Spud Gun

We live in a highly regulated world of standards and rules. You can’t get a job digging holes until you’ve jumped through the hoops of health and safety and gained – often at great expense – the requisite certificate that informs your employer’s insurers that you tick all the essential boxes to indemnify them against claims due to any shortfalls in your ability to actually dig holes. In fact, the more pre-eminent and pervasive the health, safety, diversity, inclusivity and equality agenda, the further down the hierarchy of priorities is pushed an ability to actually do the job.

I train electricians for a living and just as in every other industry there is a nagging suspicion that each successive intake is given more leeway than the last and there is little doubt that every decade sees a lowering of actual technical and academic standards, concomitant with a raising of the bar to entry of inconsequential hurdles such as site safety cards, registration with a plethora of upstart controlling bodies and a host of qualifications taught to the test, with little regard by the men in black in the awarding bodies for whether or not they contribute to or detract from getting the right men in the job.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, say the French, ever ready with the mots justes for just these occasions. Same old same old, same old shit. But after all, it’s how we like it. The latest British Social Attitudes Survey reveals – surprise surprise – that we preferred it when we were all a bit more the same than we are now. We pretend to tolerate difference but really we want to be sure of what we’re getting. Which is the main reason why tons of Jersey Royal potatoes are being left to rot; despite being perfectly decent pommes de terre they fall outside the size limits set by supermarket buyers on behalf of their customers. Better in their eyes that we pay a bit more for uniformity than have agricultural efficiency driven by a demand for cheaper food.

What is wrong with us? An entire generation has grown up with nary a sight of Esther Rantzen’s misshapen home-growns. Which brings me to poor old Ed Miliband; Labour is falling out of love with its very own odd-shaped vegetable. Sunny Hundal wrote on Labour List’s website about why, in his view, Ed still matters: but once the buyers are dead set on having the right shaped legume it’s a hard task selling a mutant variant. Ed’s Old Labour rhetoric is far too earthy; from the days when you had to roll up your sleeves and clean your veg yourself. Voters today, the few that are left, want nice uniform, sanitised and predictable varieties of politician with just the right amount of cultured blandness. Or so they think.

Westminster used to be full of colourful and popular mavericks but as fewer and fewer Members of Parliament have ever lived outside of politics is it any wonder that almost none of them seem to know what their constituents really care about? Had they been given the chance, Jersey’s potato piles could have found buyers among the less squeamish public who only wanted mash anyway; sod that Tesco only wanted to sell them what they decided was right. Which brings us back to Ed.

Ed Lightyear: To oblivion... and beyond!

The scourge of governments in recent years has been the rise of the Special Adviser. They, the fresh produce of politics spring fully grown from their PPE degrees and run amuck through the corridors of power, whispering their clever-clever ideological thoughts into the willing, wet-behind ears of baby-faced ministers-in-waiting. But if Ed had been born in the north, as is traditional for Labour MPs, he would have realised that his inability to connect with the electorate stemmed from a simple misunderstanding of his Oxford-educated accent. You see, just like big John Prescott, instead of hiring SpAds, he’s all along been taking his advice from spuds.

Talking 'bout Your Generation

I grew up in a Britain which, having expended its last gasp in defending the free world from Nazi totalitarianism seemed to slump and give itself up to Soviet totalitarianism. The unions called the shots and gave the working man – a man who formerly had to fend for himself – the impression that he and his comrades held the keys to the country. They did, but only in the sense that they turned the lock at the beck and call of their shop steward masters. Collectivism turned out to be a powerful voting bloc but did little to truly improve the lot of those with only their labour to sell.

Fortunately, for a while, their labour was in high demand, until uncompetitive practices eroded what was left of Britain’s manufacturing base, business owners sold up, packed up and took their savings away from hideously punitive taxation and for the best and brightest of our scientists and entrepreneurs the lure of the swirling maelstrom of the brain drain proved too powerful a pull. By the seventies Britain was dead in the water but by then the lumpen proletariat was seduced into believing that it was the responsibility of the state, not the individual to make everything better. So much for the blitz spirit.

