Jerusalem!

Yesterday was another day of manifesto launches, nationwide interviews and a hundred and one demands for government action on this, that and global warming cooling climate wossname. I caught a glimpse of part of The Daily Politics and their scanty coverage of ‘the regions’ (if it’s not London, it’s just ‘the regions’) and they were all banging the same anti-austerity drum; all crying out for more and more funding. “The government must bring jobs. The government must ‘invest’. The government must bring joy and treasure. The government must make me, my kids and their kids and their kids and their kids happy forever.”

Well, here’s a better idea; an idea we can actually afford: Instead of robbing the rich to keep the poor penniless-and-pointless, just say “NO!” Ignore the begging bowls and leave them to it. If businesses will not relocate north without incentive let the regions themselves provide the incentive – government is hopeless at creating productive jobs, but abject poverty is BRILLIANT at incentivising innovation and invention and lowering expectations. So what if the pits closed or the textile trade went to where they were grateful for the nasty, grinding soulless graft? Their time is gone and if the local industrial landscape won’t support your numbers you do have choices.

There is no natural law, no nebulous human right that says you must be able to extend your crappy, rickety genepool while staying put. In any case there is something utterly depressing about generation after generation being brought screaming into the same sink estate and relying, from the outset, on state handouts because thirty or forty or a hundred years ago the economics stopped working for you. Sheffield may have been built on steel and coal, but face it, the former third world does it so much better and so much cheaper. And besides, dogged clinging to the rocks of ‘community’ may just be part of what is holding you back. In-breeding becomes inevitable if you refuse to embrace change.

If you are worried about the future prospects for your children then either do something about those prospects or don’t have children. If you don’t expect anybody else to support you, you may be pleasantly surprised by what you can achieve. And if your region can’t be revived after decades of pumping in other people’s money maybe there’s a message there too. Do the decent thing and either get on your bike or just allow your expensive-but-useless, union card carrying line to die out naturally.

'Ey up! It's all gone a bit quiet...

If you don’t want your stark natural and industrial beauty, your rolling hills your old satanic mills enough, then let them go. Because without your whining welfare-enabled feebleness, without your short NHS-dependent life spans and without your depressingly helpless pleas for outside help ‘the regions’ will deliver or depopulate, in the process becoming more attractive places to make a living, supporting the types of communities who can thrive in those environments. Be it self-sufficient eco-types or new entrepreneurs maybe we can once again build Jerusalem in that green and pleasant land. But I’m fucked if I’m paying for it.

Blairey Superstitious...

That Tony Blair has come out for Ed Miliband shows how desperate Labour are for votes at any cost in the coming election because, surely, it is all or nothing for them now. After all the distance Ed has tried to put between himself and the Tory-Lite facsimile of New Labour the party faithful clearly have no faith in the old way that Ed represents. Big gamble, because Blair is as hated by almost as many Labour supporters as he is by the centre-right, whose garb he adopted as a Fabian wolf in the sheep’s clothing of woolly-soft faux conservatism before allowing his chancellor to do his worst.

His worst? To plunge us further into the welfare mire from which the coalition has tried to extract us, one sticky welly at a time. Because Labour is nothing if it isn’t spending other people’s money and then demanding more. A great deal that is wrong with our country can be summed up with a few of JFK’s famous words: “Ask not what your country can do for you…” If people did more for themselves then there would be fewer Marys in the world.

Mary is a hobby alcoholic; it’s an occupation of sorts. To ring the changes she also dabbles in other mood-altering substances when the opportunity arises but times are hard and there is only so much cash to go around. To this end she is grateful for her several children, who give her unchallenged access to the benefit bounty of free money for kids, rent and Council Tax. These, of course, are well-known gateway benefits, leading users to seek ever more exotic handout-highs.

