Plain Words

Had you been keeping a watching brief over the Brexit discourse– and many other issues, such as the filthy racism of anybody not brown, or the hideous austerity which barely keeps the unemployable in tribal tattoos – you may have noticed a certain paucity of originality. ‘They didn’t know what they were voting for’, perhaps, or ‘they fell for lies on a bus’, possibly sowed ‘the politics of hate and division’ or one of my favourites, ‘the referendum was won by illegal means’. (I think they mean ‘voting’.)

People in general are pretty poor at expressing themselves and they rely on others to do the heavy lifting, to provide the pithy phrases for their placards, to make their chants loosely rhyme and to demonstrate to all the world their vacuous lack of any joined-up thought. In the process a certain mangling of the language occurs whereby linguistics shortcomings are revealed, words are tortured into a shape they were never intended to fit and the overall impression is of a disorganised rabble making it up as they go along. If only they had some sort of quality control to avert the grammar crimes which do so much to undermine their cause.

Six decades ago, Sir Ernest Gowers decided that these would not be failings of the civil service and he gave to the English-speaking world the marvellous maxim: ‘Be short, be simple, be human’. Since then his best-selling guide, Plain Words, has never been out of print and never out of relevance as our ability to communicate in our mother tongue is increasingly relegated to the second division of desirable attributes to include on a curriculum vitae. (In fact, short, simple, human CVs are thin on the ground these days.)

So relentless has been the assault on educational standards and particularly linguistic competence that Jacob Rees-Mogg’s styleguide has attracted exactly the type of impotent derision we have come to expect from the perpetually offended. So quick, so obvious and so vociferous has been the opposition that, were one a cynical soul, it could easily be imagined that Jake was trolling, as the usual suspects lined up to take the bait. I even happened upon a highly amusing radio discussion where it was claimed that an insistence on competent English disadvantaged those who could not demonstrate it. Well, duh-er!

Once again, then, the response of the left to declining standards is to lower the bar. What are  now routinely referred to as ‘vulnerable groups’ were once the most covetous of a good education. It used to be a badge of honour for the working class, especially immigrants, to acquire fluency because, without language, all other learning is at risk. But with rigour removed from our English teaching and fewer students going on to study the language at an advanced level, it is no surprise that, instead of addressing the shortfall, Labour seeks to close the gap by plastering over it.

The lefty style guide seeks to play down excellence and revels in removing language from daily discourse. Words are banned and meanings altered to fit an agenda which is so determinedly focused on equality that it matters not how low we have to sink to achieve it. The approved text teaches that insistence on good English is colonial; it perpetuates a servant and master society; it advantages the ‘posh’ boys; it is a form of white privilege and grammar is a tool of empire, etc, etc, etc. But grammar, as we all know is the difference between knowing your shit and knowing you’re shit.

But, as ever, the one word to which the left – famously possessing no sense of humour, irony or self-awareness – routinely demonstrates a near total blindness is hypocrisy. After the book burning, after the elimination of ‘unhelpful’ words. After seeking to control the language for so many years and in so many ways, who would have imagined that the left would get so very upset over somebody seeking to do exactly the same. And as for the scorn poured on his affinity for imperial measurements, before you criticise Jacob Rees-Mogg perhaps you should walk 1.60934 kilometres in his shoes.

Howling

The next full moon this year is not until the 15^th of August but to see the distressed state of the perpetually offended you would be forgiven for imagining we were experiencing a full-on, extended super-moon phenomenon. So maybe it’s the heat which is making all those mad dogs parade their inadequacies so openly? No, of course not; it’s Boris. Boris, for all his demonstrable faults, is a force of nature so powerful it has its own gravitational field into which are sucked the political detritus; the also-rans, the unemployables, the gibbering loons, orbiting chaotically at his command, responding to his every syllable. They think they have agency but ‘Britain Trump’ is playing them like a shrill penny whistle.

I’m talking about people like Steve Bray and the other idiots who practically live outside Parliament to register their individual and collective disgust at the exercise of democracy. Donning the flag of a non-country, swearing allegiance to cynical political appointees, ignoring the hideous and non-human technocracy of their new church, they look like adult children, complete with tantrums and tears. Bray in particular has stood there, chanting ‘Stop Brexit’ and shoving his facile placards in the faces of all who would pass his way, year after year. Somewhere in his captive mind is a belief that he acts of his own free will, but he is clearly in thrall to a peculiarly 21^st Century delusional madness.