Until the brief respite from the maudlin, state-teat suckling mind-set brought about by the inspired and principled leadership of one strong woman Britain was heading in only one direction. The eighties saw the bitter struggle to wrest back individualism from the morass of mediocrity that insisted for every aspect of life ‘the government must do something’. You still hear that cry tday, but thankfully Gordon Brown’s little dalliance with Old Labour was brought to an abrupt end when once again Labour left us bankrupt. Even if it had the will the government no longer has the means. “Can we fix it?” asks Bob the builder. No, we can’t.

So it was with both pleasure and surprise that I listened to Monday night’s radio programme “Generation Right” which posed the question: Are the political views of young people shifting away from tedious lefty expectation? Surely, you might think, this is the selfish ‘me’ generation - Thatcher’s children? But no; aged between18 and 30 their views and for some, almost their entire lives, have been shaped during new Labour’s bizarre mix of Thatcherism-lite, multiculturalism and spend-spend-spend. Defining themselves differently from their parents’ generation these hip and happening kids appear to have fallen out of love with the welfare state.

Less tolerant of entitlement culture, they want to make something of themselves and have an individualised outlook on life and a firm belief in personal responsibility. Some of those interviewed were even perfectly happy with university tuition fees yet they still hold liberal views on many social issues and are not entirely selfish. It’s not that they don’t care about others but their whole lives have been lived witnessing state intervention getting precisely nowhere. A generation that doesn’t trust the government to solve their problems is a step in the right direction.

You're on your own, Owen

Meanwhile the Labour Party’s schtick has centred for four long years around the statement that the out-of-touch government just doesn’t get it, praying all the while for economic disaster to deliver the cold and hungry vote back into their sticky, crime-red hands. The welcome news that the cost of living is now the lowest it has been since 2009 must have come as a bitter blow to Red Ed and his motley crew. Yet still they chant their empty slogans and offer up sound-bite solutions to non-existent problems. As Owen Jones andhis People's Assembly demand, “No more austerity!” the rest of his generation open their eyes and ask “What austerity?” Good for you, young folk, spread the word; there’s hope for you yet.

You jihadst to do it...

Put aside your opinions as to what percentage of the blame can be borne personally by Tony Blair for the current crisis in Iraq – and Ed Miliband might want to note that unlike the cost-of-living campaign this really IS a crisis – and consider that Mad Tony is almost certainly correct in his assertion that only extreme force could have any real impact on ISIS. As for the jihadists themselves they are treading a well-worn and brutal path, in keeping with primitive warrior sects throughout the ages.

It is rumoured that after taking Samarkand, eight hundred years ago, Genghis Khan ordered a pyramid be erected in his honour constructed entirely from the severed heads of conquered civilians, including children. In the fifteenth century, Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia of the House of Drăculești, became most famous for the forests of impaled victims he left as a reminder to those who dared challenge him. Idi Amin brutally massacred anywhere between 100,000 and half a million of his own citizens, the corruption and chaos of his regime being largely responsible for the ultimately unknowable final death toll.

Whether through madness or cold calculation people like this are to be excoriated and condemned, but most of all they should be feared precisely because they do not fear us. Having left our own brutal, bloodthirsty past far behind, opting for an ‘all must come home’ model of warfare, wherever possible fought at arm’s length and through oily back room diplomacy, ISIS are correct in their assessment that by the time we do anything it will be far too late. And far too feeble.

Satellite surveillance, drone strikes, sanctions… against a ruthless and fearless enemy that glories in killing – close up, bloody killing - we are at a disadvantage so profound we might be better to just lay down our arms altogether and employ our superior technology instead on doing our best to identify the dead and dying whose names will otherwise be lost to history. Is this where the west ends up, as accountants and scorekeepers for a world ruled by a profoundly brutal medievalism?

Ignoring the dangers of unchecked islam for so many years has put the jihadists in the driving seat – region after region has fallen to the extremists and western observers have been fooled by the lying mask of ‘moderate islam’. There is no such thing, or else if there is, where ARE the noisy demonstrations calling for the kaffir NOT to be beheaded? Where are the burning korans and the stamping into the dirt of islamic flags? Western civilisation has been busy this half-century, burning its own flag… and taking its eye off the prize it created. We have already given our countries away and now we wring our hands in despair as our values are looted, desecrated and burned in front of our eyes.

Yesterday I heard of talks designed to limit Iran’s access to nuclear weapons. The very thought should chill all our bones because unlike in the civilised world – in which Iran once played a part before the rule of the Ayatollahs – nuclear missiles would not be used, as they have been for decades, as a deterrent. They would be tactical weapons of holy fury to be unleashed on a west whose main crime is to be ashamed of its own genuine moral superiority.

