Amateur Hour

There’s a lot said on both sides of The House about immigration. In the wider world people adversely affected – and they are many – find it hard to comprehend how their circumstances have come about, while in other areas – usually those who have known little else – they refer to vibrant diversity and all its wonders. There are valid arguments on both extremes if they could only be heard above the clamour of political correctness, typified by the image of a politician, any variety, clasping knees to chest, rocking to and fro and loudly humming so as not hear any incorrect opinions.

Last night’s ‘comedy’ spot on Radio 4 was occupied by Paul Sinha's History Revision and jolly interesting it was too... were it not for the fact that this son of immigrants was banging one particular drum and banging pretty loudly, too. The tune was, ‘nothing good would ever have happened in the world without immigration’. And he had the history to prove it. Now, I know Sinha is a clever lad and I’m sure he would make for invigorating and stimulating company, but this trope is over-wrought and fundamentally flawed.

‘We are all descended from immigrants’ is irrelevant. ‘The NHS relies on immigrants’ is irrelevant. Immigration, in and of itself, is not the source of all things good, it is merely one of several facilitators. It is the individual, inspired by place and experience, that creates; his or her ethnic origin is often incidental. Sinha’s thesis, inspired by his love of history – literally an ‘amateur’ historian – was based on an acceptance of the innate ‘goodness’ of immigration.

Inventure Place, in Akron Ohio, is referred to as the American Inventors’ Hall of Fame and its exhibitive niches are mostly occupied by immigrants who came to The New World, did good and invented stuff; the USA is proud to adopt them as great American inventors. But there’s a bit of a chicken and egg game going on here – did the immigrants make it happen, or did America provide the means and opportunities? Or did they do their inventing elsewhere and bring the goods over on the Mayflower’s successors? Beware the easy conclusions wrought from a non sequitur.

Anyway, we’ve always had movement of people. One traditional mode of casual migration was the regular cycles of itinerant traders, slavers, tinkers and circus folk, the inspiration for many a running-away-from-home. A friend of mine disappeared one day, some years ago and much gossip ensued. But a decade later, when the circus came to town, there he was, in full carney slap, parading round the ring, an array of ironmongery hanging from a specially designed belt.

As the crowd watched he took from his belt a small hammer, such as are used by piano tuners, which he swallowed whole. The watchers gasped. Next, a toffee hammer disappeared down his gullet, quickly followed by a veneer hammer, a small ball pein and a much larger claw hammer. The applause rippled around the big top but then we were quelled to silence as the lights dimmed; for the finale he took up a six-pound sledgehammer and after some business twirling it around, tossing and catching it he struck a pose and then, with his head tilted far back, he slowly swallowed the hickory shaft until only the steel hammer head remained visible. With a gulp, this too was gone; the audience went wild!

The roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd!

After the show, I caught up with him as he signed autographs and congratulated him on his remarkable achievements. He told me of his life and the wonderful people he had met, from all over the world. I remarked on his unconventional performance and asked if he had ever tried to swallow a sword, a much more familiar act. He shook his head. “No,” he said “that’s a job for the professionals... I’m strictly an ‘ammer-chewer.”

Nice, but dim?

In the past twenty-four hours I have been told I am a moron. I am also a disgusting person, as it happens. If both are true I plead ignorance; only following orders, etc. I’ve always found it curious how quick people are to label others as somehow beneath contempt while simultaneously providing an excuse for their lack of wisdom or morals. There is generally no point in disputing the charges and especially not in hurling back equally intemperate epithets, but it’s interesting sometimes to examine the claims.

Moron /ˈmɔːrɒn/ early 20th century (as a medical term denoting an adult with a mental age of about 8–12): from Greek mōron, neuter of mōros ‘foolish’. Well, most of this is refutable holding, as I do, several higher education awards and having lived a varied life of independence from the assistance of others. The foolishness, I grant you; I have made poor choices and endured their consequences, but who among us can claim otherwise? But, on balance, I’m not sure my being a moron would hold up in court as defence for my disgustingness. But wherewith comes that?

I admit, somewhat, a lack of general empathy for my supposed fellow humans, but then I have never been an advocate of equality at any cost and while I clearly see difference, I see no reason to pretend that diversity is an unalloyed good, especially where it also brings such obvious strife. The news media recently celebrating the diversity of the dead, whether by knife or truck or fire, are hardly covering themselves in glory as they simultaneously fuel the prurience and exploit the biddability of the masses, but, lest we forget, I’m the disgusting one here.

Yet I have killed nobody, threatened nobody and – while some may wish to tell themselves otherwise – I have refrained from hurling the spitting abuse which comes so readily to my detractors. This is the burden of pragmatism; I accept human frailty and see no reason to hide that acceptance. Why should I dress up my observations of humans reverting to the animal type they are just to meet some arbitrary notion of how kinder, gentler political minds think we ought to behave?

