Booted up

Democracy has been served and Viktor Mihály Orbán stays in power in Hungary. But what’s this I hear, the wrong sort of democracy? The ‘D’ word is often used to denote freedom, a form of decision-making where even the lowliest has his say. But should the will of one person be exactly equivalent to that of another person? Should an employer of many people, provider of many livings only have the same clout as those who serve him? Should a nurse’s priorities carry the same weight as a soldier’s, a judge’s as those of a petty thief? Come to it, what do you mean by democracy?

The people who didn’t like the outcome of the referendum nevertheless generally support proportional representation, under which system we would still have narrowly voted for Brexit. Our first-past-the-post system is a form of democracy, but is widely open to fraud and gerrymandering; would that have returned the ‘correct’ referendum vote? Was a simple majority enough and if not, what margin would be acceptable? In Britain we are so neatly split down the middle that practically any referendum on any issue who’s outcome isn’t clear beforehand is going to have a narrow outcome.

Winston Churchill said in 1947 “Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time...” And he was right. Elevate a despot to power and your precious freedom is gone. Make it a free-for-all and much the same outcome ensues. We value our freedoms and our protections and our democracy gives us them, but...

Democracy is divisive; it produces winners and losers. In Britain it means that most of the time, close to 50% of the population are pissed off, the only consolation being that from time to time we get to swap the misery. But this is the game we’re in and it almost always better to make a decision than to muddle along without one, even though large-scale opposition to those decisions is inevitable. One thing noticeable in the divide, however, is that when the broadly right are in opposition they moan a bit but then get back to work because, after all, they’re paying for everything and moaning doesn’t get the work done.

When the left are in opposition, however, bitching and moaning takes on a whole new meaning. Largely freed of the need to keep the economy afloat – public sector jobs are a cost, not a contribution and many on the left are unemployed, students, etc – they can launch demonstrations, go on strike, flood social media with commentary and generally make a nuisance of themselves. They may be in the technical minority, but boy do they have a loud voice!

The rise of the right? Let history judge.

Right now the left, although preternaturally vocal, are fighting for their survival. The socialist EU super state is being challenged and the sucklers on its teats are not happy. They call democracy ‘populism’ in order to discredit  it and warn of ‘the rise of the far right’, by which they mean you and me. And Orbán’s re-election is – in their propaganda – one step away from Mussolini. But have a good look at the left. Listen to their words, see their actions. Whose feet are the jackboots really on?

Think

Let’s try a little thought experiment. Imagine, just for one second, that the Labour Party has good in its heart. Let us, for a while, entertain the notion that people like John McDonnell honestly hold their views. Let’s put aside their visceral malice towards their political rivals and just take them at their word. They are the nice party, the caring party; they have the monopoly on kindness. So, how would a Labour government change anything at all in a meaningful way, which would bring about all the things they claim to stand for?

Alan Sugar was ennobled by the Labour Party, but he left them over Ed Miliband’s hopeless leadership and is once more attacking their hard left, anti-Zionist stance; they don’t much like Alan over at Momentum Central. To be fair he had no business being in the party in the first place, but like many from working class roots he naturally admired their former championing of the working man. But – and here’s the nub of it – despite the high talk Labour hates social mobility. Get on in life and you’ll become a class traitor in their eyes.

This is particularly exemplified by their determination to eradicate grammar schools. How dare schools stretch pupils and give them ideas above their station? And how dare they promote the idea that some can and will achieve more than others? When Tony Blair said “Our top priority was, is and always will be education, education, education...” I am willing to believe he was sincere. But the trouble with education is that young people learn to reason. Maybe the mantra would more correctly be rendered as ‘indoctrination, indoctrination, indoctrination’.

Even this can be excused if you accept that the world would be a happier place if we all just tolerated each other and rubbed along, but in their admirable zeal to ‘rescue’ the ‘most vulnerable in society’ they simply do not see the reality. Despite socialism’s best efforts people do eventually begin to think for themselves and it’s all a matter of perspective; when you are young and broke it seems entirely reasonable that others should ‘do more’ (pay) to improve your lot. When you are old and rich, like Lord Sugar, it is easy to be charitable and donate directly. It’s just everybody else wherein the problem lies.