The talk in the west is about the options open to us to do… to do what? What do we hope to achieve? To intervene or not to intervene? To fight or to merely mop up the blood stains? But discussions about the choices open to us are mostly futile; when the time comes, islam will give us no choices.

Textually Explicit

On Radio 4’s Today programme the other day was a textbook example of the sort of misleading claptrap promulgated by that eccentric breed of outsiders, The Expert. On a depressingly regular basis, experts tell us that what we have known for years is wrong. Gravity is a push, not a pull, the sun rises at night and sets in the morning and drinking thirty cups of strong sugary coffee every day before breakfast will vastly reduce the incidence of dementia… mostly because it will likely kill you before senility has a chance.

It has become fashionable to produce expensively funded ‘studies’ and ‘research’ which reveal that the counter-intuitive conclusion is now always the correct one. Thus enforced multiculturalism, far from being a recipe for strife, can only ever be a force for good and if it isn’t working in your part of the country that is only because you haven’t yet had enough multiculturalism. And dear old Tony Blair, as we are discovering, is rapidly demonstrating his true expertise as he seeks to put his theories about harmony in the Middle East into practice by assisting in the genocide peace process.

But sod the warring factions of a sunni disposition, we have a far graver ‘expert’ crisis on our own doorstep, nay inside our very homes, for ‘research has shown’ that texting may actually improve children’s spelling and grammar. Yes, you read that crekly: Txtspk, fr frm being a modern scRg is 2 B encRged… also leaving out punctuation and capitals can be shown to contribute to the positive development of childrens spelling and grammar skills according to the study by coventry university and the university of tasmania of course not everybody will be happy with the findings because of how very annoying it is especially when you have to wade through whole swathes of dense unpunctuated type several times like this here in order to discern the meaning i find it exhausting even typing without using punctuation and if i had to read everything in text speak i think I would have to resort to a killing spree…

What utter, unadulterated claptrap. This displays not only a total ignorance of cognitive and linguistic development and the difference between cause and correlation, it also show the naïveté of asking children – or psychologists as they like to call themselves - to comment on childhood phenomena. There may be a dozen things going on here, but proof that lazy spelling and no-existent grammar engenders better performance later in life is simply not one of them.

This is simply self-justifying tosh; the same sort of enquiry into developmental psychology that brought about the disastrous and destructive decades of child-centred learning and the notion that the kiddie-winks would become Nobel Prize winning physicists if only the teachers would become mere facilitators and leave them to get on with it. The kind of thinking that led to the ‘all must have prizes’ school of non-competition that causes many British kids to become unemployable after thirteen years of full-time education.

The Intertext - Answers on a postcard...

But hey, maybe I’m being too judgemental and reactionary here. Maybe I should lighten up, take a progressive view and get with the programme. After all, there may be funding available. Coming up: my research into how sitting on your big fat arse every day will help you live longer more fulfilling lives and how you are statistically more likely to win the lottery if you never buy a ticket. Ground-breaking research? Bollocks, more like.

Find a Job for Ed?

News just in that beleaguered Labour Leader Odd Miliband is resorting to desperate measures in order to reach out to ordinary people. Acting lessons, Ed? Surely the jig is up when you have to consciously NOT be yourself just to get people to listen to you? Behind the scenes Ed’s ‘intellectual self-confidence’ may have been an asset but nobody – I mean NOBODY – can seriously imagine Miliband in a photo line-up at a world leaders’ summit.  Or if they can, there is something way out of whack with their judgement.

So toxic now is Ed’s image, especially after the Sun newspaper misjudgement and subsequent fallout, that even as a backstage scene-shifter nobody would be associated with him, covered as he is with the imaginary bruises of a hundred metaphorical bargepoles. So what awaits Mr Ed outside the world of Westminster? Join me folks, as today we launch the quest to find a new job for Ed

Waiter in a tea shop?

Personal Trainer?

Stage Hypnotist?

Prince Tribute act?

Relationship Counsellor?

Sex Therapist - Blow Job Specialist?

There must be a thousand jobs out there that a Miliband could do without him ever having to get anywhere near the access codes for Britain's nuclear deterrent. Come on Twitter, do your stuff! #FindaJobForEd