The Fabian Formula

Settle down children. Now, today we are going to start with sums. There’s no need to boo, my dears, because Uncle Len says that sums are simple; sums are fun. Now, repeat after me, “One, two, three, Clause Four…” What is a clause, I hear you ask? There’s no need for you to know that right now, but as long as it is followed by a four it is a very good thing. One day you will need to remember that, but for now it will be our little secret.

We used to say that school days were the happiest days of your life; now it’s likely they may become the most politically active too as ‘Red Len’ McCluskey’s union, Unite, wants to enlist malleable young brains in the cause of Communism. Len knows what he’s talking about – he worked out which side his bread was buttered early on, becoming a shop steward at the tender age of nineteen, back in the days when the unions really did tell the government how to run the country.

If the thought of your kids being gently indoctrinated into the ‘four legs good; some are more equal than others’ machine fills you with no fear, then it’s probably because you don’t realise it is part of the Fabian Society’s long game. To realise how long you only have to reflect that yesterday was the 100th birthday of its propaganda sheet, The New Statesman. Current regular contributors to “The Staggers” include such exemplars of unbiased opinion as Mehdi Hasan, Will Self, David Blanchflower and  Laurie Penny, peddling neo-Marxism as intellectual and ‘progressive’.

Persuasion is normal, we all do it all the time; letting those around us know what is acceptable and what is not by gentle repetition of preferred themes. In this way we both mould and are moulded to fit into our little life niches. If we’re not comfortable we can move on, but it’s rare not to accept some compromises in order to fit in, because straightening up and flying right is ultimately easier than fighting all the time. But who is doing the straightening and what course are they setting?

The EU has been gently steering your kids into an uncritically Europhile mindset for years and now Unite wants to lead those same ductile ducklings to the picket lines by funding video lessons in the art of protest. Were it a balanced view of the democratic process and how to take part that would be fine, but the material appears to focus on how to oppose local businesses and fight plans for privatisation. In other words there is a deliberate bias towards the Fabians’ ideals, dressed up in the harmless ‘fun’ of dreaming up slogans and making placards.

Two legs bad!

You can tell Len McCluskey what you think of this idea by following @Untie4Len on Twitter and putting forward your point of view. But for now, children, it’s back to the lesson. Repeat after me, “Two plus two equals five.”

KT and the Sunshine (Banned)

It is quite possible that the last time I watched The Apprentice was the 2007 series where Katie Hopkins walked away from the Brillo-bearded Sralan Sugar. The format was already going stale and has since become an obvious and unwatchable freak show, but the Katie Hopkins One-Woman Phenomenon has gone on to become a triumph. KT’s schtick? Good old, plain speaking; unapologetically saying what political correctness doesn’t want to hear.

In a world where you can offend by proxy – for instance, last week I was berated and blocked by a long term twitter follower because I retweeted a picture she found distasteful (although it was actually hilarious!) – La Holmes just carries on regardless. And she’s loved for it. She has well over 50,000 followers and only a tiny number of them follow just to be outraged. The rest of us, ‘for the lulz’.

Here’s a sample tweet from yesterday:

Katie Hopkins  @KTHopkins Marvellous. It is Learning Difficulties week. Is there an Academic Excellence week? This country is a liberal left leaning minefield of pc.

See what I mean? Her followers retweet such pithy, philosophical musings then sit back and await the oncoming storm. What fun to see just how very humourless the left can be. They call her a troll, but she’s not hiding under any bridge, she’s just sitting there in full view, dangling a baited hook and my, do those wrigglers bite! Anyway, as for Learning Difficulties Week, I bet you could see their lips moving as they negotiated that particular sub-140 character missive.

I watched Benefits Britain 1949 yesterday - the episode focussing on the allocation of council houses. The clearest message was not of fairness or unfairness then and now, but of the ingrained sense of entitlement displayed by today’s participants, along with aspirations way beyond any apparent ability. In this respect it had something in common with The Apprentice but whereas the Sugar Show deflates the arrogant self-worshipper, Benefits Britain shows the unfortunate obverse of the no-fail culture.

How utterly reliant the general population appear to have become. The state must house them, feed them, nurture and eventually contain the worst excesses of their children. These people are not turning out the next generation of doctors, scientists or engineers; they are simply replenishing and expanding the common herd. And because our soft, liberal, socialist society dares not face the truth we need commentators like Katie (and me) to remind you of the forgotten notion of self-reliance. (On BB1949, it was a Polish vegetable picker who had to tell you all to get off your arses.)

