Ho, ho, ho, it’s magic!

The desperate search for a killer cause to swing the election in favour of the Party of No Personal Responsibility is now working the “Boo hoo, Tories cut police funding” line. Hey, you can have as many police officers as you like, so long as you can pay them. Of course, if the Conservatives increased the numbers of officres on the thin blue line, Labour would accuse them of presiding over a police state. The purpose of opposition is, after all, to oppose, no matter how ridiculous it makes you look. But whatever you propose you have to be able to afford it.

A penny on income tax, said one twitter moron, the argument being that low earners would pay nothing, as they already do, high earners would hardly notice and everybody would be happy to pay up. But, of course, the extra this might raise (ignoring that prices would rise to compensate, consumption would fall, the cost of living would increase and then the lowest paid will be negatively impacted) might theoretically pay for one of Labour’s pledges. But what of the others; another penny here, another penny there? Before we know it we’d be back with the traditional inflationary spiral with interest rates headed for ‘Oh-my-good-God!’ and never-ending pay battles with newly emboldened unions.

The centrist line has always been ‘there is no magic money tree’ but as is the modern way, the left are attempting to use this as an argument against common sense by suggesting that yes, there is. This disingenuous article in The Guardian says we can pay nurses, policemen, teachers, etc, all we want, after all, we magicked-up the money for the ‘evil’ bankers back in 2008, so we can do it again... and again. It’s a tempting theory, but it is simply wrong; it is as wrong as Gordon Brown selling off the gold reserves and pretending this was clever economics. No more boom and what, Gordon?

And just as with all the other new-world-order, illuminati, Bilderberg conspiracies and the rest it feeds neatly into the ‘unfair’ narrative peddled by the left. It’s not your fault you earn less, it’s because those nasty Tories, in cahoots with the bankers want to keep you down. But surely it takes only a second of rational thought to reason that, if people are kept poor, consumption is kept low and profits suffer. If it was as easy as fairy-tale believing left wingers seem to think, why doesn’t evil capitalism indulge in ‘trickle-up’ economics? After all, a comfortably off population is a contented population, everybody would be happy and everybody would be richer; a socialist wet dream!

Yes, the money tree is real, dear, it is just as real as human equality. I’m guessing that when the flaws in the print-more-money theories are pointed out, along with the failures of socialist states to bring about the wished for prosperity, the response will be that the magic money tree has never been tried properly! Take out your Occam’s Razor and slice; if it was this easy, if the left had an answer on the lines of what this columnist is proposing, don’t you think they would have applied it, somewhere in the world? Or is the failure to conjure something from nothing yet another conspiracy against the workers?

A vote for Labour?

By all means, dream. Imagine winning the lottery, or coming up big on the gee-gees, or inheriting from a forgotten millionaire uncle, or even – cross fingers – imagine a government waving a magic wand and making you rich at a stroke. Dream of unlimited resources for every public service imaginable; nobody can stop you dreaming. But when you wake up, for heaven’s sake, sober up before you consider voting for what, in the cold light of day, is revealed to be a simple lie.

Leader Board

Golf is not the oddest of games, but it inspires passion and derision like few other activities. From the relentless golf bore in the club bar who almost, nearly, mighta claimed a course record except for the double bogey on the seventeenth, to the quiet unassuming up and coming youngster, diligently bringing down his score, round by round. On the professional circuits the stakes are high and there is nowhere to hide; the vicar might get away with kicking his ball from the rough into the fairway when nobody is looking but the pro is followed by the cameras everywhere he goes.

Another game that scores high on the passion and derision stakes is, of course, politics and never more so than when a major prize is up for grabs. Like golf it rewards the steady hands, those who can stick to their technique and keep on chipping away at every hole. And like golf, politics does not deal kindly with the ingénues, brashly sporting their tartan plus-fours and pink tam o’shanters, hoping that the bling will divert attention from the divots. Prior preparation is a must; which is why even those golfers at the top of the game turn up hours before the match and practice their swing.

Both games are won and lost in the head as well as the hand. On Sunday Theresa May as Prime Minister, had no option but to make a speech decrying the terrorist attacks of Saturday night. She did so; she took one measured stroke, straight down the fairway and then respectfully retired from the scene as others sought to catch up. Jeremy Corbyn, seeing an opportunity, took a wild swing; he accused her of making political capital out of the situation, sliced his ball and then spent the rest of the day wildly flailing away in the rough, tweeting another twenty times on the same theme.

Calm heads, preparation, deep breaths and considered responses. Last night Diane Abbott, surely the least capable politician of recent years, but nonetheless still somehow clinging on to her job, came out from the woods to answer her critics and save the day for Labour. On Sky News she approached the ball, sitting high on a tee at an easy par three; trash the government record on national security, demonstrate how her steady hands would bring the Labour team back into contention, tap in for a par.