This isn’t dedication to a cause; this isn’t helping anything; this isn’t a decent person’s opposition to enacting the wishes of a majority with whom he happens to disagree. This is mental illness, plain and simple. It is a wish to be thought relevant; by these actions he shall be remembered… and quickly forgotten. All he has achieved is to show every potential future employer that if he doesn’t accept what you have decided to employ him to do, he will refuse to do it. He has rendered himself a laughing stock, a braying idiot and an embarrassment who will forever have to live on the kindness of others or the charity of state.

But he is not alone. One could argue that, as a private citizen, he has fallen prey to a temporary madness and without wise counsel has naively exposed his inner thoughts to an unforgiving world, but such excuses don’t apply to many prominent others. Alistair Campbell, Jon Snow, Adam Boulton, Anna Soubry, David Lammy, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Owen Jones and many others – name after well-known name pops up to openly demonstrate their lack of perspective, judgment and temperance in demeanour. Imagining themselves somehow ‘better’ they use their platforms to bleat far and wide exactly how disturbed they are. And how wrong we all are.

Bray by name...

And it is becoming a concern because this has gone beyond anything to do with Brexit, the country or whatever newly minted grievance you happen to have dreamed up. This isn’t about protest, is about them, the individual and their need for validation in a world that really couldn't care less. “But, look at me!” they cry, “Look at me, damn you. I am anti-Brexit and you are all racists and have but a fraction of my moral worth!” Like a child acting up the only effective response is to just ignore them and hope that one day they realise that they are nobody.

British Standards

Of course Boris Johnson was going to beat Jeremy Hunt and no matter how the media tried to spin the fact that Hunt was making ground in the last two weeks of the contest, once it was whittled down to those tow they may as well have just have had the vote and be done with it. But at least it gave the whiny brigade the opportunity to have a run-up to their garment-rending, self-harming tantrum and prepare themselves for an but highly public irrational meltdown.

Irrational? Of course; Boris being Prime Minister is hardly surprising, given all the assistance afforded by the Remain campaign. Not recognising that their brand ethos of lecturing, hectoring, browbeating and generally abusing the general public for their ignorance, xenophobia, causal racism, Little Englander mentality and all the rest is largely what lays behind the Brexit vote in the first place. The British – the true British – are phlegmatic. We are not quick to hot temper; rather we quietly absorb the insults, then defy you.

So, by so emphatically screeching from the rooftops how Boris must never become Prime Minister you were, effectively, endorsing his candidacy in the eyes of those you hold so low. And now, by yelling your impotent howls of pain into the void, all you are doing is feeding our sense that we were right all along. Mediocre comedian-muso Mitch Benn is a near-perfect exemplar of the genre, with his small-minded, hastily composed anti-Brexit, anti-British ditties and his insistence that those who would swear the UK’s fealty to foreign powers are the true patriots. An idiot doesn’t know that he is an idiot.

An idiot used to be something you tried not to be, but nowadays it seems that in the bizarro-world of leftist equalitarian nightmares, idiocy is the moral equivalent of intellect; one man’s inadequacy is the equal of another’s excellence. And now that the idiots are in positions of power the acceleration towards the age of idiocracy is almost palpable. They are everywhere; in the classroom, the courtroom, the boardrooms and woven through the very fabric of our national administration.

Our armed forces rightly bemoan the loss of competence; if we no longer have experience in all theatres of warfare, how can we adequately train future soldiers to fight for our freedoms? If we scale back on rigour in education, is it any wonder that the school- leavers of today are less well-equipped for the world of work? And if our public discourse is so poorly degraded that any idiot with a grievance believes their poorly framed and intellectually bereft grudges are as equally valid as honouring a national democratic referendum.

The rage has barely subsided; if anything, it has intensified since 2016. These people are not only not going away, they are growing in self belief and self-righteousness even as their argument becomes weaker and their former supporters desert them. They are not even embarrassed now by their, frankly, embarrassing tweets, pronouncements, press briefings and articles. Boris has begun to lance the boil and he hasn’t even lifted a finger yet.

Time to be the bulldog

He has a small window of opportunity to stop the rot, drain the swamp and show up the flimsy ambitions of Parliament. They wish to remain under the thumb of a supranational junta; have our standards set by others; subjugate ourselves to a project which does not have our interests front and foremost. He has to start hard, maintain the pressure and insist that the only standards to which we should all be held are those our predecessors spent blood and treasure establishing. Is it too soon to hope that the Battle for Britain has begun?

Gunboats!

Gunboat diplomacy without the gunboats is how our inability to defend shipping in the Strait of Hormuz has been described. As the deliberate and not so gradual winding down of Britain’s once world-bestriding Royal Navy now shows, in stark relief, Britannia no longer rules the waves. No longer and not for some time, as the US Navy took over that role in the middle of the last century. Still we could – and did – hold up our end of the deal until relatively recently.

