The Greatest Gift

Happiness, sang Ken Dodd, happiness, was the greatest gift that he possessed. Gift in this case meaning gifted by god, by nature, by providence or, just possibly gifted by himself. So precious is this gift that the pursuit of it is enshrined in the US Declaration of Independence, alongside life and liberty. But while life and liberty are granted as ‘unalienable rights’ even the Founding Fathers recognised that that happiness means different things to different people and thus it was up to each as individuals to pursue their own with no guarantee of success.

So it is somewhat presumptuous of Jo Swinson, the new and excitable leader of the Illiberal anti-Democratic Party, to propose the appointment of a Minister for Happiness. For a start, what can she mean by happiness and how would we measure when one has achieved it? Will we have to regularly report our state of elation to government auditors for assessment? After all, if you are going to create a ministry how will it know when it has achieved its stated aims and will it have to define an acceptable type of happiness; will happiness be regulated, ordered, monitored and corrected, or will we be granted the liberty to define our own?

But just suppose happiness – and bear with me on this as I riff – is, you know, a by-product of many other things, such as being comfortably well-off, having a sound roof above your head, being fed and watered and decently clothed. Being free of worldly concerns has to contribute to the sum total of contentment but humans have a habit of finding misery even amidst great wealth and comfort. So, I’m guessing the new ministry would have to also consider removing the impediments to joy which thwarted ambition, failed relationships and loss bring.

Perhaps we could also have ministers whose purpose is to ensure good educational outcomes, healthcare, stress-free and efficient transport, agricultural productivity, environmental security and, say, equality and human rights? If only these had been considered by earlier administrations then we wouldn’t need Jo’s blue-sky, outside the box, radical, direct-to-the-heart-of-the-matter prognostications. Better still, to make us feel better than ever, why not a minister for self-esteem? See, these are classics of student-level, socialist groupthink; ‘if only everybody could be more like me… let’s legislate!’.

It turns out, on further investigation that we already have (who’d have thought it?) ministries to deal with all the above and more. And we have more advisors on health, wealth and happiness than we have ever had. The internet is awash with people making themselves very happy indeed – and smug – by telling everybody else how to achieve a nirvana just like theirs. And it is a crock because what makes you wriggle in delirious delight may well make me squirm in revulsion. We no more need a minister for happiness than we need one for breathing.

But, you know what is good for happiness, for self-esteem, for all-round well-being? It is a sense of being in control of your own destiny. Give people the tools and the wherewithal and they will work out the rest for themselves. Educate them, provide meaningful, well-paid work and a sense of community and responsibility and they will become better people. Free them from the shackles of groupthink and suddenly the whole group is healthier. 

Real freedom - not those 'freedoms'.

As a nation the freedom to pursue life, liberty and happiness will not come from being shackled to a moribund rules-obsessed monolith which believes it can legislate people better. It will not come from a one-size-fits-all approach to every part of society. It is in the Declaration of Independence, Jo! Freedom from those Newspeak 'freedoms' of the EU. Happiness comes from pulling up your socks, getting up off the bench and walking out through that open cell door. Brexit has opened the door for us – let’s get the hell out before people like Swinson slam it shut again.

Still Winning

I love it when people who know so much better than me tell me why I voted to leave the EU. I have been, variously, an unthinking dupe of the Russians, indoctrinated and herded by rich ‘elites’ who ‘stand to make a fortune. I am a Little Englander who wants a return to the nineteen-fifties, shortly after we had stood up to Hitler and survived, battered and bruised… but I am also a Nazi myself; somebody who would deny others their freedoms. I am a brutal racist thug, under-educated fool, lower class canon fodder and all round idiot. Also, I am old.

The insults come quite soon after you have challenged a Remainer on the ridiculous things they are saying and often immediately precede a block. It is quite tiresome at times, trying to argue with these bricks in the propaganda wall of hate which has been carefully laid by pro-EU agitators. It is also amusing to see how many Remainers claim to know ‘many’ leavers who have changed their mind when confronted with ‘the facts’ and – of course – while Remainers endure forever, Leavers are dying off in their droves.

At yesterday’s losers march, the bias of the establishment was hard to avoid. While the dwindling numbers of referendum-deniers were pretty much allowed free rein to wander as they wished, those opposing the chosen ones’ show were kettled and frustrated by the police. When the self-declared communist Ash Sarkar took to the stage the first thing she tried to do was to goad these largely honest voters by screeching “Fascist scum – off our streets” and get a crowd chant going. It is all beginning to ring hollow.

The same old insults, the same old tired schtick. Remain voters are good, caring, intelligent, educated people with the best interest of humanity at heart. Leavers are, to a man, thuggish, sluggish gammon; thick, brutal, gullible and gulled. Remainers went to university, you know? Leavers learned their skills on the streets as muggers and conmen. Remainers care deeply about the world. Leavers want to plunder it. Yeah, yeah, yeah… you know the word ‘populist’ is just around the corner and – wait for it – Boris Johnson is, literally Hitler.

