Strong enough for you?

“Tax cuts for the rich!” goes the familiar refrain. It is Labour’s only response to a budget that had to be. It has been their response to every budget that has not been their own. What would Labour do, then? Why, they would create a workers utopia where everybody wins. All of which makes it decidedly odd that they never thought to do this during their thirteen years in government. Possibly their last period of power for a generation because apart from a few diehards and a clutch of young fools, people aren’t buying it any more.

“But Labour cares!” they insist, not like those nasty Tories... who you voted for... again. (Isn’t it curious how, whenever the left loses the argument, the voters didn’t know what they were voting for?) Of course the caring answer is to take even more of people’s hard-earned cash and give it to others who haven’t worked as hard. When leftist governments are broke it’s the workers they come for, every time, despite their rhetoric in opposition. Capitalists are evil until the socialists want their money and the most accessible capitalists are ordinary people, trying to get on in life; the fat cats they like to demonise are usually well out of reach.

As for the ‘attack on working people’ portrayed in the popular press, the increase in National Insurance contributions for the self-employed to near-parity with the rest of us is practicably the embodiment of the very fairness principle which Labour claim to espouse. Anyway, given that a huge proportion of the self-employed – I’ve been there – ‘forget’ to declare every scrap of income and over-claim business expenses as a matter of course, any actual rise will be absorbed by the normal process of ‘adjusting’ accounts to suit how much tax they want to pay. To insist otherwise is wilful blindness to reality.

Throughout my life I have been bemused by the newspaper treatment of budgets. I have never known a gasp-inducing, life or death budget; most people shrug, assume it will make them slightly worse off, then carry on keeping their own treadmills turning. But see the press and the words ‘fury’ and ‘unleashed’ and ‘cruel’ and ‘heartless’ are liberally sprinkled throughout the tabloids with only slightly more sober reportage employed in the serious papers. Most of the people, most of the time, don’t run their lives on the basis of being a few quid – and it is a few - up or down over the course of a year. Cumulatively, yes, there may be a gradual increase in tax take from NI as more people go self-employed, but individually, meh... 

What is far more important it how the government approaches Brexit and beyond and there are far more serious issues than the pound in your pocket. If we can get past the negativity of the persistent talking down of our prospects by remainers-in-denial it should be possible to imagine a positive future which is entirely within our control. Trade will sort itself out – profit-seekers always find a way – what is more important is how we use the ability to govern ourselves again. Post-Brexit, we really can become stronger, in more ways than money.

Strong enough to care properly for our genuinely weak and sick and elderly. Strong enough to resist the mindless pull of ever greater diversity. Strong enough to tolerate the multiculturalism we already have, but also to tame it; turn it British and dial down the ‘vibrancy’. Strong enough to reform education by selecting and improving and giving youngsters the tools to flourish. Strong enough to properly punish crime but offer genuine redemption and rehabilitation.

Time to crack on with it...

Labour doesn’t want any of this, no matter what they say; without dissent they have no purpose. In a day or two the budget will be forgotten, as it always is, by the vast majority of the population. It’s really not that important; we have far greater challenges ahead and it is about time we got on with tackling them. 

You reckon?

There is something fundamental about humans and how they function. Competition. It’s how we became the dominant species that some of us belong to and why we continue to evolve along so much more than merely biological pathways. One troupe of chimps is pretty much like another, one ants’ nest near identical to all the rest. But humans, we practically speciate at will; we try things out, we adopt different solutions until some groups become convivially incompatible with others, making breeding practically impossible. Of course, some of these socio-evolutionary forks lead to dead ends and the extinction of the branch.

Take left and right, for example. Right generally means conservative, or sticking to tradition while left means ‘progressive', unhappy with the status quo and trying new ways of dividing society. But while new buds can look exciting and vibrant and fresh in the springtime, they can also wither and die. Conservatism remains, however, because it is the trunk of the tree, the super-highway responsible for fast-tracking us to our current supremacy. Conservatism is where we retreat to when the adventure sours, because it works.

For some years western societies have been experimenting with an oddly inhuman idea; equality. Under this doctrine it is dangerous heresy to suggest that any one person has status above another. Heaven forfend, sayeth The Left, that any man should consider his opinion to be weightier than the rest. One man, one vote and the combined mass of all these equal expressions of desire shall be evaluated and let the majority decision hold sway. And yea there was a great consultation among all these millions of equal people... after which it was decided that the few hundreds in the House of Lords should have the power to overrule the demos.

‘Parliamentary Democracy’ they repeat, as if they genuinely don’t understand why those of the conservative bloc no longer wish to support the cul-de-sac that the EU and so-called progressive thought represents. Having swamped our formerly successful nations with unsustainable difference and demanded preferential treatment for the waifs and strays and undesirables; having elevated criminals to special needs, victim status and denigrated the working backbone of society; in the face of the palpable failure of this dead branch of social experiment, still they demand to be suckled by the teat of the taxpayer.