While the Labour Party have allegedly banned the use of brand-toxic words like benefits and welfare and while the anti-frackers dance to the tune of the giant corporations that control so-called green energy and while people languish in front of Jeremy Kyle, their self-esteem slipping between the sofa cushions, KT was up at the crack of dawn this morning to review the papers on Sky news. I tweeted this fact to be met with a few dissenting replies and therein lies part of the problem.

People find it hard to listen to a message if they despise the messenger, but isn’t this exactly what Goebbels exploited so well in reverse? Thus Labour, desperate not to offend, wheel out the platitudes, spouted by friendly we-love-you mouthpieces, knowing the recipients of such unaffordable largesse will be oblivious to the very reality Katie dared to repeat this morning. The paying public have had enough of the welfare state.

See? She says what you wish you could!

So, three cheers and say what you like about Katie Hopkins; if she was up for office, I’d vote for her! (Although I’m not entirely sure I’d want to work for her. :o)

Frackaday!

While sleeping off the night’s excesses amid a mountain of uncollected bin bags in Brighton I was surprised to bump into local MP, Caroline Lucas, in the early hours of this morning. “Community Service?” I asked, surprised that the court system had acted so quickly after her Public Order offence arrest yesterday. “No,” she said, “this is my regular shift. The council pay double time on the bins after hours and I need to pay off the overdraft.”

Surprised that an MP would be short of cash and brought so low as to need a second job, I pressed her on the matter

“No, it’s this global overdraft.” she said and went on to explain that humans have used up all the natural resources the Earth can provide for the year and are now in 'overdraft'. Caroline explained that we are at 'earth overshoot day', and have exhausted supplies such as land, trees and fish and outstripped the planet's annual capacity to absorb waste products including carbon dioxide. According to the Global Footprint Network, for the rest of the year, the world is in ecological debt, with supplies depleted, land degraded and carbon dioxide building up in the atmosphere

I gazed up at the fresh dawn skies and undepleted land and countered that I had never noticed the world shutting down after August before and asked, “What happens next year then? Does the planet get a fresh stock of resources every New Year’s Day?” Caroline wasn’t listening. Instead she was furiously tapping at her iPad to find the evidence. “See?” she said, showing me, “We should aim to be like Gabon!” I gazed at a graphic. Sure enough, Gabon is well into ecological credit

“But Gabon’s a low-population, fertile, oil-rich country isn’t it?” I asked. “Yes,” she replied, “but here in the west we have a massive energy deficit. We are running out of oil and gas and soon we won’t be able to keep the lights on!” Her voice had edged an octave higher and her trademark stridency was showing through. “In a decade we will be like a Third World. When democracy fails we must take direct action to save our country now!

“But they told us in 1973 that the oil would run out by 1990,” I said, adding “and they also said there would be a new ice age by the end of the last century. None of that happened. And anyway, we are sitting on a gazillion cubic metres of natural gas, right here in Britain.

Caroline pondered this for a moment. “But it’s deep underground, in the shale,” she said, ”our only option is renewables!” She gazed intently at her iPad screen and found the page she was looking for. “Look!” she said, displaying the National Grid page, where the combined might of our thousands of creaking wind turbines was currently supplying less than two percent of our off-peak energy consumption. “Oh…"

We sat there in silence for a few minutes, as seagulls soared overhead in the clear skies. High overhead an airliner left chalk-mark contrails on the blue canvas. “Windpower won’t get you on your holidays.” I suggested and with that she stood up, resolved. The screen on her iPad faded as her battery died. “Can I borrow your phone?” she asked, “I need to book a taxi for Balcombe.”

Caroline Lucas - doing it right!

I sighed. “Back to the picket line?” I asked.

“Frack that,” said Cazza, “I’m with Cuadrilla – We must Dash for Gas!”

There be Dragons!

Everybody loves a bogeyman. In the face of a good old yarn about fire-breathing monsters tearing up the earth, eating whole villages alive and leaving behind the stench of brimstone, logic has no hearing. We’d rather thrill to tales of an evil Frankenstein who can create dangerous life from spare parts, than address the likely-impossibility of the science. In the past humans have been led to perform blood sacrifice on an industrial scale to assuage the dread caused by unappeasable forces of nature.

The ability of the human imagination to conjure up fear is so powerful that the shaman who stokes the fires can tinker with a crude fundamental unease to dream up ever more outlandish versions of the threat – add glowing eyes here, a touch of acid there. Invent an earth-shattering narrative and bingo, wait for the tributes roll in. In fact, draw up a detailed enough myth and you can make a living from it for ever more; ask the Vatican.