And so to the papers and the polls. The serial failure (and cabineteer most likely to elicit the question 'who?') Amber Rudd leaving the Conservatives is widely touted as a mortal blow to the government. But why would the jettisoning of ballast make Boris’s balloon fly lower? In fact, with every sneaky sucker punch the usual suspects try to get in, Johnson’s stock in the country rises. It is almost as if those so supremely in the know don’t really understand Britishness at all. Keep beating the dog and sooner or later we will step in and stand up for it.

Boris brings the house down.

So as we enter the end days of this struggle – if Robert Mugabe’s reign can be described as a heroic struggle, then Brexit surely can – let us hope that Boris keeps his nerve and sticks to his guns. The threat of prison for breaking the newly-minted and highly partisan law, if necessary, to take us out should only embolden him. If the left, the communists, the true forces of remain really want to make him a martyr, we will cheer him all the way to the metaphorical scaffold.

Brexit Maximus

A recent report has revealed that the children of women who suffered stress during pregnancy are more likely to develop mental health problems by the time they are thirty. Labelled ‘child personality disorder’, presumably to generate a new income stream for those who diagnose such things, it manifests itself as an excess of  anxiety, emotional instability, anti-social behaviour and even paranoia. In other words, immaturity. Quelle surprise!

As with all such revelations it should be taken with a pinch of salt and a great deal of scepticism. With a bit of redrafting the conclusions could have been a much more credible; ‘stressed-out mums create neurotic kids’. It is well-known that the children of adults in difficult circumstances have far poorer prospects than those brought up in secure, happy, well-balanced households. Why should these redundant ‘new’ findings raise even an eyebrow?

But this is not to dismiss this latest example of stating the bleeding obvious as entirely irrelevant, because it is a well-established fact that certain personality types are difficult to live with and cause trouble in all sorts of unpleasant ways. Pandering to them, as our nice, usually pretty tolerant society tends to do, doesn’t always help; this is how we end up with tyrannical infants pulling temper tantrums and embarrassing their parents, or ego-maniacal talking heads in positions of influence, whipping up a storm, But enough of Owen Jones.

Actually, no. Owen Jones may well be the prime exemplar of the stressed-out mother’s progeny; and if she wasn’t stressed out during pregnancy she really ought to be now because Owen, in common with many high-profile figures, is exhibiting signs of a deep and chronic mental disorder. One of the obvious signs of mental imbalance is an inability to recognise when you are out of whack with those around you. So unaware are they of their own extremism that they think it is perfectly normal to predict the direst of consequences, repeat the craziest of conspiracies and liberally insult and demean those round them.

People, undoubtedly, are a product of their environment – in the case of Greta Thunberg possibly a product of THE environment - but Greta at least has an excuse in the form of a diagnosed autistic spectrum dysfunctionality. But what mitigation can we offer in defence of the derangement of Jones and Soubry, of Campbell and Grieve, of and Hammond and Umunna? (Oh, wait, sorry: Chuka’s issues are entirely due to his own misplaced high self-regard and delusions of relevance.)

The rest of them, though? It has been called Brexit Derangement Syndrome and in homage to their identifying hashtag Full Blown Psychotic Episode. Whatever you want to call it it bears all the hallmarks of a genuine mental illness and it is rife. The only likely cure is a form of immersion therapy, with a deep and rapid exposure to the cause of their anxieties. The only thing that can cure the rabid FBPE crowd now is Brexit. Not your cautious soft Brexit, nor a Norway option but a full-leaded, no safety net, no-going-back, Brexit Maximus.

Help them; before it is too late.

Much ballyhoo is being made in Parliament – a major nexus of the sickness – of the attempts to prevent the Prime Minister from carrying out the job he was elected to do. But he must be allowed to administer the medicine or else the disease will spread until it affects the still-functioning organs. It is far too late to treat it locally and only an amputation of the infected parts can bring about a cure for what remains of us. We absolutely must leave now – before the entire country goes mad.

[Coda: Some mental Tweeters have started to add a black dot to their profiles in order to claim they, or somebody they know WILL DIE as a result of Brexit. This isn't just a bout of midsummer madness, it is an epidemic.]

Forgive them

The scenes this weekend, of zombie EU drones stumbling around the capital, impromptu protests against ‘fascism’, ‘dictatorship’ and a ‘coup’ that the government has somehow mounted against itself, are starting to look desperate. Demands that we ignore the referendum and – ideally, it seems – keep on voting until Remain wins, abound and formerly respected public figures once more make utter fools of themselves. Having finally got a Prime Minister who appears to mean what he says, is the truth beginning to dawn?

The screeching is becoming frantic, the demonstrations more desperate. Paul mason, communist agitator for a bygone age of heavy industry and wildcat strikes, has been all over the news parading his own breakdown for all to see. Remainer politicians, still believing they can play both sides, are laughably claiming they stand for democracy while simultaneously trying to overthrow it. And of course, the clownishly clad, EU-flag toting, ageing hippies are out there, speaking for the young, whose ‘futures have been betrayed’.