Down the EU’s evolutionary expedition is a form of equality in which a Britain has sunk from first place – a long time ago – to 27^th in mathematics. Where attempts to bring back grammar schools is not greeted with an enthusiasm for improvement but derided as a throwback. Where the largest empire the world has ever seen has become a mere province of a sclerotic and failing administration. And all due to a misguided buying into an unsustainable ideal where all must win and none may fail. Even language has been conscripted to maintain this illusion.

A Lord contemplates his future...

But we don’t want equality, equality is neither normal nor desirable; we need to have both winners and losers, the way nature intended. We want the power and the right to invoke selection, competition and triumph, which necessarily means some will fail. This is the natural order. They messed with it and will now reap what they sowed; the clamour to abolish the House ofLords has never been greater and with last night’s vote they lost any respect they had as a reforming house by blatantly crippling the most straightforward of bills. When Britain leaves the EU – properly leaves it – there is going to be a reckoning.

It's Them Again

Obviously the Daily Express only reports fake news – a convenient dismissal of any inconvenient facts - but to those of us who have been baffled by how anybody taking benefits is contributing to the exchequer, this report makes complete sense. The story is a year old but it seems to have had little serious scrutiny and the mantra it exposes as false – that immigrants are a net benefit to the economy – has been heard again recently as part of the what-do-we-do-about-those-already-here debate. Yes, it ignores the productivity part of the equation, but if indigenous Brits are being undercut and displaced and not being trained, they become casualties of mass immigration, perpetually unemployable. How is that helping?

The woman in the BBC Question Time audience last week who pleaded “Who will serve our coffee at Pret?” (post-Brexit) was rightly derided for her naivety and narrow focus, but to her, those concerns were real. That smiling barista may be lovely and vibrant and diverse, with an exotic accent and a certain Italian charm; the ladies of a certain age no doubt thrill as they order their organic infusions from Antonio. But for every Latino lothario working for minimum wage in the service industry, there is a British youngster languishing in unemployment, denied the opportunity to develop life skills and a work ethos. This is not a problem that is going away.

Instead of playing ping-pong with policy, instead of simply pointing at the other side and blaming them we should leave aside the faux war between ideology and reality and we should be asking why is it that the British are not in those jobs? Pret a Manger are not alone in having a long standing policy of almost entirely recruiting foreigners – yes they are foreigners, no matter how much you want that word to mean something it doesn’t. East Anglian farm-labour gangs are often exclusively from Eastern Europe and many factories are staffed entirely by non-British workers.

Uncontrolled mass movement of labour, while being a delight to the coffee house set and the employers of au-pairs and cleaners is just one piece in the jigsaw of neglect for the British. Depressed wages push those in work into welfare dependency in a deliberately engineered move by the last Labour government. Tax credits are the CDOs of the benefit system – paying top-up wages from a reducing tax-take and forever chasing new Ponzi contributors in the form of more low-paid workers from abroad. Consumer demand up, average spending power down. Madness.

Free movement of capital allows large scale employers to site their operations, at a whim, wherever suits their short-term duties to their shareholders. Great for business, lousy for stability, job security, training and development. Many British youngsters, outside the genuinely university-worthy minority are growing up with little or no expectation of a stable wage and everybody knows what work the devil finds for idle hands.

Free movement of goods lets the UK car industry, for instance, import raw materials for production of basic parts, export them for assembly into more complex parts, re-import them for the manufacture of larger modules, re-export them for the production of vehicles which are then imported for sale. Does any of this strike you as efficient? And yet none of this kind of thing seems to come in for any real examination. Instead, when it is suggested we can contain and control these various economic supply chains nationally the abuse flows freely.

Education, training, citizenship... national belief; all have been allowed to fail, sacrificed on the altar of multiculturalism which has only even been the dream of bien pensant elites and their unthinking acolytes who, quite frankly, feel they are better than the rest of us. A prime example of this is Matthew Parris who feels empowered to gloat derisively as he expresses a desire to witness self-inflicted Brexit misery for the masses who dared to hope.

It really is as simple as them against us and ‘them’ are not prepared to examine the flaws in the system that ‘we’ are affected by. So it’s little wonder that that all the simmering resentment has finally boiled over and yet, no matter the rhetoric flowing down from above, it’s not the immigrants we despise, but those who put the British worker in competition – some would say conflict - with them.  The British are as they always were – phlegmatic, pragmatic, stoic and true – it is the establishment who have painted us otherwise. 

Austerity is back

Some people are never satisfied – take the lords and their never ending bickering over whether Brexit means Brexit or not... And Gina Miller who, having subverted the whole process is now bitching because the House of Commons is unwilling to play her game. Meanwhile, over in Brussels, Jean-Claude Juncker is having his own moment of madness by trying to pretend he genuinely wants meaningful EU reform, as many millions wish, while insisting simultaneously that continuing on the same path toward further integration is the only way forward.