For instance I think that, yes, we should have subsidised housing to allow lower paid workers a decent place to live near where they toil. But I know that corruption would create favouritism in allocation, sub-letting would let in private renters or high earners in public office would seek to take advantage, as Bob Crow did. I would love to raise wages so that a working couple could afford bring up a family on a single wage; but I know that this will put millions out of work as industry seeks cheaper labour elsewhere. I’d like to cap fuel and food prices but I know that this would create shortages as providers decline to meet a demand which would not pay them for their effort.

Shiny happy people... and all of them broke.

The dream of plenty for all is just that, a dream. Maybe in some throwback commune where small numbers of people live in tribal harmony such equitable division of wealth is possible... but somehow every example of communal living is also an example of people eschewing much of the trappings of modernity. Maybe you can be nice but not rich, or else rich but not nice? Or, maybe, you can be both rich and nice as long as don’t openly enjoy the fruits of your success? When the left decide what they want and realise what we can afford maybe we could come to an arrangement other than what we have now. Failing that, keep pissing on those chips.

Extreme Measures

To all you toxic Britons, you xenophobes, you bigoted, narrow-minded racists, you sexist, homophobic, Brexit-voting bastards... welcome. Welcome to the new reality, you soon-to-be re-oppressed. Everywhere you hear it ‘Hope not Hate’. Don’t give in to Nazis, don’t let the ‘far right’, ‘hard right’, ‘alt right’, ‘extreme right’ win. Stamp out hate; hate the haters, destroy the right, kill them, kill them all! The incessant whine of progressive discontent has risen a couple of octaves to fever pitch since the Momentum surge and – in their eyes – vindication of all the labels they have invented to describe the objects of their animus. ‘Remainer’ sounds pathetic in comparison.

Admittedly the referendum result brought a thrill, a sense of belonging, the heartening realisation that in fact we were not just small, isolated pockets of rabid, fruitcake Little Englanders. We felt a sense of relief in the prospect of freeing ourselves from an unhappy relationship in which we had never felt comfortable, a divorce we had hoped for but never thought possible. Yes we did have a little gloat, a dig at our tormentors, a nose-thumb at the politically correct, kinder, gentler, yet somehow more rabidly bloodthirsty politics.

But now the left, who are easily raised to passionate anger, are back in the game and they are pretty full on. Since the disastrous gamble of Theresa May’s not-quite-snappy-enough election and the unexpected Labour vote-share, the activists have been in full gloat mode. Revenge is a word I keep hearing, spat out with some bloodthirsty glee; even at the height of our joy over Brexit we still harboured doubts it would come about, still kept our powder somewhat dry. But the whipped-up delirium of some of the leftist bully boys shows no such restraint.

In recent years we have seen the march of the left globally: book burnings, violent mobs contesting the free speech of others, empty-chairing invited speakers and campus revolts against anybody with differing views. We have witnessed openly anti-Semitic attacks and seen a sinister new alliance with islam, a religion whose extremely devout openly call for the killing of Jews, gays and apostates, in the name of such clearly misunderstood aims as equality and cultural harmony. Where do you start to discuss peace with a pink-haired, tattooed, transsexual, body-modified, professional protester who spits in your face and screams “death to the islamophobes”?

Who are the extremists here? Those of us who in the main, slog out our lives earning and saving and trying to be as little a burden as possible, who wanted to regain a sense of national pride before we died following a reasonable retirement, or the entitled hordes who march at the drop of a pink beret, sing The Red Flag and demand, with menaces, that we throw open the treasury doors, throw open the borders and throw out the rule book of society so that their muddled ideology of ‘anything goes’ can be allowed to hold sway.

Irony in action...

But, perversely, their understanding of equality and human rights does not extend to an acceptance of normal, decent, working people who have no political agenda. In fact segregation is the norm, with every sector of society identified and labelled and judged; exclusive ‘safe spaces’, gender-segregated work places, women-only and black-only events (anything but white men, eh?) and persecution of anybody perceived to have acted on or have displayed anything which they can seize on as ‘prejudice’. These hooded, armed, violent reactionaries call themselves Anti-Fascists? They look like Nazis to me. 

It's all gone horribly wrong!

So, I was wrong. Again. I was wrong about Brexit, wrong about 2015 and wrong to have underestimated the passion in some quarters for what they honestly think is doing the right thing. I admit it; I was wrong. Being a natural conservative – both big and small ‘c’s – I will do what we always do and get on with it. To be fair, very little in political life directly affects me anyway as, being as big a C as I have just declared, I have made it my life mission to look after my own affairs and never expect anybody else to care a fig. Long may that continue.

