Partly Political

I would have a lot more time for socialism if those making a living from peddling it were instead actually practising what they preach and doing something about the lives of those they claim need to be rescued by it. As far as I can see, socialism for all of its 170-year history has signally failed to improve the lives of those who vote for it. Meantime capitalism, the system by which pretty much all trade exists, has increased material wealth for all, but generated some, on-the-face-of-it grotesque, imbalances.

Maybe it is a simple fact that humans are not very good at making impartial decisions and equitably sharing out what we have amassed. In true ‘more equal than others’ fashion, socialist politicos are notorious for jumping housing queues, getting planning permission for favoured religious buildings and creating nepotistic dynasties throughout the public sector. Meantime, more than a few Tory MPs have been mired in scandals involving huge financial privileges granted to friends, family and powerful benefactors.

Politicians of all stripes are less trusted now than they have been for many years and yet all of this still carries on. MPs who have been imprisoned for fraud, perjury and the like should not even dare to show up again in public, yet they retake their seats on release from jail as if butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths. They are caught out in newspaper stings in such embarrassing circumstances that most of us would change our names and flee the country, yet continue chairing select committees on Standards in Public Life. Or they appear in their underpants cruising for gay sex, but then imagine they can adopt moral stances without criticism.

Whatever you think of the Orange Man he was dead right on one thing; the swamp needs draining; as true an ambition over here as it ever was in the US of A. Forget your big global conspiracies, your New World Orders, the Great Reset and all of that guff. Change at that level is nigh-on impossible for we mere mortals. Much as I hate the term, co-opted as it has been by the Labour Party, change needs to happen at grass roots level.

Every person in public office, from the school board up to the House of Lords, should come under close and highly intrusive scrutiny. It should not be possible to award a contract to anybody with whom you have any connection, or by which somebody you are connected to may profit, without full disclosure, and pending approval from people outside your closed circle of colleagues and friends. And if it is unavoidable that a policy you have championed enriches your nearest and dearest the very least you should do it to retire from public office.

As a start to this swamp-draining, anybody seeking office should be assumed to have nefarious reason and be under such detailed scrutiny that only the whitest of white (and I make no apology for the use of that phrase, you all know what it means an if you are offended then you are also unfit for office) could ever make it through to nomination. And all voting for MPs should be via personal attendance, identity proven, apart for those in exceptional circumstances, for whom ballots should be collected directly by at least two, sworn-in officials of at least two different political allegiances.

Two cheeks of the same political arse

The shenanigans over the pond over the last week should leave us in no doubt that western politics is broken. And the insertion of predominantly Pakistani muslims into so many political seats from which they seem unassailably capable of practising politics in a less than, shall we say, a western democratic manner, should be cause for concern for all. Politicians like to talk about fighting for things; isn’t it time we fought back?

Sincerely yours?

Can there be anything more sick-making, for level-headed, stiff upper-lipped Brits, than the sight of emotionally insecure people spontaneously breaking into tears as they sob their soundbites into recorded history. Wall to wall wailing has been breaking out across the formerly civilised world in response to a charisma-free septuagenarian being declared the 46^th President of the United States.

There is something embarrassing about mass outpourings of emotion. Those huge funereal crowds, rending their garments and gurning for the cameras. We used to be amused by the ululating natives, the quaint piccaninnies with their emotive ways, but now the piccaninnies are us; at least, they are some of you. And while those of us who eschew such public frailty still look on bemused, we fear we are a dying breed.

Politics and power used to be the preserve of sober men and women. Pragmatism used to be the guiding principle of governance, with the rousing of passions reserved for tub-thumping occasions. A speech in the house, a hustings, a public debate, a call to arms and so forth, these were the rare times the lip might tremble and character be revealed.

We need character – and characters – in public life, but we need consistency more. We also need backbone and tenacity and leaders who are unafraid to be unpopular when they need to be. In this respect Boris Johnson is no Donald Trump, being master of the emotive u-turn. And although Trump inspired some dangerous passions, in people you wouldn’t necessarily want to be neighbours, I don’t recall a flag parade of sopping wet handkerchiefs on his 2016 victory.

Trump’s message, for all his faults, was America for Americans. Biden’s appears to be America for whoever wants it. And people are weeping for this? As Biden himself might say. “come on, man!” Yet even here, where a Biden victory may spell some difficulty for us as a country, people on the left are blubbing on air like they just received an all-clear from a cancer scare.

But sober and pragmatic and realistic and reasonable are boring, while joy and anger and fear bring a rush of blood to the brain. Reason rarely wins over emotion and this is the power of the left. Forget trying to explain – everything is far too complicated – instead, seize on a single smouldering nugget of fury and apply the bellows. Fan that flame until the anger it engenders is impossible to resist, then set the mob alight.

