Panto Season

When did we get so soft? The new Defence Secretary, Gavin Williamson came out and told an undeniable truth that a dead terrorist is an ex-terrorist; a cast-iron, 100% non re-offender. The liberal media went mental – you can’t say that, they said. The legal profession also took him to task and counselled caution; you don’t want to sound like President Trump, they advised. No? At least Trump has either the balls or the political naivety to say out loud what everybody outside politics is saying. And at least Williamson is, for now, sticking to his guns.

Elsewhere, however, capitulation to victimhood gathers pace as students swallow lie after lie fed to them by the kinder, gentler politics of perpetual grievance. Not content with no-platforming speakers who say ‘bad things’ and cocooning themselves away in safe spaces with soothing cuddle-puppies, they can even feel themselves bullied when others use the most descriptive term yet devised to describe their delicacy. Boo-hoo, they say, calling us snowflakes damages our mental health. 

Like all these whiny insistences on special treatment this sort of bullshit devalues genuine need. In all the areas that the state tries to help out those who cannot help themselves - mental health, disability, poverty, homelessness, etc. – freeloaders (for money, sympathy, attention, recognition) pile in with their bogus claims and spoil it for everybody. You can’t say this, you can’t say that. Oh, you’ll upset the gays, you’ll offend the muslims...

Trump, on the other hand? Jerusalem. Bosh! Job done. It might be childish, but I get an enormous amount of pleasure from watching the whiners on the left ball up in fury and bawl bitter tears of pure hatred just because somebody they despise has said or done something that most people are nonplussed about or even applaud.

And so it comes – as, inevitably it must – to the pantomime of Brexit and the last scene of Act One. After many months of rehearsal, Mrs May delivered the lines she has been rehearsing ever since she realised she had only two options – treat or leave; and this lady is not for turning. The media also played their part, pretending to gasp in wonder as the announcement was made that a deal had been agreed. This is no deal; it is a simple capitulation to the demands of outsiders that the farce be allowed to continue.

Every PM wants to leave a legacy

We are at the point in Springtime for Hitler when the audience ought to be walking out in disgust; abandoning the cast to play out their hollow fictions to an empty auditorium. But instead, they have decided to play along, delighted that somehow they can see the Emperor’s fine new clothes when all that has been dangled in front of them is a pair of scrawny, hairy bollocks. So, that’s it, we’re not leaving the EU after all. The End.

Give it a whirl

In the 1970s the UK was in the grip of strike fever. Union officials gleefully called wildcat walk-outs, sympathy strikes, occupations, mob picketing and any form of action that could bring an organisation to its knees. Even some private companies found themselves caught up in the madness, choosing to close their doors rather than give in, resulting in their work-forces picketing the dole office instead. In nationalised industries, days-long ‘beer and sandwiches’ meetings were held, during which union moochers flexed their muscles and managements were held to ransom.

Inevitably these strikes achieved little to nothing. Necessary redundancies went ahead anyway, in some cases hastened by the very industrial action intended to prevent it. And in the case of the most militant of unions, longer term plans were put in place to render them impotent within a decade. As a result, the Labour Party, the former party of the workers, was banished for a political generation. Talk about shitting on your own doorstep.

It is the job of opposition to oppose. But it is not the job of any responsible party to simply obstruct. Decisions have been made with which you may not agree, but continuing to fight a battle long after the victor has left the field is denial and folly. Whilst politics itself may be a game, governing the country should not be; at a time when differences should be put aside for the national interest, undermining our position is tantamount to treason.

But it isn’t just here and it isn’t just Brexit. Across the developed world populations are awaking, trudging to the ballot boxes and saying no to the entrenched positions of increasingly socialist regimes. Fed up of being ignored, alarmed at mass migrations, the apparent elevation of minority rights above the rest, the fiscal failures of welfare states, ordinary men and women have found their voice. And the left doesn’t like it one bit.

Donald Trump was elected President of the USA. He didn’t just break in and assume control; he was voted in, democratically. And Hillary Clinton lost, democratically. The Conservative Party are the elected government of the UK, albeit by a thread. Angela Merkel cannot form a government, because the German people no longer want what she wants. Those who were promised a socialist utopia are disillusioned and no longer afraid to speak out.

Like the union wreckers of old, the left are not interested in giving the majority of people what they have said they want; they exist to oppose, to frustrate and to generally get in the way of progress. This is somewhat ironic for a movement that calls its politics ‘progressive’, but then, just like the so-called ‘anti-fascists’ their headspace is an irony-free zone. Meanwhile, Momentum pushes ahead with its takeover of local councils, despite what voters actually want – which is credible governance, not ideology.