It seems that, even in the twenty-first century, we are no more able to overcome our irrational instincts than were our forebears and while we may not, beyond the age of ten, believe in demons and dragons any more, some of us are all too ready to invest our ancestral fear-seeking in other fripperies. Billions are spent in holding back the waves of time as the age and beauty industry peddles its outlandish claims. And it appears we’d rather accept a constructed conspiracy theory based on an unlikely series of sinister events than the much simpler explanation that the driver was a bit drunk; he crashed, she died.

But not everybody is that stupid. Oh no. For those who care not for their appearance and hold no reverence for the memory of princesses spurned; for those who see through the mountebankery of the eternal-youth racket there are bigger fish to fry; at least there would be had they not seen through the blatant lies of the protein production industry and turned to veganism instead. For them, the big evil is oil and money, money and oil. The two go hand in hand and the modern-day crusader knows that where there is money, there is evil. They’ve never forgotten the Sheriff of Nottingham

The pragmatic approach to the extraction of oil and gas recognises that we have been digging, drilling and demolishing for centuries to extract the materials we want. Mountains have been flattened or cut in half to bring roads and rail and waterways have been diverted to create canals and reservoirs. Whole settlements have been abandoned – but more often because the resource has run out or become too difficult to extract than because of the adverse effects of the industry. But that’s too prosaic for the fracking protesters.

Suddenly, in an age of unprecedented wealth due largely to the harnessing of cheap energy, we have to flagellate ourselves in penance as a new religion comes of age. After fifty years of myth and legend they claim the perverse narrative that doing the thing that has brought all the benefits of progress is a palpable evil as dread as any dragon, as powerful as any volcano. Whipped into froth by their own high priestesses they will brook no argument. Feed Gaia or die in her vengeful flames, they believe.

Right on, sistah! 

The Anti-Gas movement is no less an industry than gas itself, with its own lies and legends. There is even some credible suspicion that its furtherance is funded by the inefficient and unsustainable-without-subsidy wind power industry. What is certain is that the convinced anti-fracker is a believer and not a critical observer, quick to deny others the known benefits of cheap energy in support of an unproven ideology. I do hope they don’t hypocritically employ the fruits of the industry they so fervently oppose. But, of course, pointing that out would spoil a good story.

All Aboard!

So another day older and the Internet Outrage Bus, powered by the mighty, howling hamster wheel of rage, rumbles steadily on its way to Offence Archipelago where its cargo of miscreants will be discharged into Shameonyou Square to protest and demand the immediate execution of anybody, anywhere, who causes the tiniest amount of distress to anybody, anywhere. But don’t panic, I shall have the snipers positioned and ready to do good work.

Honestly, it’s as if some people have nothing to but patrol social media with a view to taking offence on our behalf at the flimsiest of imagined slights, the tiniest of unintended slurs. Oh wait, that’s exactly what they do. In order to seek out the perpetrators of these heinous crimes against humanity, these hair-trigger guardians of our freedom from freedom, lurk quietly in the background, sniffing out the smallest morsel of distress like a... like a... well, like a troll, actually. So, the moral crusaders are resorting to trolling other people’s conversations to bring about a world in which, should anybody be offended, somebody must be jailed.

I expect the police are delighted. One press of the [Caitlin] Moron Button and it'll be, “What did the nasty boy say, ma’am? You can’t tell me because it was so hurtful? That’s good enough for me, get him in the back of the van, lads.” No hassle, 100% clear-up rate and very little in the way of knives and fists and broken bottles to contend with. In the future you will all be incarcerated for your own safety and any argument will be treated as insurrection, to be met with extreme state-administered violence; you may be forced to listen to hippies loudly playing bongos without any apparent irony at an anti intolerance demo near you.

Through the door just now, an important communication from South East Water; what can it be? Important supply-disrupting work to be carried out? Compulsory water meter fitting? An increase in the charges? No, it’s a “How did we do?” survey, whose sole purpose is to head off at the pass any future attempt to claim they didn’t listen to their customers; to prevent any offence been taking. Never mind the piss that’s been taken with their customer’s money, offering £2000 in prize money for a draw from completed surveys, let alone the cost of paying somebody to write the damned thing, plus printing and postage. I’m outraged, but I suspect it’s the wrong sort of outrage for Twitter.

So where is it all going anyway, this outrage entourage? Once speech is curtailed entirely will we find offence in the way people walk, or the clothes that they wear? Or the quizzical expression on their offensive-looking physiognomy as they try to present a mien of absolute neutrality? Luckily, science has the answer. It seems that in the future we may be able to exist just as brains, detached from our frail and hateful human bodies. Free from the possibility of animation and thus physical contact and able to wage war ONLY with words. Oh and remote controlled robots.

 Bring it on. I look forward to a lexicon-laden labyrinth of illiberal legal offence-seeking bollocks to occupy us well into the next millennium.