Maybe I am being unfair, but it does seem to me that leftist politics is emotionally driven and appeals to people who are dreamers, rather than doers. This is possibly why we don’t see very much of notionally right-wing mobs. The right wing, such as it is, is busy running things, putting food on the table and actually paying for all the things the leftists demand but can never provide for themselves.

They won - why cry over it?

If immature passion was what drove the world, what made it function, then the left, having once been elected, would never be out of office. But they always run out of steam. People realise they can’t eat emotion; they can’t keep warm by really wishing to be warm and they can’t build structures with sentiment. These are campaign tools which attract a certain sort; the sort who often lack the ability to realise their dreams. I have no doubt that leftists are sincere, but like leftism itself, sincerity never built anything.

Don't Get Too Excited

It’s been a while since I published a blog. It’s not that I have been out of ideas, rather that by the time I get the draft in my head, circumstances have changed, the public mood has shifted and others have already blasted their thoughts into the blogosphere. But I sense a brief lull as the world holds its breath and gazes at the USA, and here in the UK people enter a Covid stupor, unsure what to believe.

Well that’s not something I’m going to help you with; you make up you own minds. But here’s the crux of the matter – how? The government tells you one thing, your mate tells you another. Extensively researched papers are published and reach a reasoned conclusion, but then some reality television ‘star’ begs to differ. And just when you think you have a handle on an issue a cleverly argued debate spins you 180 degrees.

With statistically very few exceptions, none of us are experts, so we rely on experts – or rather the people who interpret the experts – to inform us. But when the experts – or those who interpret them - disagree we fall back on preferences. Once, we relied on the impeccably neutral ethos of the news media, on meticulously impartial documentary makers. But who now believes that any reporting comes without bias?

You don’t know the reality around either the pandemic or the US election. Neither do I. Nobody does and nobody ever will because, even with the benefit of hindsight, much will remain unclear or deliberately obscured. Historians will be overwhelmed by data and will find it impossible to discern fact from fiction, truth from lie. The outcome of their endeavours will be as much determined by what they want to see as what is actually in front of them. Will history in the future consist of multiple competing accounts from which to choose? What will be taught in school?

The focus is further blurred by credible bloggers, people with their own devoted following, who pursue particular threads: climate change, green technologies, politics, conspiracies, medicine, economics, etc, etc, etc. The world is awash with opinion peddled as indisputable fact, with conjecture posing as informed conclusion. The partially sighted leading the blind.

What of ‘Citizen Journalists’, you ask? Those on-the-spotters who film events in real time and thus generate accurate records of indisputable reality? I often watch such clips and fail to agree with the version of events which the publisher claims is being revealed. And then I have to ask how it was that they were right there, phone at the ready, to film just that segment. Not the minute before, not the resolution after, but just that bit which they believe supports their case.

Who knows what to believe any more? There are some who say that there is the proof, that the presentation of many facets of every story is a deliberate, deep state tactic to prevent us from knowing the truth. I think you know my views on that; isn’t a much more rational explanation that it is what it is, a multiplicity of different viewpoints randomly informed by experience and only occasionally having the appearance of collusion?

Relatively speaking, he knows no more than you...

How do we navigate through all this fog? Well, mostly, I try not to get too excited, try not to invest too much time worrying about things that don’t really affect me and concentrate instead on what I can do to further my personal aims. I’m more parochial than global in outlook and I still have faith in the silent majority… which is perhaps why I haven’t blogged for a while.

Diversity built Britain?

Hard on the heels of yet another barbaric muslim atrocity and the insistence by the close muslim community that these devout followers of islam are not real muslims, the Chancellor announces with some degree of pride a new 50p coin bearing the words ‘Diversity Built Britain’. Not content with that simple lie, he then states in a tweet: “I have seen first-hand the contribution made by ethnic minority communities to Britain’s history.” That would be all the fantastic ethnic historical figures of the last 40 years, then?

This is what propaganda looks like and it is bolstered by the continued presence in the broadcast schedules of the likes of Ash Sarkar and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and the grotesque Kehinde Andrews and Shola Mugabe Umbongo from SOAS, banging the race drum for all they are worth. Yes, they may be making black British history now, but none of it is helpful; it is just a non-stop demand for special treatment and unearned reparations. There can be no statues to celebrate their divisive actions.

It seems there is no position so extreme that the BBC will not give it oxygen, unless that position represents a white viewpoint. Whatever the topic, time should not be devoted to giving the majority view. Where is the balance? Where is the platform given to people who espouse personal responsibility and don’t forever demand that the government bows down before them? Important debates are not being had; important voices are not being heard.

