Plain Sailing

Bryan has lived a long and comfortable life with Marjory and now in retirement with their two children long since flown the nest there is little to break their familiar old routines except the occasional patter and chatter of grandchildren on their infrequent but always welcome visits. Marjory is happy in the kitchen while Bryan potters around the garden or down in his shed and lately he has taken to leaving Marjory to her soap operas while he has a regular pint or two at the village square pub.

On one of these convivial evenings he regaled the assembled revellers with risqué tales from his courting days; quite the rake was old Bryan in his youth, with many anecdotes about escape from the nearby girls’ boarding school dormitories after lights out and later, during his time in the army, as the Don Juan of Aldershot. Soon his Wednesday night revelations became quite a fixture down the Crown & Anchor, especially as he began to spice up his narrative with more than a sprinkling of erotic detail and advice for adventurous couples.

One night the pub landlady asked him if he would address the next meeting of the Women’s Institute the following Wednesday night, as a guest speaker and so flattered was he to be invited he accepted without stopping for a moment to consider how he would explain this appearance to Marjory. Marjory, you see, had long ago given up having any interests in the bedroom department beyond duvet covers and fitted sheets.

For a few days he prevaricated but he knew that if he didn’t tell her, sooner or later one of the village ladies would let slip and he doubted very much that Marjory would see the funny side. Instead he told her that he had been asked to deliver a lecture about the joys of sailing the Norfolk Broads, as he and Marjory had done on a couple of occasions early in their married life. It sounded a suitably staid and safe topic. Meanwhile, down in his shed, Bryan carefully polished off some of his best old memories and embellished them for effect, come the big night.

Well the village hall was packed and nobody left unsatisfied. In a perfectly pitched talk he brought the house down with gasps at his daring, giggles at his cheeky asides, plenty of nodding and taking of mental notes at his nuggets of marital advice and uproarious laughter at his well-timed punchlines. The meeting finally broke up and the ladies went home in gaggles, laughing and joking and nudging each other with provocative cackles as they went. More than a few married men about the borough were pleasantly surprised at the up-tick in conjugal activity over the next few days.

Even Marjory intuited that something was up. As she went about the village she sensed an air of intrigue and she was sure she heard, on more than one occasion, a stifled snigger, quickly cut short, as she walked into the newsagents or the greengrocer. It was all most unusual. Then, one morning as she took her little dog for a walk, she found the Crown landlady matching her pace and sidling up to her. “Your Bryan is a dark horse, isn’t he?” she said, “Who would have known we had such an expert in our midst?”

Surf's up!

Marjory was taken aback. “Whatever do you mean?” she asked, whereupon the landlady heaped praise on Bryan’s eloquence and all-round grasp of his subject, making plain her envy for Marjory’s good fortune in having married him. “Well that’s odd,” said Marjory, “As I recall, he’s only done it twice. The first time he was sick and the second time his hat blew off! “

Ho ho ho, it's magic!

Today’s hilarious yet hideous reality is the unedifying Queen’s speech in which the coalition promised to do loads of stuff they will never do and Ed Miliband’s response tried to suggest he had the first clue about the disaffection of the voters with politics and politicians. He used all the right words, most of them in the right order, then destroyed the illusion of temporary sanity by neatly listing Labour’s ersatz, listening-to-the-people response. A housing bill, an immigration bill a minimum wage bill… a bill for this, a bill for that, an energy bill, a lack-of-energy bill, a duck bill, a platypus bill, a bill for bloody everything.

For pity’s sake Ed, we are drowning in bills; for some of us our entire life is spent either working to pay our own bills or to pay the tax to pay you lot to dream up ‘those’ bills. We may as well just burn most of our wages for all the good they bring us. But I don’t expect Ed or his ilk to ever understand this; Justine probably does the paperwork in their household anyway, or maybe they have an accountant; doesn’t everybody? Tony Blair may have holed Labour's empty vessel with the outright lie of unfulfilled ‘education, education, education’ but the millipede wants to go further still and brave the stormy seas on a raft of legislation, legislation, legislation!

Fortunately, yer Uncle Batsby has his spies out and about with their ears to the ground and I can reveal that, like the BBC, ‘I have learned’ the following important rumours: Worried about your weight? Worry no more, because Labour’s new Gravity Bill will reset the dysfunctional ‘mass’ market. By capping the kilograms nobody need weigh any more than their ideal weight ever again. The obesity crisis solved by a waft of His Celestial Majesty’s magic philanthropy stick. But why stop with simply altering the laws of physics?

Replace the tedious and convoluted legal system, so tortuous and verbose that all it does is make rich men of the worst lawyers, with a law and order bill containing a statement banning all crime. I wonder that nobody thought about it before. Starving? Make starving illegal; job done. Similarly, why declare war on want when you can just pass a bill declaring want a crime in itself? Legislate for longevity, life, love and loveliness and all will be well, says Magic Ed… from his lofty perch atop the magic toadstool, waggling his limp little wand, down among the faeries in the bosky glades of Dingley Dell.