What a hoot. They are reliving the Greenham Common peace camps, the Ban-the-Bomb marches of the sixties and their own experimentation with the discredited mind-altering ideologies of Marx and Mao. Democracy is one thing, direct action another and the ignoring of a democratic mandate is an abuse of both. The vote is won, but the war goes on and the lies, the misleading rhetoric and the abuse of gullible people is largely the work of the losing side. We are now in the fourth year of this war and the end feels like it really is coming this time.

But how will they cope after the armistice, if armistice there is? After the war is over, will these people quietly go back to the jobs they held before? And what of the overly vocal public figures who, mask-slipped, have berated the public for their gullibility, their naivety, their doltish stupidity? How will they fare post-Brexit and will they double down on their own public humiliation by continuing to lobby for a lost cause? Well, of course they will; there is nothing else left for them and obscurity would be unbearable.

The only thing worse than being talked about, said Wilde, is not being talked about. For those who have been made to look fools – Grayling, Miller, Campbell, Clarke (the list goes on and on and on) the lesser punishment might just be to look for scraps of funding from EU sources to continue the fight from their little intellectual archipelago of disconnected islands. As far as the rest of us are concerned, a period of silence from these hollow vessels would be welcome.

  

Remainers make their reasonable demands...

So, let them have their last few weeks of public displays of grief. Let them imagine their dwindling numbers are fighting a cause which has not – as it has, undoubtedly – already been lost. Let them rend their garments, shriek until they are hoarse, dance like loons draped in the flags of our adversary. Let them call us fascists and Nazis, despots and dictators one last time. And then, let us forgive them and forget them, for they know not what they do.

The Final Countdown

It’s getting silly now. Like many who voted to leave the EU I did it for pragmatic, quite straightforward reasons. I don’t have the gift of prophecy so, unlike so many who proselytise for remaining under the direct control of a foreign power, I have no idea what the future brings. But I do have a clear and unwavering picture of my moral, social and political positions and development over the years. And I opted – given a free vote – to place my trust in the basic decency, honesty, thrift and wise counsel of the British people themselves.

I have never draped myself in the flag, although I quietly did my bit by serving in Her Majesty’s armed forces for a number of years. I have never taken to the streets to demonstrate, for a number of reasons: One, I have seen the scant regard given to noisy rabbles by the typical Briton. Two, being English, through and through, I am not given to public displays of grief, anger or even jubilation; I cling to my British phlegmatism, proud that it sets me apart from the more emotional Johnny-Foreigner, the behaviour of some of whom is, frankly. embarrassing.

But more importantly, I have never espoused a cause so precious that it has been worth my energy and dignity to parade my enthralment to all and sundry. Yes, I want to leave the EU. No, I don’t expect a return to empire, nor necessarily any ‘sunlit uplands’ to which I have not directly contributed. I don’t expect anybody to fight my battles for me (and I recognise I am fortunate not to need them to) but I also don’t expect anybody else’s single vote to hold more value than mine. And of course, being British, should I lose a battle, I quietly applaud my adversary, withdraw from the field and wait for the next time.

Just because Leave voters are not out in number, screeching obscenities at Westminster, spitting and snarling at those with whom they disagree, does not mean that the strength of feeling is any lower, nor that opinions have changed. Iain Duncan Smith once cautioned: "Do not underestimate the determination of the quiet man" and right now it feels as if we are the British garrison at Rorke’s Drift, facing up to an enemy we don’t recognise; an alien, hostile, noisy and numerous enemy; and lest anybody think that ‘enemy’ and ‘foreign’ and ‘alien’ are hyperbolic descriptors, just look at what they intend.

That is no less than the overthrow of an elected, if marginal, government. The overturning of constitutional procedures which go back centuries. The dismissal of the monarch’s role and in the process the trashing of the life’s work of the world’s longest serving and arguably the most steadfast head of state. And ultimately – for this is the European Union’s destination – the subjugation of a once sovereign nation to the whim of an unelected and unaccountable politburo of cronies and cranks with a common vision utterly at odds with the populations over which they hold sway. For them to refer to Boris Johnson’s prorogation of Parliament as a coup is an absolute triumph of doublethink.

Oi! Don't frow them bladdy spears at me!*

So the battle is joined. And while the throng on the field is clearly that of the aggressor, the invader, the foreigner, parading their garish colours for all to see, do not imagine there is no resistance to their aims. We have watched and waited as they beat their drums and bare their chests. We have kept our powder dry as they have fired off salvo after salvo. We have rationed our resources as they have laid siege to our motives, our intelligence and even our patriotism. But we have held steady and now, in the last scenes of this uncivil war we are waiting until we see the whites of their eyes.

(*Yes, I know. This ISN'T a genuine quote from the film!)