The real fear for Labour is that once people start to make larger than average tax contributions they have the annoying tendency to want to know how their money is being spent. And once you begin to question the profligacy of flawed policies throwing money at lost causes, it is inevitable that your sympathies become somewhat dissipated. Labour simply cannot be the tide that lifts all boats because at their core they are all about robbing the rich. And the rich often used to be the poor.

Forget the current round of anti-Semitism, that is just another symptom of the Labour disease. Ideology harbours contradictions and equality is the most malign ideology there is; outwardly harmless, it slowly drives its host mad. Because in order to bring about equality you have to practise inequality and penalise those you used to praise. And just like a whipped dog that one day turns on its persecutor, when the policies that once controlled you now arouse your anger, your perspective shifts. That thought experiment? Think again.

Oh, honey honey!

When The Archies hit number one in the US Billboard Hot 100 in 1969 they sang, “You are my candy girl, and you've got me wanting you.” Oh, those far away days of innocence and youth and a little of what you fancy. But we got greedy. We wanted much more of what we fancied and cheered on by the marketing giants what we fancied was being carefully moulded and refined behind the scenes so that we would yearn for the instruments of our own destruction.

A survey announced yesterday claimed that two-thirds of British people felt they were living their own Groundhog day, doomed to repeat the same old routines without fulfillment forever and ever. This is what you get when you tell lumbering animals that they are better than they really are; that they have a higher purpose. But just as – from our perspective – a pig’s life is to eat and eat, grow fat quickly and then become bacon, the purpose of the average human in the west is to consume, to fuel the machine and then in turn be consumed by it

All the inspirational, aspirational lifestyle advertising and sloganizing has but one aim; whether it is a political party, a car manufacturer or a purveyor of breakfast cereal, the message is simple: buy what we are selling and you will become a better person. This groundhog day phenomenon is simply realisation setting in. Or, rather realisation not setting in, by which I mean that despite the simple truth that mankind is just another animal, its individuals truly want to believe they are better.

Not so many generations ago just surviving from one year to the next was a celebration. Easter was a collective sigh of relief for having made it through the winter and after the long, dull nights it was time to redouble efforts to grow a bigger crop for next year. Groundhog day, involving actually waking up tomorrow and doing it all again, was almost a bonus. Those few individuals who broke out of the mould and became leaders and artists and entrepreneurs were – and are – very much the exception.

And if you need any more convincing that your monotonous life really is all that you deserve, just look at what your actions produce. But it’s still not enough, is it? You need somebody else to somehow alter the consequences of your decisions. You want to eat too much sugar and not get fat. You want to spend all your money but still have a healthy bank balance. You want to vote Labour and not remain poor. You want to vote Conservative and not have to compete. In short you want to complain about Groundhog Day when you’re not prepared to step out of it. 

You want to change your life? Well it’s not up to others; don’t listen to them. You need to stop complaining about how other people are holding you back. You climb break out of your rut and re-shape your life. You need to get up off your arse and start grafting. You’re not going to get the Coca-Cola lifestyle and still keep your gym body unless you’re prepared to give something. If you really want to reduce your glucose intake you shouldn't have to wait for government to tax you into doing it. It might actually come easy; it’s more likely to be hard, but it’s not going to happen at all unless you 'just do it'. Or did you want me to sugar-coat that?

Don't you just hate that?

Alison Saunders says she won’t be renewing her contract. This is a contract that is now widely known wasn’t going to be renewed anyway. Why do unpopular people make slow-moving targets of themselves so regularly? This isn’t so much jumping before pushed as indicating when you’re already on the slip road. But what is Alison’s greatest legacy during her time as Director of Public Prosecutions, heading up the Crown Prosecution Service? Assessed like most other service industries, on the expansion of their ‘customer base’ you’d have to say she’s done a bang-up job. But turning us all into criminals is hard to describe as any form of success.

Imagine you are on a bus in any large city in the UK and a very fat woman in a burka gets on. She addresses the driver in a language you cannot fathom, then lumbers her way towards you, the only person occupying a double seat. Knowing there are free seats upstairs and with several stops to go, you vacate your seat and allow her to sit as you head upstairs. A low murmur comes from nearby, but you think nothing of it. When, a few stops later, you descend the stairs you are greeted by and escorted from the bus by the police. What was your crime?