The left love to talk about everybody else as dinosaurs; dull, lumbering beasts who should be extinct. But if anything it is the resurgent hard left who are the dinosaurs, harking back to the smoke-filled rooms of the seventies and the destructive deployment of union muscle. Then as now, it is the young who are taken in by promises of what will never be; aimless cannon fodder, all too ready to swear allegiance to a false prophet in the guise of Labour’s latest ‘Uncle Joe’, Jeremy Corbyn.

Did you ever wonder what being

on the winning team was like?

Like generations before them they will surely come to learn how they were used, then look on in exasperation as the next wave of recruits marches and chants and does all it can to be part of the problem. But instead of always being against, how about a little experiment? How about a year – one, single year – in which those clamouring for a change they are not going to get stand silent instead? Or, even better, get on board. Try being on the winning team for once; you never know, you might even get to like it.

Poor me

I worry about the fragile state of the world around me, I really do. In the winter of ’63, trudging through the snow to our new home, the prospect of a bedroom of my own – albeit for just a year until my baby sister claimed it for herself – was a major leap in our family fortunes. Central heating, windows that fully closed and didn’t let the snow in, fitted carpets, a refrigerator, telephone and other such luxuries were many years in the future but at least we had, for the first time, an inside toilet.

This isn’t some pity-me, poverty story; I’m not even sure we were really so aware that we were poor. It was simple reality for millions of ordinary families across the land. A council house, a coal fire and a rented television... when we had electricity. Education and hard work were the ways up and out and the grammar school system was like winning the lottery for council house kids like me – and it was for access to this grammar school that we ended up here in an older house and not in the brand new house reserved for us on the other side of town.

The stirrings of social protest were abroad, but demonstrations were something only the hippies and the deranged had time for. The working class was generally pretty grounded and sacrifices made now, everybody seemed to agree, would yield dividends in the future. And things got better, for everybody; yet not everybody was satisfied. While the silent majority got on with the job of making ends meet, the malcontents were laying the ground for recruitment to the causes of cultural mayhem.

If you believe the hysteria, we are at tipping point on so many metrics – financial meltdown, climatic Armageddon, the mother of all Brexits, Trump - the literal anti-Christ - homelessness, child poverty, foodbanks, gender identity, women’s rights, the pay gap, the equality gap... gaps gaping as wide as the eye can see. Gaps created first by not taking the concerns of our minorities seriously and then by taking them far too seriously.

Triggered; the default state of the 

perpetually offended...

And yet, the sun rises, people go to work and the word keeps on turning. The huddled masses carry on almost as if they weren’t watching and don’t care... because they’re not. And they don’t. Furthermore they don’t need to. Selection may no longer be purely ‘natural’ but selection is an intrinsic part of our human story; we can make choices. Admittedly, not everybody has a cornucopia of options to take, but we all still have choices.

We can choose to be a victim, or we can choose not to let life grind us down. We can choose to be selfish, altruistic, or – if we have the means and the disposition – both. We can choose to take offence, even on behalf of others, or we can choose to cheerily suck it up. The poor will always be with us, especially when we make the definition of poverty subjective. But poverty is the absolutely best incentive to seek something better and most of the poor are doing just that.

The massed ranks of the protesting classes aren’t made up of poor people. They aren’t even really speaking for those people; those people are busy digging themselves out and many will succeed, unaware of the clamour raised in their name. The angry screeching you hear all around is the noise of the bubble. The echo chamber of the righteous who imagine that it matters; who think they know. In their minds they speak out for society, when in fact they are apart from society, existing in their own little fantasy world of impotent rage.

But where do they go from here? When our current crop of bien pensants wake up and realise all their protest has achieved nothing will they become the new charity cases? Clapped out, unemployable, mentally unhinged adult babies, forever trying to recreate their glory days; like Baby Jane – whatever happened to her? I almost feel sorry for them; poor things.

On the Rise

Even if you don’t look very far, every day you will hear, or read about, the rise of the ‘far right’. It is taken as a given by otherwise sober news outlets, that Brexit and other recent phenomena are entirely the result of a concerted onslaught on our hearts and minds by manipulators spreading ‘hate’. The Nazis never went away, they imply, they just took jobs at the Daily Mail, although this article in said organ does a fair job of outing the real source of hatred in the today’s increasingly uncertain world. Swallow your revulsion and read it.