That said, where do we go from here? Theresa May has little option but to cling on, at least for a while and hope that when the clamour dies down she can carry on getting us out of the EU. The last thing anybody (except Labour) needs right now is a Tory leadership contest. But I’m fully prepared (and partially expect) to be proved wrong again. Unlike the rabid hordes of Momentum, however, I refuse to rip up the streets and threaten people with personal violence if that happens.

In the short term at least as far as my life is concerned, it makes little difference. I expect I’ll get by whatever system rules over us. In the longer term as well it won’t really affect me very much whether we’re in or out of the EU, whether we collectively pay 2p more or 2p less in tax. Whether or not our population is 80 million or 800 million, whether we join the German Army or become a caliphate etc, etc. But if this marks a shift towards a Corbyn-style of Marxist regime the people who will be adversely affected will be the children of the children who have just voted for a change they may not like very much when the money runs out.

Oh yes, a gentler kinder politics may be what’s on the masthead, but when you see how very, very angry the mobs can get even a newly minted Labour voter must, surely, have qualms about what sort of society we may become. Will the tendency to restrict freedom of speech intensify yet further? Will the ever-expanding and contradictory lexicon of human rights prevent us from actually having meaningful human rights? Will profligacy replace prudence, to the financial downfall of us all?

What of business confidence? Voting to pragmatically leave a restrictive union with 27 other squabbling nations might have been the very thing that would bring a new prosperity; will a new dawn of socialism bring about a return to the misery of the 1970s? The prospect of a future left wing Labour government is not likely to encourage investors to spend money in industries which could be swiftly nationalised. The drying up of tax revenues and the fleeing of the entrepreneurs will inevitably end in said government borrowing still more to fulfill promises made in opposition.

Theresa May adopts a new look... wrong.

Unless the Conservatives get their act together and shore up the breaches the future does not look very bright at all. The British, by their very nature, are conservative at heart; minor corrections, left and right, to a steady and unexciting course. But maybe we’re going to approach things in an increasingly less British manner over the next few decades? Has anybody taken the pulse of Venezuela lately? I really can’t see any of that going well at all, but I could be wrong. Please, let me be wrong.

The enemy within...

Election day is upon us and the security services are on high alert. Warnings are flooding into police call centres across the land as the threat to our democracy increases by the hour. They want most to disrupt our way of life to force on us an ideology which is abhorrent to people who love freedom and they would enslave us forever to the worship of their own idols, eschewing the decency, the humanity, the civilisation which has been Britain’s bequest to the world over the last thousand years.

Fifth columnists, the antagonists are home grown, living among us but not with us, keeping to their own communities; some of them have never spoken to an outsider, never heard the arguments of those who follow a different path in life. In these communities, which take a much higher than normal toll on our public services – the NHS, the police, social services – inbreeding is common, as they blindly condemn the very society that provides for them. And all the while they have been stealthily infiltrating local councils; wolves in sheep’s clothing.

The threat of violence is ever present and these people, this anti-modernist cult, frequently rallies its soldiers to bring their twisted and contradictory belief system to the streets. Ordinary, decent people are too cowed by political correctness to dare name the threat, but I name it today. Look after yourselves as you go to your polling stations. Report any suspicious behaviour to the authorities. But most of all protect your homes, your family, your businesses, from the very real threat of The Left.

Expect riots tomorrow, when the results come in and their false god remains outside the corridors of power. Be on guard against looting for equality and bottle-lobbing for fairness. Jeremy Corbyn has uncorked the bottle and released the evil genie; his tub-thumping, rabble-rousing war cries have echoed across the lands of the idle hands and now they are crawling out from under their stones once more to bring militancy back to the streets.

If you ever wanted proof of the Marxist leanings of the Labour Party, the quick propensity of their disciples to violence and brute force is right up there with the Bolsheviks, the Trotskyites and the grand wizard of leftist bully boys, Hitler himself. The brownshirts have spoken out on Facebook and called on leftists everywhere to riot, to disobey, to revolt. 'Twas ever thus. From spitting at candidates, calling out for the death of Tory politicians, to the physical intimidation of voters at the polling booths; the police have their jobs cut out today.

Labour Youth? Back to the future...

For decent people everywhere this should serve as a reminder of what we are fighting against. Don’t let the nasty party – Labour and their thugs – gain a single extra seat. And if you think giving in would make for an easier life, think again. If they are so ungracious in defeat as they have shown themselves to be, over and over again, just think how much more emboldened they would be with real power in their hands. So much for Corbyn’s ‘kinder, gentler politics’; you think he would be able to control them, a meek devotee of Karl Marx? Groucho Marx, more like...