You are not being charged with maliciously affording a seat to a lady – that would be sexist. Nor are you aiding and abetting the recognition of disability – that would be ableist. And fat-shaming. Thinking that beneath the burka was a woman is also assuming her gender, which is transphobic and not addressing the new passenger in her native language, or engaging the services of an interpreter could be construed as xenophobic since Mrs Saunders’ tenure in post. (Actually, referring to Alison Saunders as ‘Mrs’, even though that is her title, could, in itself be construed as a crime.) Nobody dare mention the burka.

No, you need not be charged with anything so specific and practically anybody on the bus could have denounced you to the Thought Crime Unit, because you are guilty without any form of trial of hate. Yep, you nasty, nasty, hatey bastard. It’s too late to try and defend yourself by claiming you were merely offering a seat to a lady; you could have budged up a bit but no, by leaving the seat altogether you have caused offence on a level capable of inciting actual violence among the more ‘misunderstood’ communities. Consider yourself lucky you weren’t lynched.

Lest you are unaware, the CPS definition of a hate crime is: 

"Any criminal offence which is perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice, based on a person's disability or perceived disability; race or perceived race; or religion or perceived religion; or sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation or transgender identity or perceived transgender identity."

They further ‘clarify’:

“There is no legal definition of hostility so we use the everyday understanding of the word which includes ill-will, spite, contempt, prejudice, unfriendliness, antagonism, resentment and dislike.”

And the departing DPP seems to actually be proud of this. So, well done Alison. You really won’t be missed.

April Fools

We return once again to a timeless classic; what is the point of the Labour Party? I’m serious. Where once Keir Hardie’s band of brothers joined the struggle to wrest workers’ rights from the hands and whims of capricious High-Church philanthropists; where once the impetus was to put the means of production under the control of those who toiled, now it is, what, to turn out victims? In an effort to be all things to some men (the others are out at work) Labour has totally lost the plot as quickly as it has just lost its grip on the moral high ground.

After the failures of the overly-mighty union days and the overwhelming evidence that having horny-hands on the levers of industrial power is not such a great idea because they don’t always play nice, the parliamentary Labour Party needed a new mission. Having essentially lost control of and hence interest in the workers they decided that what society really needed was a ground-up remodelling. Hence the rise and rise of the special interests groups; but, when everybody has special needs, nobody is particularly special any more.

The moral crusades of the last few decades have not been about uniting the majority of the population in a common cause, but about dividing society into ever more nuanced variations. Variety may be the spice of life but nobody lives on spice alone... and too much spice can give you indigestion. It is little wonder then, that in a world where the microscope is used to discern the slightest difference on which to squander public money, scant attention is paid to the much wider world beyond the eyepiece. Forget them; they’re all right, Jack. All we need from them is the tax they must pay.

To the socialist, all money comes from tax. They have no interest in how the wealth which attracts that tax is generated. So, in order to feed the burgeoning equality and diversity industry, ever more government jobs need to be created, replete with all the hard-won rights won by workers who actually grafted to create the wealth that is now being squandered. Government jobs create no wealth. Government jobs outside the essential services and bureaucracies to administer them create no value either. But at least they come with tenure, eh?

Once again the laws of unintended consequences rise up from the depths to bite them on the arse. Why work hard to acquire a useful skill, a trade, a saleable portfolio of competencies when you can turn to the state instead. No father of Old Labour would have said “Today, son, I’m going to show you how to be a loser, a needy person.” But today it could be deemed useful advice. And if you can’t actually be a loser, you can always train to recognise and serve those losers, by joining the army of occupations that start with socio and end in misery.

This is the socialist mire: The more state jobs are needed to serve the dependency culture the smaller is the talent pool for productive employment. Taxes rise. The more capital flees, the greater the demand for state assistance. Labour’s solution? Yet more government intervention and an expansion of the system which created the problems in the first place. Eventually all you have is a machine for spewing out ever more demand for resources and no more resources to go around.

Trust me - there's nobody here but us chickens...

How do you sell this pack of trivialities and neediness to a wider public fed up of seeing the squeaky wheels of protest getting all the grease? Apparently, you recruit even squeakier wheels and put them in positions of power. Men on all-women short-lists; women on the boards of heavy industries entirely composed of male workers; perpetual victims to play the role of advocates for ever more wasted spending; foxes in charge of hen houses. And Eddie Izzard on the NEC. Send in the clowns.