She took a practice swing and her club flew out of her hands, nearly taking out a bystander; on Monday, with the election on Thursday, unforced, in her opening statement, she declared that there were two days until the vote. With an apparent reference to the ‘village people’ instead of the British people she missed her first shot at the ball. Dermot Murnaghan then unfairly asked her about the recent Harris report on London’s safety and security. Diane flailed again at the ball, still sitting steadfastly on its tee and missed by a mile. Yes, she’d read it, of course she’d read it but mysteriously couldn’t remember a single thing about it.

As in golf, elections are generally won by those who have the most experience, have practised long and hard and are at the top of their game – as Gary Player said, the more I practise, the luckier I get – but even the best players go into decline. Diane Abbott may think of herself as Labour’s Tiger Woods in his prime. But in reality she has always been much more like Tiger Woods is today. It’s time to leave the field. So, with Labour in trouble and Jeremy Corbyn rolling up his trousers to paddle in the burn and take his tenth stroke at the eighteenth, all Theresa May needs is a straight and steady chip down the middle and two putts to win.

Nothing to see

Once again election campaigns were suspended temporarily so that certain people could signal their virtue by sending out their hearts (they’d die, surely?) to the victims of ‘terror attacks’ of unnamed provenance and motiveless end. What drives these mentally unstable, unhappy, lone wolves to carry out such totally random assaults for no ideology whatsoever? It’s a mystery; a mystery at least to all those charged with protecting populations from them. If only there was some common theme to these attacks?

Meanwhile, you don’t have to look far on social media to find certain ‘types’ screaming blue murder... literally. “Kill the Tories!” is considered a perfectly reasonable response to a concerned enquiry about the mental health of somebody who thinks that Conservatives are actually plotting to kill off the old, the sick, the lame and the thick. Oh, if only we could, but in the meantime we just pay to keep them angry, it seems. A large proportion of those who put a roof over your head, feed you, allow you to breed with contemptuous irresponsibility and then even try to educate your offspring are natural Conservative voters and are repaid with nothing but hatred.

It can’t be coincidence that the same people who demand that ‘the rich’ (anybody earning more than me) pay larger and larger chunks of cash also demand that we not name the terrorism threat. The islamists are actually killing us but we must not blame muslims, yet ‘cutting the throat of capitalism’ is somehow a noble cause. Ordinary muslims join marches to demand the institution of the sharia and death to the west and are protected by our police as they do so, yet daring to point the finger of suspicion at the followers of the koran is somehow inhuman. The ability to hold mutually incompatible positions is characteristic of both the left and of schizophrenia.

The left, collectively, is textbook insane to the point where anybody displaying signs of common sense is considered to be of the ‘far right’. The national conversation has, so far, gone like this: Multiculturalism is good for you. We don’t like it. That’s bigoted; try it, see how you get on. It doesn’t feel right. That’s just your prejudice speaking; here, have some more multiculturalism, it’ll grow on you. It hurts. No it doesn’t. But I don’t feel enriched, actually I feel impoverished and disadvantaged by it. That’s your white privilege. I don’t feel privileged, I feel threatened. Bigot. But... Bigot. But... Racist. But... Don’t blame islam.

Labour's experimental Tower Hamlets candidate.

Okay, so back on the campaign trail. Forget the weekend events, except where they can be used to bolster claims and counter claims to make the case for more politics. And while the brownshirts of the left bully and intimidate and stuff the polls and threaten violence against those who dare to fear violence, remember we have just three days to save the NHS... from Labour.

Nobody here but us chickens

So Donald Trump has pulled out of Paris; the climate change agreement, not Ms Hilton, although, you know, he has form. According to some the world will soon, literally, be engulfed in flames. The EU has stopped just short of branding the USA a pariah nation and imposing sanctions, but you can bet that has nothing to do with saving the planet and everything to do with continuing trade. Trump’s decision is, of course, also to do with money and while the world condemns him, governments are all going to watch keenly for signs of economic upturns at which point expect others to follow suit, if in less dramatic fashion.

You can guarantee, however, that grass roots protest will ensue with hippies making Washington DC look untidy, anti-frackers churning up rural areas as they hold ‘peace vigils’ and the like and in an echo of the self-destructive instincts of some of Britain’s high profile Remainers, signed-up climate change scientists will take to the skies to fly to fragile exotic ecosystems where they will generate enough hot air to melt the ice caps, just to show how wrong Trump is and how much they care.

