paid, working or not, is unwaveringly positive, their dabbling in black markets seen as either necessary, unavoidable or simply high jinks, Jack-the-lad antics to brighten up the place.

I can hardly bear to listen to young people any more with their Jafaican patois and their risible groupthink assertions of the opinions of some of their brainwashed teachers. (And since when did tutors start calling their charges ‘mate’? Watch any episode of ‘Educating Yorkshire’.) Yet many susceptible parents are now instructed by their semi-literate offspring that their views of the world are wrong and that acceptance of deliberate and harmful social engineering without question is right.

A spokesman for god-knows-what on The Daily Politics this week repeated the on-message assertion that immigrants are a net benefit; that is they pay more in tax than they take out in benefits. But this is a classic use of numbers to affirm a lie – the net figure, even if it is actually true, hides the real costs to Britain on a one-by-one basis. Take this as an example:

A foreign worker brings his wife and two kids here, where he gets a job on £30k a year and thus pays total deductions of around £6,800 for the 2013-14 tax year. Will he get tax credits? Or housing and child benefit? I don’t know, so I’ll assume he doesn’t. Given that the NHS alone costs about £3,600 a year for every working person in Britain (based on £109bn last year, with around 30 million workers) he is not even paying his way for the kids, let alone a family of four. Factor in the cost of schools, roads, defence and the family on benefits that this family is displacing and it’s clear the numbers just don’t add up. Yet all immigration is still always good immigration.

Traditional Britain - according to the BBC

We already cannot afford this economic, cultural and social illiteracy and it is only going to get worse. But it doesn't matter; superstate EU puppet handlers will simply rob Peter to pay Paul then alter the facts to suit whatever disjointed agenda is the cause du jour. While the Winstons are busy ‘adjusting’ our history they may as well alter old song lyrics too. Remember the rousingTom Robinson classic Motorway, from the nineteen seventies? Let’s all sing together “Two, four, six, eight – manipulate!”

Comic-Con

Scotland is to rig the vote, sorry, lower the voting age, to allow young pups to distort participate in next year’s independence ballot. If that smacks of Scottish Nationalist desperation then how do you feel about the European Union spending taxpayers’ money to indoctrinate the very young indeed? Yes, the EU is sending multilingual propaganda colouring-in books to infants everywhere. Don’t come bleating to me when your ten-year old dobs you in to the authorities and you spend five years in a gulag learning to love Big Brother.

Well, two can play at that game. I hereby present my own version of the Euro Comic translated into just one language – the correct one – and invite you to disseminate it far and wide. We may yet wake up one day in a green and pleasant land, free to be British again, although I’m not holding my breath.

Page 1 and the story so far... Mr & Mrs MEP have to run the gamut of protesters bleating on about useless wind turbines. Do these people not understand that they have to register before 1830 on Monday evening to get their full day's allowance? It takes a good few hours sleep on the gravy train Eurostar to even get to Strasbourg, never mind all those demands on their time.

When they get there,there is much work to be done. For a start they have to book dinner at a swanky restaurant commensurate with their status, then have a relaxing evening before the challenging and ever-hectic Tuesday schedule begins... around midday. There are many palms to be greased and many favours to return.

Life is not all rosy; some of the expenses and allowances have to be tracked down. It's not like they hand them to you on a plate - it's more of a suitcase stashed with money. And suitcases can be hard to lug around Strasbourg all day, so once Mr & Mrs MEP have signed in they must take a free limousine ride back to their apartment where they have to count it all up and then account for every penny they are unable to hide. Those EU budgets don't audit themselves you know!

And then suddenly - almost as if they've done no work at all - it's Friday morning and time to go home. What a gruelling life Mr & Mrs MEP have, supervising the porters lugging their heavy suitcases through the open diplomatic channels and into a waiting Swiss bank account. But first they have an important mission to complete at the Parliament building.

I know what I want to be when I grow up! 

English. Don't let it die of ignorance

Every day we mangle our precious language. We use words we don’t understand, or use the wrong words to describe what we might not mean. Occasionally, hilarious clangers, such as ‘escape goat’, remind us how little care we take over verbal expression, or how reluctant we are to challenge received Norman Wisdom.

Other examples of misused phrases include ‘for all intensive purposes’, ‘play it by year’ and ‘that’s a mute point’. Add to the mix the proliferation of so-called management speak - meaningless pumped up expressions that allow corporate clones to miscommunicate with each other - and we are perilously close to little more than grunting… albeit in a form of English. 

If I ever hear utterly redundant phrases such as ‘going forward’, or tautology like ‘me, personally’ or the ridiculous ‘from the get go’ I know the speaker has nothing to say and will use too many words to say it. I’ve already closed my ears and pretty soon my eyelids will follow suit. I’ve been known to snore loudly in meetings and not miss a single important thing. 

We also use phrases from the past whose origins are lost. How can ‘now then’ mean ‘hello’, for instance? But, English changes; all languages change with common usage. Useful phrases from one age – ‘balls out, ‘big-wig’, ‘dyed in the wool’ – often survive with their meanings intact, while others die out altogether or change their meaning. I’m not against change; I’m against wrong. 

And the wrongest of wrongs must surely be the ubiquitous ‘should of/would of/could of/must of’ and any other variants you can think of. Wrong because it is simply incorrect; but even more wrong because users don’t seem to realise it. You hear it pronounced ‘of’ instead of have, which is bad enough but far too often you see it written down, even in newspapers and official documents. It’s only a matter of time before the OED lists it as acceptable. 