I haven’t watched BBC Question Time in an age and not just because it airs a mere five hours before I get up to go to work. I have also tuned out of the weekend politics and discussion shows because they demand I spend far too much of my time listening to people with whom I profoundly disagree. Now, you may say, one ought to give ear-time to those with whom you disagree, the better to understand their argument and perhaps to empathise with their world view.

Fine, but why is the same tolerant patient demeanour not expected of them? It is okay for them to call me a Nazi, to insist that I live a life of hate, that I am a racist who despises all people of a different skin colour. But where is the condemnation of them when they blast me for the colour of MY skin? Hypocrisy is too weak a word; we need a new one to describe this prolonged attack on ordinary, decent, working people. This has been going on for decades now and every time somebody gets close to having a platform to air a contrary but no less valid viewpoint, they are screamed down.

Katie Hopkins, Darren Grimes, Roger Scruton, Douglas Murray and plenty of others have been de-platformed. Hell, even Germaine Greer was deemed insufficiently acquiescent to woke mobsters. What Alibhai-Brown said to Laurence Fox on Jeremy Vine’s show the other day would have had a nominal right-winger exposed to the might of the Crown Prosecution Service. What Darren Grimes said in exasperation some years ago, in the face of the extreme remain faction trying to overturn a democratic vote, has been held up by Femi Oluwole – yes a-fucking-nother one – as tantamount to inciting violence.

As I said, hypocrisy doesn’t begin to explain how some people get away with what would be a crime if aimed at them. The organised left, then, actually get to engage in violence and vandalism, with their never-ending assault on public decency. They get to exercise their right to protest with police protection while the police are deployed to whip up and then suppress those who exercise the same rights to different ends.

There is something sick about a society in which the majority view is regularly held to be the wrong view and those espousing it are regularly demeaned as bigots and fascists. And now, of course, Brexit is back on the menu. This means that the overworked insult ‘gammon’ is enjoying a whole new resurgence. That’s right, a term based on skin colour and used blanket-style to cast a majority sector of society as pantomime villains in jackboots. This is what diversity has built; and it has built little else.

Metaphors are Easy - the Truth is Hard

I’m planning on committing a hate crime. D’oh, what am I saying? I am thinking, therefore I am automatically committing a hate crime. It is only a matter of time before the pre-crime units throughout the land will be equipped with the necessary pre-cogs and intuits to read my mind. D’oh again, my mind is already being read as I type; as you read. You know what I’m going to think even before I think it myself. Bastards! (But you knew that, didn’t you?)

The trouble with facts is that that there are too damned many of them. Bloody facts, coming over here, raping our beliefs, taking advantage of our tolerance. Millions of facts are flooding into Europe; you can’t move for them. Sometimes I wonder if there is any space left for the truth, as the truth gets pushed out of our public lives and facts appear on our screens as if if fact lives are the only lives which matter.

Respected historian, David Starkey, paid a price for dabbling with the politics of facts and Darren Grimes in his turn is being made to suffer. There is no justice for truth these days, but threaten a fact and the Old Bill will turn up in a dawn raid to take your liberty in a heartbeat. The truth of the matter doesn’t, er, matter, when facts turn up en masse, demanding attention in far greater proportion to their numbers.

A very recent study even demonstrated that facts are over-represented in all visual broadcast media. What room is there, these days, for the truth, for all our truths… for our truths’ truths? I fear for the future of the young truths of today; they even want to be fact, as if somehow a raw fact has the same value as the honest truth. Truth is the bedrock of a civil society, whereas facts have a habit of multiplying without reason and imagining they have the same value without putting in the hard miles.

Yesterday, in response to a tweet about yet more rapefugee asylum seekers being represented by what are referred to by government voices as ‘lefty lawyers’ the Dorset Eye (me neither) challenged me to produce evidence to back up my re-assertion that they are, indeed, lefty lawyers. That is the truth of the matter; they are defending left wing ideals in regard to these invaders. But lawyers don’t deal in the truth, do they? They deal in facts. And facts, like statistics, if tortured long enough, will tell you whatever to wish to hear.

Where this leads...

The rule of law is devalued when it deals in facts and ignores the truth. The fact of the matter may be a rash word, issued under duress. Gather enough of these inconvenient facts and the truth of a good life lived in tolerant harmony with others is buried and forgotten. Only the fabricated facts of the ‘hate’ remains. This is important because the truth is being denied on a daily basis. I’m not just defending David Starkey here; I’m speaking out for all of us.