And in the background, of course, conspiracy theorists will abound. Look out for increased chemtrail hysteria activity, every drop of rain, or lack of it, being claimed as a direct result of yesterday’s announcement, rapidly rising sea levels to be widely broadcast... only for those reports to be retracted as the tide goes back out again. And the Sun headline ‘Phew, what a scorcher!’ to be put on standby for every edition. The world will go mad for a while and then everybody will calm down and forget about it.

Of course, the largest stakes to play for are the vested interests of the numerous committees, councils, research grantees and paid consultants in what has become a global industry. Not so much save the planet as save the jobs of the professionally concerned. Many children are betting their future on being able to continue playing make-believe long into adulthood as they convince themselves and each other of the spiralling dangers in a positive feedback loop which makes survival-fear a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom and gloom. There is a serious danger of climate ‘scientist’ over-supply in the near future and some may be questioning the long-term viability of being a Climate Cassandra.

Fortunately, forecasting disaster and then profiting from advising how to avoid it is a transferable skill these days; every industry is looking for the silver bullet to fix everything and will carry on paying for quack cures long after all reason has left the building. You can find the quackery of expert consultants in every walk of life. Too many low-paid migrant workers? Open the borders! Too much bureaucracy? Convene a select committee! Too many laws? Legislate! But what about the chicken problem, I hear you ask?

Farmer Brown’s chickens began to quarrel, Cooped up because of avian flu, they started to peck and wound each other, much like the uneasy internecine hostilities of the crazy coalition of the left. Many of them were dying, so the upset farmer hurried to a consultant, and asked for a solution to his problem. “Add baking-powder to their food,” said the consultant, “It will calm them down.”

After a week Farmer Brown was once more at the consultant’s office,explaining that nothing had changed and was there another way? The consultant said “Add apple juice to their drinking water. The attacks will stop, for sure.” But of course, no such change came about and a week later the farmer, now distraught, was back once again. “My chickens are still quarrelling. Do you have some more advice?” The consultant sat him down and answered “Of course I can give you as much advice as you can pay for, but the real question is whether you still have any chickens left to save.”

Debatable

Did you see the chimps’ tea party last night? The unedifying spectacle of seven party leaders and representatives squabbling over the sandwiches and general flinging their shit about? I believe it was billed as a debate, but as usual it was nothing more than Britain’s Not Got Talent for a bunch of deluded losers who all think they have something to offer. Hoot-panting as each spoke over the other, the IQ of the audience, already not the most gifted part of the ensemble, progressively lowered as the night went on.

Let’s talk about that audience. Balanced, the BBC said, rigorously selected to represent a true cross-section of the population. I assume then, that there were no more than a dozen deranged mentalists in there to mirror the support for Plaid Cymru, The Greens and  the SNP combined. Perhaps the same again for Ukip and the LimpDems, leaving the bulk to represent the Tories and Labour. Naturally the Conservative Party supporters would have sat back, listened and considered what was being said, while the others wore their colours more openly.

The repeated and often hysterical attacks launched at Amber Rudd and her calm response pretty much summed up the mood for me. It is hard to be in the government of such a benign realm as this. Notwithstanding Diane Abbott’s ridiculous assertion to the contrary this is one of the most tolerant countries in the world but the one part of society which is openly not tolerated by the baying mob for ‘social justice’, is the white, working, tax-paying, patriotic backbone of middle class England.

Welsh, Scottish and Irish accents seem to confer a sort of honorary BME status on even damned whitey, giving them a leeway not accorded the hated Tories. And herein lies the main curiosity of the whole shooting match; the quiet party, the getting-on-with-it, mustn’t-grumble, doing-our-bit party; the party which most represents the British national character, is constantly hectored and bullied by the ingrates they feed with their constant cries for more. The strident demands of those who do the least persistently drowns out the calls for a sober discussion of solutions.

Always with the problems, your leftists, always wagging the blame finger. Like arrogant teenagers, yet to make a meaningful contribution to family life they stamp their feet and clench their fists and spew out irrational hate for their parents and yet at the same time whine for more pocket money. The whole event was one of each in turn and often all together railing against the calm and reasoned voce of the only one there who has ever held high office. Amber Rudd stood up to her assailants with dignity.

The Coalition of Chaos convenes its first cabinet

But make no mistake, it was a mugging which Theresa May, for all the opprobrium she is getting for failing to show up, was wise to avoid. In any case, which other party could you possibly choose to run the country? The bullying communism of the Greens, the Charlie Drake party of Tim Farron with his knockabout quips about Bake Off, the insignificant Welsh and Scottish separatists, Paul ‘Hillsborough’ Nuttall, or the far left commissariat of the newly Marxist, not just old, but superannuated Labour Party? Give me Grey May any day.