Now, of course, the powers are calling for an international joint task force to take control of the region, much, it can be assured, to the chagrin of the Arab powers who seek to burst free from the restraints that more, shall we say civilised, nations have applied. The region needs to be kept in check, possibly more than ever before, now that an impending nuclear dawn for islam draws nearer. But there it is, the Royal Navy is neutered, shackled and brought to heel along with the British Army and the Royal Air Force, victims of an ideology of defeat.

Meantime, civil society has been under its own siege as manners, conduct and general behaviour have been eroded to the point of near anarchy. London appears to be the stabbing capital of western Europe, overrun, it seems by lawless gangs, drug runners, people traffickers and the like, many of whom spring from the unaccounted population of what are now termed ‘irregular migrants’. Even the language has been controlled so that such meaningless terms make it nigh on impossible to call a spade a spade and thus address the recurrent theme.

That theme is decline and retreat and surrender and  beg for assistance and there is no logic to it. No logic unless, you desperately conclude, it is deliberate. But surely, it couldn’t be deliberate, could it? Britain barely contributes its commitment to NATO and it is obvious to all – serving and veteran, like myself – that even that is nowhere near enough. Events in the Gulf confirm it. We are no longer independent economically, militarily and even culturally; we have been diminished, diluted and to what purpose?

To sell the notion of supra-national governance, where no one state can exist without the help of all the others; where no actions may be taken – militarily, economically, culturally – without the consent of all the others; where no flag assumes an importance greater than the flag of the mother ship; where we are all citizens of the world and wards of state. In an earlier age this was called communism, but now they call it the EU. Those who plead to stay are those who have accepted the loss of British identity; those who are convinced that ‘progressive’ is derived from progress, when it is really spawned from helplessness.

Boris channels Churchill? He will have to.

So, tomorrow we will have a new Prime Minister and the EU rats are already deserting the government midden. If Boris has the balls he could turn this evacuation into a rout, and in the very brief window of opportunity before they try to bring down the government, he has the ability to reach out and demand more. Not from him, not from Parliament, but from us. More optimism, more hope, more determination to recover what we threw away some decades ago. If we have even the smallest glimmer of a hint of a sliver of a chance, we need to get behind Boris and push like fuck.

Last Week

I just watched the very last This Week with the incomparable Andrew Neil. What a loss to everybody this is. It will be missed by its devotees and its demise makes the BBC significantly poorer in terms of political balance. Complained about by ardent lefties as being driven by Neil’s aggressively right-wing agenda it was, of course, nothing of the sort. Rather it was a last bastion for independent thought and free expression without taking itself too seriously.

The last show was a masterclass in self-effacement and the willing participation in the kind of ritual embarrassment the show claimed as its own as commentators and politicos from left, right and right-on made utter tits of themselves, then showed up to be shown up in front of a live audience. Forget the ‘reality’ shows where former back-benchers pose as ordinary human beings for the edification of a thoroughly non-discerning public, This Week’s pastiches had none of the dignity of the bush tucker challenge or ‘real housewives’; they were amateur hour personified and what better portrayal of the frailty of the position of those with power or influence.

Naked under the Andrew Neil spotlight, This Week allowed for the widest possible set of views and woe betide those without the depth to back up their claims. Nobody was safe and many a pomposity was pricked as the expounders of lies and bent truths spluttered and stalled before the master interrogator’s inquisition. Neil was uniquely well-prepared and attacked all false claims, from either end of the spectrum, whenever falsehoods were being promulgated or out-of-context ‘facts’ used to support false theses.

To the left, Neil must have seemed like a right winger but ask any right winger who has been placed in those thumbscrews how much mercy was shown and they may well shudder at the recollection. Legion are the social media clips showing the evisceration of the high and mighty and the self-proclaimed champions of unworthy causes. Livid were the bruises and scars of battle as hypocrisies were exposed, bullshit batted away and crap countered. And he did all of this with a smile and a cheery, cheesy line.

We may never see its like again, yet we have never needed a sense of perspective so much. The opening monologue alone was worth tuning in for – a catalogue of catastrophic, comically inaccurate predictions, forecasts, earnest proclamations and plain dodgy prophecies presented earnestly over the years. If only some of those just as earnestly forecasting doom and disaster over Brexit could see just how foolish they appear to the rest of us. If only the never-Trumpers could give just an inch of grudging ground.

Let's face it, Jonesy, you're a bit of an arse...

But the fight goes on and Andrew Neil’s spirit will still stalk the corridors of power. Political discourse may have lost one of the few people keeping it grounded, but there are plenty of we amateurs on social media. Keep taking the piss, keep knocking them off their lofty pedestals. Before we can clean up politics we need to sling a whole lot more mud.