You’d think by now that somebody bigger might have come along to knock all their heads together, but over in USA-Land, the same kind of non-arguments are being pursued, with rumours that Barry Obama is heading up a stop-Trump coalition. And all the while the uncertainties are making the money men richer while raiding the prospects of everybody else. The world just isn’t rigged in favour of the honest little man, it never was. But the power is in the hands of all of us to make a difference.

After ten years of top-down imposed austerity (so-called) I see little evidence of belt-tightening by the Richard Bransons of this planet. But they aren’t the problem; were the wealth creators to pay no tax at all they would still be distributing billions in wages, which is what actually runs the entire economy. Labour’s ridiculous posturing over rich men’s tax affairs hides a simple truth; they have no answer and can’t face the naked truth that we have lived beyond our means for years.

Thrift, as a virtue is a concept from a world long gone, although it is still survives in a few pockets of consciousness and indeed, right here in the UK – what is left of it – is possibly the world’s foremost exemplar of the noble principle. Not for nothing has the interrogative “You’ll have had yer tea?” passed into folklore as a distillation of Scottish parsimony. Now, at a time when the Scots especially may need to consider going without, it’s a paradigm we might all do well to heed.

Al of which reminds me of an incident, not so very many years ago, when a soldier in the full ceremonial uniform of the Black Watch strode into a Glasgow chemist’s shop. He approached the counter, asked to see a male pharmacist then very carefully opened his sporran and took out a neatly folded cotton handkerchief. Inside this a smaller, silk handkerchief was revealed, which he then proceed to likewise unfold. In there lay a small square of tissue paper, inside which was a condom.

The soldier took out the condom and gently placed it for the pharmacist to inspect. The condom had a number of patches on it, which the chemist noticed immediately. He took out a magnifying glass and examined it more closely. The soldier cleared his throat and asked.

“How much to repair it?”

"Sixty pence," said the pharmacist.

“How much for a new one?”

“A poond.”

The soldier painstakingly folded the condom into the tissue, wrapped it in the silk square, then folded it carefully into the cotton handkerchief replaced it in his sporran, and marched out of the door, shoulders back, chin held high and kilt swinging. A moment or two later the pharmacist heard a great shout go up outside, followed by an even greater cheer. The soldier strode back into the shop marched up to the counter and saluted the pharmacist with a broad grin on his face.

“The regiment has taken a vote,” he said, “and we'll have a new one.”

House Call

Children are the future – I’ve been hearing this particularly trite aphorism since at least the eighties. It’s trotted out whenever the future is being discussed, regardless of whether or not the issues under discussion have any direct effect on children. But what utter, disingenuous tripe this all is. That crayon-covered child there, the one licking that window, is that the future? Or the one busily tying fireworks to a cat; is it him? How about the one who, at the age of three has been encouraged to self-identify as non-binary gender? Maybe that’s where we’re headed?

I heard this phrase yet again this morning and it made me think; it seems to stand for something, taken at face value, but it dissolves under analysis into a mushy, shapeless puffery of meaningless sounds. Who was the future when your grandparents were children? And to how much future are we referring; is it the future as in tomorrow, or the day after, or next week/month/year? Is it when these children are adults (in which case are they no longer ‘the future’) and if so, how old? Twenties? Forties? Eighties? It’s a moving goalpost whereby those who have built the world we live in are discounted as irrelevant in favour of an unknown hereafter.

To take a currently topical political figure, Hitler was once a child, as were Pol Pot and Mao, Stalin and Peter Sutcliffe. So, also, were Rembrandt and Shakespeare, Beethoven and Sir Clive Woodward. What does this any of this prove? The future will happen whether or not the upcoming generation are up to the challenge, but by constantly pandering to the culture of youth we seem to be determined to ensure they are not. Education, behavioural standards, entitlement, privilege, and an absurd set of unrealistic beliefs in spurious ‘equalities ‘which will never be realised; all the ‘investment’ in this future strikes me as counter-productive.

Anyway, I thought we had given away their future with the Brexit, so where does that leave us? Cue the superannuated, dribbling crybabies of the House of Lords as they struggle to grasp the concept of the European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill 2016-17 which has only one purpose. It is a bill ‘to confer power on the Prime Minister to notify, under Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, the United Kingdom’s intention to withdraw from the EU’.

The EU, in the form of once-was-the-future Angela Merkel, has already refused to offer reciprocal rights to UK citizens in the EU, or indeed discuss any future arrangements, until after Article 50 has been invoked. All the oh-so-noble Lords have done is foment further uncertainty, one can only presume to prolong the very uncertainties they accuse Brexit voters of causing. It’s been this way since 24^th June last year; having failed to vote the way they were told, the plebs must be punished.

Remember when this idiot child was the future?

The only way to secure any certainty for the future is to push ahead with the process of leaving the sclerotic European Union. That’s what grown-ups would do, that’s what most of us want to do, but the supposed senior chamber has concerned itself, as children do, with meaningless sloganizing about ‘bargaining chips’. All this action has done is to bring their status and privilege under scrutiny. Who knows what tomorrow will bring? But I know a certain unelected House of Cronies who may want to consider their future.