 The children, as is natural when you have no aspiration, rarely attend school regularly and they are in and out of the courts and state care as often as Mary is in and out of rehab and treatment programmes. Between them they cost the country many hundreds of thousands of pounds in failed education initiatives, court costs and frequent unnecessary visits by the emergency services, called in by concerned neighbours because of the violent stand-up rows, which replace normal functional communication.

It’s likely the kids will never work and will inherit many of Mary’s troubles, going on to reproduce for recreation and soaking up ever more healthcare and social services resources. The brood will spread and in a few generations will fill a small sink estate and its attendant state-provided army of people whose miserable job it is to contain their worst excesses and limit the damage they can do to others. Multiply the problems by the number of Marys and it is clear that public spending could be vastly reduced were they simply not there.

It's our country now...

Draconian measures would be needed to expunge the blight though, and any party attempting it is automatically damned as monstrous, but it is clear to most that it can’t continue. If the country isn’t allowed to do for Mary, then Mary must do the right thing and exercise restraint. Fat chance. The rot started long ago but it accelerated wildly under the ‘caring’ and ever watchful evil eyes of Blair’s administration. New Labour solved nothing, they just took your money and concealed the crap under the carpet. The money is still all gone – where do you think Labour will look for more?

Skint

I had a long chat to my mother yesterday. In 1972 she went back to work having got the last of four kids (I'm the eldest) safely into what was then called Junior School (We had real schools back then with only the earliest glimmer of the notion of holding everybody back on account of some misguided egalitarian nonsense) She took a job as a representative for the Empire Stores home shopping catalogue company and largely touted their wares to exactly the kind of working class family we were.

She was shocked to discover, lurking in the teeming council estates full of the genuine working class, a new kind of denizen; families who managed to survive entirely without regular work. No, not the lovable Barbaras and Toms of the self-sufficient Good Life model, but the prototypes for the ‘unwaged’ underclass now under the protective custody of the Labour Party and its apologists.

Narrowly avoiding the all-too regular occurrence of the limited-to-140-characters Twitter-spat last night, my interlocutors were demanding I furnish them with examples of the harm done by socialism. Actually they were mostly critical of my apparently wanting to lay the blame at the feet of Karl Marx, which I absolutely wasn’t doing. I was however, suggesting that the origins of the widespread take-up of socialism lay with Marx, Engels and other young Hegelians and the whole class-struggle, means-of-production malarkey.

As it turned out, I didn’t need to point at the many examples of murderous socialist regimes corralled under the various versions and nomenclatures of Communist or Socialist, collectivism, such as those of Soviet Russia, Nazism, North Korea, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia and so on. All I had to do was suggest they watch Channel Four’s new documentary Skint, filmed on a Scunthorpe estate; the real life version of Shameless.

On a small scale there is absolutely no doubt that some form of social collectivism must exist in order to prevent us tearing each other limb from limb. We used to call that ‘the family’ – remember them? You know, where children were brought up in nurturing environments and taught the rules and given aspirations to better themselves while the government’s role was to provide educational and legislative structures to make that possible. But as the scale of government intervention grows, control is lost.

Socialism maybe doesn’t intend to impoverish people but it always does, as opportunistic and resourceful humans adapt to their environment and choose, if regular work is not available or pays too little, the kind of lifestyle seen on Skint. Black marketeering, petty theft, casual acceptance of dangerous drug use and gross, anti-social behaviour all become normalised and accepted modes of living. The answer to the doomed life cycles thus created by the good intentions of big government surely can’t just be more big government. I have a sense, at least, that the coalition knows this, just as Labour desperately tries to ignore it.

The true face of productive Britain

What’s the solution? Short of a brief and deep humane cull, I have no quick answers, but neither do those who seek to rule us. But at least Skint answered one question that has long puzzled Britain’s social philosophers. Much of the programme centred around the unschooled, uncontrolled, fifteen-year-old jailbird-in-waiting, Connor, as he made his mother’s life a misery. If you’re looking for a contender, then I propose Connor as the real c**t in Scunthorpe.