This is how propaganda works. Say it often enough and loud enough and eventually people will accept as true something which palpably isn’t. The Conservative political philosophy is as far from being evil as you can get, but Tory may as well be pronounced ‘Lucifer’ for many. Labour’s fiscal policies are demonstrably unworkable, unfair and destructive, yet somehow ‘welfare dependency’ is interpreted as caring. 

If you can’t even be bothered to check whether what you say means what you intended, what are the chances you’ll bother to check the provenance of the news of the day? Ignorance breeds more ignorance and eventually the truth is lost altogether. How else did the gigantic despotic experiments of the twentieth century get off the ground? 

The USA has just had its say and produced an outcome many disagree with and some even fear. But at least the USA IS one nation with no real threat to its identity. But a United States of Europe? English isn't just a language, it's a whole way of life. We should of got out when we had the chance...

Mock the Weak

Lots of propaganda skirmishes joined over the last few days, but who do you believe? They say you can’t hypnotise somebody who doesn’t want to go under and it is much the same with persuasion; entrenched views are harder to shift than shit on a blanket. 

Some cultures need to be mocked out of existence - far left, far right, faddish and marginal movements and any religion intolerant enough to create people like Azhar Ahmed. But should this have ever got to court? Far better, surely, to let him say his stuff, point out his gullibility and ignorance, then point and laugh from your loftier vantage point… the British way. George Galloway was on LBC talking about freedom of speech and the limiting of such rights. But, George, where do you set those limits? 

A survey on attitudes to welfare reveals that those in work are feeling the strain of paying for those out of work, but at the same time there is an upwelling of feeling against the Atos witch-hunts, with plenty of stories of deplorable treatment at their assessment centres. Who do you believe? It wouldn't be the first time that special interest groups had rallied their supporters to flood the newspapers and radio phone-ins with sob stories. In life as in warfare we appear to have arrived at a point where no casualties are acceptable and to say otherwise is denounced as cruel. 

Talking of war, I was alerted recently to an apparently pernicious EU plot to brainwash tender young minds into becoming Euro-sheep. 

And so it goes. We are bombarded daily with a cacophony of propaganda from all the party machines with varying degrees of atrocity being forecast as the result of dissent. This is (sadly) a good thing because few people will be dissuaded from their chosen course and the UK will remain a mishmash of diverse opinion. It’s also (sadly) disastrous, because few people will be dissuaded from their chosen course, etc. 

How I long for the fictional good old days of the nineteen-sixties when, as amply demonstrated in psychological cold-war claptrap such as The Avengers (Diana Rigg could persuade me of anything!) whole audiences could be hypnotised and programmed by watching spinning discs and a tone sent over the phone could scramble an assassin before you could say 'Manchurian'. 

Whatever she said...

So, what ‘truth’ would you go for? Time to grow up, Britain and accept the cold reality that there is no free ride in life, that there is no magic sky pixie and that we each must triumph by our own endeavours. After all, even Ed Miliband appears to have embraced the notion that this doesn’t necessarily make you evil. 

Or do you want to carry on believing there is a limitless pot to satisfy every need, that every life has equal possibilities, that every soul is sacred and that we will all live happily ever after in a fluffy, happy wonderland?

Fact or fairy story; you choose.

Proper Propaganda

I don’t go out of my way to upset people, really I don’t. I just tell it how I see it and let them make up their own minds. I lose quite a few followers that way but I’ve always reasoned it doesn’t matter; it’s their loss. So, I leave the blog for a few days and what do I find on my return? A right bloody political palaver, that’s what.

We have a coalition ‘government’ (for want of a better word) at the moment, in case you hadn’t noticed. I ask whether you’ve noticed because it’s important. Any form of leadership needs to have at the very least a teensy, tiny bit of a clue where it wishes to venture in the mighty ship of state. Where would be the navigators of one of Her Majesty’s sleek, grey messengers of death if they were all working from different charts?

So what in the name of Clusterfucks Incorporated is going on when, fresh from his paper round, The Boy Clegg demands we steal more from the rich a proposal which then has to be roundly slapped down by George Osborne, the bloke with his actual hands on the purse strings. Who is steering this bloody thing? Does anybody know?

We will never understand the politics of common consent in this country – what we used to imagine was democracy - because we’re free to believe what we want, yet remarkably ill-equipped to tell fact from fiction. I used to think that if politicians just told the truth we’d all make intelligent decisions and vote for the party with the best policies. Think again.

Take Al Murray and his successful Pub Landlord character. This was supposed to be a beautiful bit of British fun-poking at the bigotries of the little Englander, but just as Johnny Speight learned many years before, the great bigoted British public sided largely with the Alf Garnet character. We have travelled nowhere… although Al must have done very nicely out of it. 

It has sod-all to do with policy and nothing whatsoever to do with truth.

prop·a·gan·da/ˌpräpəˈgandə/
   Noun

1. Information, esp. of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicise a particular political   cause or point of view. 
2. The dissemination of such information as a political strategy.

The Left have won the propaganda war, fought on party battle lines drawn up over half a century ago, because now those on the right – especially those IN the right – dare not even pop a pate above the parapet for fear of having it blown clean off. The current government don’t yet seem to have thoroughly grasped that whatever the solution is (and no economist knows) you have to be in office to achieve it. And the last thing you need is a divided front.

The game might yet have been winnable, but then along came Tim – I make millions out of your gullibility – Yeo, to blow the entire ship out of the water. With his dirty thumb in as many pies as the Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee can bake, he is the very epitome of the mostly fictional Nasty Tory Fairy Story the left have promulgated so well.
 

So, well done Tim. One can only conclude that your future fortunes lie in a victory for the other side. You arrogant, cheating, swindling twat.