What is wrong with these people, who pretend to feel our pain even as they recline on soft, downy cushions, the powerful opiates of the money-morphine isolating their nervous systems entirely from the world of human pain and suffering? I don’t want my politicians to empathise – or worse, pretend to empathise – I want them to actually do something. I want them clean and sober, up off their arses and leading. I genuinely don’t need to believe they are my friends and every time one of them lays a metaphorical hand on my shoulder and tells me she cares, all I can sense is the unadulterated whiff of hypocritical bullshit.

But hey, look on the good side: today is the Newark by-election! And whatever happens between UKIP and the Conservatives, Ed’s lot are in for a thumping and could well end up disappearing in a puff of smoke. Abraca-fucking-dabra.

Hearth and Home

The Nationwide Building Society announced yesterday that house prices had risen by 11% across the UK in the past twelve months. If that’s the case, Mr Nationwide, perhaps you can tell me why my own house is not only worth considerably less than I paid for it eight years ago (despite being fully renovated in that period) but is likely to fetch not a penny more than it would have done last year… or the year before? As always, supposedly ‘national’ statistics are pretty much useless in painting an accurate picture.

It’s like the weather forecast; no matter what the general prognosis, the majority’s experience of specific conditions will differ. In one village an enormous cumulonimbus dumps hundreds of tonnes of the wet stuff in under half an hour while in the next the cricket continues unabated until only the cucumber sandwiches stop play. Similarly, recession or not, companies fail and people are made redundant while others prosper and profit, yet the statistics deal only with aggregated productivity and fail to tell the real stories of the majority of individuals.

What’s my beef? It’s the fact that not only will our own government rarely properly consider and accommodate regional variations, acting instead on overall figures that are representative of almost nobody, but that the EU feels compelled to butt in and do the same. Help to buy has been a real boon to people trying to buy their first house in areas outside central Londonistan yet the commissars are now ‘suggesting’ to Westminster that they take steps to curb this apparent economic bubble by cutting off the only means many people may ever have to own their own home.

How dare the EU, having shown utter profligacy throughout its existence, turn its attention to dictating the detailed policies of supposedly sovereign nations, especially those who thank their lucky stars they didn’t adopt the euro. “Tractor production at an all-time high, comrades. Cease making tractors and divert all resources to bringing in the glorious turnip harvest!” Cue the mighty tractor army of the south-east gathering in a record tonnage of the favourite communist comestible while in the tractor-deprived north the crops rot in the fields. The national statistics show only good news, while in some parts of the country the only growth industries are undertakers and clothes recyclers.

The human rights industry grants rights to criminals whilst denying justice to victims. Discrimination legislation discriminates and criminalises the majority. Employment law puts people out of work. The common agricultural policy makes farming unprofitable and food scarce. Energy policy makes electricity unaffordable, or a luxury item for some. And importing ‘vibrant’ third-world multiculturalism makes no-go areas of our inner cities. For every blue-flagged leisure centre or community outreach hub apparently paid for with ‘EU money’ we have paid IN ten or twenty-fold.

House? Luxury!

We have been ripped off, lied to, insulted, affronted, subjugated and treated as vassals throughout our whole sorry history of association with this shabby ‘communism-lite’ experiment. And still the arguments always spring from an assumption that without the EU nothing good could have come to pass, because whatever successes we do achieve it is easy to turn the passive fact that we are a member into the triumphal and causal claim that it is because we are a member. Just remember all that when your EU-fawning offspring are still eating you out of the family home at the age of 40.

The Blair Essentials

Tony Blair. Anthony Charles Lynton Blair. What a nasty, treacherous, mendacious, evil little puppet he is. Statesman for sale to the highest bidder. Start a war, become peace envoy. Deliberately adulterate a tolerant population, then decry those among it who find tolerance a one-way street. Declaim “education, education, education” then preside over a sustained and quite deliberate erosion of the same. Cast aside that same deluded, under-educated generation in favour of your cheaper, imported wage-slaves then label racist all who speak up for them.

The New Labour project marked a deliberate separation of the British people from its democracy and ushered in a new politics, practised by and for an entirely political class. The last few dinosaurs – politicians who had previously worked in ordinary jobs for a living – are rapidly becoming extinct; those currently in office who can claim non-political work experience come largely from the law, the newspapers or, bizarrely, the world of entertainment. Soon, however, only the direct political entrant will have a chance of being nominated.

Politics, national, corporate or familial was always a game based on power before principle, office before efficacy, but at least it ultimately had to serve, albeit imperfectly, the greater good of those who gave it power. But the gradual shift away from dependency on the electorate seemed to enter a new phase under Blair. Under his imperious reign politicians no longer asked what the people wanted but smugly told them what they were going to get… and what they would get if they didn’t like it. The old joke “It doesn’t matter who you vote for, the government always gets in” became a joke no more.

Political parties no longer engage the public who just feel that that wherever you place your ‘X’ it makes little difference. They don’t get the local man or woman who knows them and will represent their concerns. If it’s a safe seat they get a quota-filler, or a spotty-faced political dynasty product in the form of a mini-Blair/Straw/Prescott who will contemptuously hoover up their tribal loyalty then ignore them until the next election. If it’s a vital marginal they will witness a bout between rising Westminster superstars, none of whom will give a fuck once the voting’s done.