A key descriptor here is the word ‘activist’. Political activists pretty universally fly the flag of one particular colour and that isn’t the hue of blue. Indeed, people on the supposed right are more noticeable by their lack of activism. No mass demonstrations, no rioting when they don’t get their way. They don’t engage in looting or pointlessly destroying other people’s property and it almost unheard of for a ‘rightie’ to issue cheap death threats or wish cancer on their opponents. They are far too busy working for a living and pursuing what the left term as their hateful ideology.

The Mail may not be the finest newspaper out there and yes it does display a bias towards the British and towards traditional British values, but promoting hate? Do me a favour!. Live and let live and self-reliance may be anathema to the left, but it hardly constitutes hatred, let alone a definable political ideology. People on the notional right are far more likely to be apolitical at heart and tend not to impose their world-view of the on the rest, saying only, ‘it’s up to you’ and ‘life is what you make it’... and ‘mustn’t grumble’. It’s hardly the stuff of revolution, is it?

The Mail article linked above responsibly exposes the utter hypocrisy of the ‘Stop Funding Hate’ movement. In common with all its kindred tribes – Hope Not Hate, Reclaim the Streets, Unite Against Fascism – the collective often referred to as ‘Antifa’ rely on the unthinking obedience of its mostly juvenile acolytes. As they parade their banners and screech their slogans and spit and snarl, the degree of cognitive dissonance on display is remarkable, even for their incredibly high threshold of tolerance towards holding competing views without seeing the contradictions. They punch people because they are more peaceful.

Such malcontents talk openly and without fear of censure about causing physical harm, sexual abuse and even death to people for whom they hold the deepest enmity, yet cannot see in themselves that which they are determined to prove exists in others: Trawling through a news story for the flimsiest hint of antipathy, such as referring to a foreigner as, say ‘a foreigner’ they will, on finding (or imagining finding) such references, instinctively scream ‘Hate Crime!’ And then in denouncing this crime will call for their followers to demand the metaphorical public dismemberment of the person who dared to type the hate-filled word.

This is how Corbyn and his rabid fans will be brought low – when one day it dawns on them that the much-promulgated and fervently hoped-for ‘rise of the right’ simply does not exist. When the supposed far-right atrocities turn out never to have occurred. When they awake from their dream amid the burning ruins of the city they used to call home. When the camp followers one day - perhaps while setting fire to a pregnant woman for daring to say she didn’t think all Tories were murderers - suddenly wake up and ask themselves... Are WE the baddies?

The Ten Days

Did anybody expect anything more positive from Brussels? The latest play in the interminable mind game that is the uneven contest between the 27 other EU countries and the one domino that will topple the lot is to give us ten days to ‘do better’. This is, of course, code for ‘capitulate’. But from what we’ve seen so far – and always suspected – the collective that calls itself the EU (but would be more correctly referred to as ‘the enemy’) has no intention of bending. Far from it; should Theresa May offer them £40billion, they would insist on 60. The goalposts are not so much moving as dancing.

And during it all the endless leaks of supposedly confidential information. Tittle-tattle about he said/she said. Secret pacts, deals, Remainer cabals, offside briefings and the relentless whine of diehard Europeans intent on slandering all who voted leave as ill-educated, narrow-minded, xenophobic, low-grade, old, clapped-out and rotten-to-the-core neo-Nazis. Gleefully they tell each other that Leavers are dying out; one hard winter, they reckon and the balance will tip.

It can’t escape anybody’s notice that the frenzy, the quasi-religious fervour and the threats, cat-calls and jeers are coming, almost exclusively from one side. If only they had the dignity displayed by the vast majority of Leavers during the 40 long years of hope. Had we lost, they insist, we would be behaving just the same, but it is simply not true. We may not have taken the defeat lightly, but I like to think that – just as with the quiet certainty of the right rest, in contrast to the shrieking fantasies of the left – Leavers would have accepted the result, for now at least, and made the best of it.

But hey, the festive season is almost upon us and we have ten days to ‘do the right thing’ and ‘improve’ our offer. Let’s join together and celebrate in song with the Ten Days of Brexit.

On the Tenth day of Brexit,

The EU sent to me:

Ten Lords a-Leaking,

Nine Goalposts Dancing,

Eight Merkels Moaning,

Seven Deadlines Slipping,

Six Geezers Braying,

Guy Ver-hof-staaaadt!

Four Calling Foul,
Three Flying Fucks,
Two Fingers Raised,

And a Parliament in a Quandary.

There, if that doesn’t bring peace and harmony throughout  Euroland, I really don’t see what more we could possibly do.