And even in the face of the current ‘interesting times’ their only concerns are how to counter the appeal of other parties, how to play the political game, but never how best to serve those whose votes they crave. Once upon a time the electorate turned out in force and had the power to unseat the ineffective but more often than not today people neither know nor care who their MP is; it makes no difference so they just don’t bother. Elections are decided on a dwindling turnout of the politically motivated and nobody else matters.

Which Blair project?

Then, once they are in post their sights are set on higher goals – European commission positions where votes simply don’t matter; all they have to do is follow the bidding of their new political masters and the little people, those countless millions who have to live with the disastrous consequences of shallow political whimsy, are powerless. Remember all this as you watch Tony Blair, who is once again on manoeuvres for such a position. And when Anthony Charles Lynton Blair finally ascends, god-like, to the Euro-throne, say a prayer for the soul of our dear, departed democracy.

Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it

Does anybody remember who won the local council elections? Surely it has to have been

Labour with a 324 seat gain. The overall picture still puts the Conservatives ahead with 8296 seats overall, but they lost 236 in the election; that’s a comparative gain of 560 seats by Labour. So it’s no wonder the Tories have been quiet about it all, allowing UKIP to take the limelight a little over the subsequent Euro elections; burying bad news, so to speak. My thanks to the always interesting Peter Hitchens for highlighting this.

His blog neatly sums up how tricky it is to separate fact from fiction in politics and indeed even in the news. If you have an area of intellectual expertise – the law, technology, business, the sciences – you already know how the newspapers are almost universally incapable of relaying the truth to their readers. And even worse, they indulge our confirmation bias with astonishing brazenness. Thus the planning of a new wind turbine is either: a harmful attack on people’s health and sanity (Daily Mail) a progressive and necessary step towards fuel sustainability (Guardian) lining the back pockets of Britain’s parasitic land-owning classes (Socialist Worker) or a new holy temple of enlightenment and salvation (Green Party News).

There is no real place for the truth in all of this as there is no such thing as the truth when it comes to politics. Oh, there are facts all right, but facts are difficult and often need specialist knowledge (we used to call it education) to analyse them. Raw data can be difficult to discover and even more difficult to convert into meaning and even in the supposedly open information exchange of the internet most of us rely on others to do the donkey work. My blog for instance, is always written from my own perspective of what is right and wrong and while obviously always showing the one true path, might not be to everybody’s taste.

So the next few years are going to be really interesting. Let’s assume that whoever wins the general election next year will have had to offer some form of referendum on our membership, or otherwise, of the European Union. Like our party political system there are die-hard Europhiles and Europhobes whose minds will not be changed, but the opinions of probably half the electorate are up for grabs. How are they going to be able to decide which way to vote? And I’m serious about this; whose version of ‘the truth’ will they go with?

Them 'as wants' to stay in the EU have years of momentum on their side. The project rumbles on, crushing all in its path and nobody dares challenge the received wisdom that we are better off on the train pissing out than running along the platform trying to piss in. But who said we needed to piss in, or on, anything anyway? Some supposedly foregone conclusions are nothing of the sort yet remain unchallenged.

They say that Britain couldn’t survive without immigration. They say our coffee shops would grind to a halt, our offices would never get cleaned, cars never get made and crops never get picked if we had to rely on British workers. What on earth did we do for the thousands of years BEFORE the EU then? It’s only because successive socialist-inclined governments over the last half century have allowed our values to be steadily eroded and have taken easier options – easier for them. Instead of doing the hard things – maintaining or improving education, guarding morals against a rising tide of laissez-faire, do-what-you-like individualism, instilling civic pride and a healthy level of patriotism and yes, putting Britain and the British first.

Oh it’s all very old-fashioned, I know, especially with the seductive myths of happy multicultural diversity and all that shite, but those who make policy have almost exclusively NEVER had to suffer the consequences. Even those politicians from relatively humble backgrounds know that having risen to cabinet level it is unthinkable that they will ever have to return to the type of lives the greater majority of their constituents put up with. I still believe it is up to the individual to make their own way in life, but if government has one purpose, surely it is to protect the environment that makes aspiration achievable.

What if, unencumbered by EU regulation and socio-political group-think, Britain could home-grow and train, as we used to, the very best in the world? What if life outside the tired, old union sluggard is not mere survival but confident and successful and vibrant and the UK has in its grasp the possibility of becoming a world powerhouse again? Yesterday’s ‘The Big Questions’ single enquiry was “Is there life after death” and despite all the confident assertions, nobody really had any truthful answers. Nobody knows until they go and there wasn’t one audience member who had actually come back from the dead to tell us what lies beyond.

Brexit or bust?

Well as sure as eggs is eggs the European Union will, like all administrations, run its course and decline into obscurity. Indeed, we may already have witnessed its early heart attacks. Nobody knows what awaits our part of the world after the EU shuffles off its mortal coil and joins the choir-invisible and it’s certain that nobody in the here and now can say. Independence might not only be new and interesting and exciting, it might be the start of a whole new global success story, but one thing IS for sure. If we don’t try it we’ll never know.