Jab Away!

I have to say it has been quite an education this past year, peeking into the mindset of Joe Average and realising that what lies between those average ears is malleable to an extraordinary degree. Beliefs that can flip on the toss of a coin are clearly not deeply held convictions, but the new vision of the converted is a force of nature to behold. People who were once healthy sceptics are now worshippers at the altar of one unifying dogma or another.

The anti-vaxxers have their religion but why should they impose it on others? This is especially invidious when you factor in that the anti-vax, anti-lockdown converts have a large Venn intersection with the free speech crowd. So what is it, freedom of speech but not if you say you are happy to comply with the government's attempts to save lives? Surely the right to disagree is embedded in the very core of freedom of speech. (If you don’t like that opinion, I have others.)

This duality pervades every debate; of course you have the right to disagree but you are wrong. Most debates are not simple dichotomies, though; people who believe the virus is a hoax have a different anti-vax stance from those who believe the virus is not only real but planned, developed and deliberately released. Those who object because they fear testing has or will not be comprehensive enough have a different view from those who have fallen down the 5G conspiracy rabbit hole.

And it’s not just Covid because, alongside all the conventional battle lines of disagreement have been added a whole regiment of new or revived challenges. Climate change, the plight of the third world, society as a whole and for some, the very future of humankind. But none of these topics stands alone and among your own ranks, fifth columnists muddy the waters and spread uncertainty and disinformation.

Trying to assess just one of the subjects of disagreement, the whole 'let's change our entire energy paradigm' conundrum is far too big, far too complex and far too interrelated to possibly solve without casualties. And as ever, the first casualty has been truth, leaving a gaping vacuum into which pours pure madness! The discussion on green transport rapidly descends into an argument about ending personal freedoms. Attempts to ensure energy security erupt into shouting matches about independent nation states… which inevitably tends towards ‘Hitler’.

As genuine experts and deep thinkers soberly ponder the options, Joe Average wades straight into the muddy puddle with some rant about exploding batteries putting lives at risk, or the fascinating conflation of Saharan dust with potato harvests in Chile. Every line of dissent seems to spiral down into hysteria about the freedom of the individual. This really is the end point; at the bottom of every movement, every cult, every new-age madness the freedom of the individual appears to be paramount.

It's just a little prick...

Yes, indeed. This necessarily includes the freedom to starve, to die of cold to be eaten by wolves to succumb to every invisible microbial, bacterial or viral agent out there. The freedom to go it alone against the might of the universe and damn the consequences. Because that is what ultimate freedom brings. The human race is a cooperative species and that is the secret to our success. Thus I have concluded that the freedom of the individual does not trump the needs of the herd and if my herd needs help to fend off disease I will willingly sacrifice any fancy lone hero nonsense and have the fucking jab, okay?  

Don't Panic - there's a Plan!

I was never a fan of Project Johnson, but the bungling, wild-haired buffoon appears now to have set out a ten-point plan to bring down his own government. Ed Miliband signed us up to some sort of nonsense years ago when he was something or other (who remembers?) in Brown’s cabinet but, not to be outdone, Boris has abandoned an already perfectly unachievable environmental target for one so ludicrous, that maybe the Lizard Overlord theories aren’t entirely unfounded. This is a plan of which Baldrick himself would be proud.

The last Labour government signed us up to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050. The Cameroons then arbitrarily rolled up their sleeves and said, right, we’ll do 100% by 2040 and now Johnson’s girlfriend has thought, fuck it, if we’re promising the impossible then why not go all in? If Michael Foot’s 1983 manifesto was the longest suicide note in history perhaps the current Tory aims comprise one of the shortest? A shame they couldn’t have got it down to three words; then it would be like all their other policies.

Yesterday the PM’s comedy machine put out the ten-point plan summarised below.

 Let’s look at them, briefly, in turn:

·       Offshore wind to be the only source of electricity for every home, thus ensuring for many homes that no electricity is provided at all. But the good news is that 60,000 consultancy jobs will be created… in London. Green Job is, of course, shorthand for “overpaid unaccountable ‘expert’ with zero credentials, sucking on the public teat.”

·       Develop the first town to go up in a fireball by 2030. Hydrogen I the answer, they all clamour, give us hydrogen! Tell that to the passengers of the Hindenberg.

·       Keep pretending to advance nuclear energy, but also keep on delaying funding, thus ensuring that we end up with too little, too late, too costly, and to the disapproval and existential alarm of many citizens.

·       Doing his level best to wreck the personal transport dream which lifted millions out poverty and gave opportunities to the masses, the unseemly dash for all-electric will land many in debt and net negative incomes.

·       But it’s okay because they can always walk or cycle to the wind-turbine blade factory on the edge of their sink estates. Has nobody noticed the weather for much of the year? Or that despite half a century of complaining about it, public transport has become more unreliable and less and less safe? No matter, get on those cattle trucks, plebs.

·       Supporting greener industries is just a soundbite – the government wouldn’t recognise a green initiative if it smashed them in the face and once again, why will nobody admit that there is no such thing as ‘zero emissions’, unless you simply ignore all the emissions? (In some areas, electricity production is already more polluting than modern diesel engines, mile for mile, so electric actually has higher emissions than your small runaround.)

·       Carbon capture is, of course, another one of those ways of brushing reality under the carpet and as for planting all those trees, has anybody noticed how the nation serially fails to meet ANY of its tree planting targets by a country mile? Of course, here we have learned well from the EU and the solution to a failed target is to declare another, more ambitious target, you know, just like a straw-clutching candidate on The Apprentice presenting a bunch of vague wishes as a supposed business plan.

·       And as for the Green Finance ambition, at least here we finally an achievable aim. If you want money laundered, because this is what this ultimately means, what better place than the home of corruption and government itself? You don't believe me? Ask the Russians.

Boris and Woko

Well, it’s school tomorrow for me – I’ve had a couple of very soggy weeks of annual leave – so I’m sharpening up my pencils and ironing my uniform, etc. Oh and, you know, filling out that risk assessment, as you do. Or, actually, as you don’t, unless you are in one of the few industries that have a genuine need for it, or your industry is actually creating the mountains of documentation that nobody ever reads.

Being in the Health and Safety Bureaucratic Complex must be a lot like being a supporter of Richard Burgon; nobody knows what your purpose is and fewer even care. The company I work for has done what so many small-to-medium firms do, they have outsourced H&S. This means we have all signed to say that we have received and read the official company Health and Safety Policy booklet, but of course, only one part of that affirmation is actually true.

I am reminded of all this because in my email inbox sits a week-old injunction to complete my annual online Fire Marshall training. Last year I clicked on the link, found a button on the page which said ‘completed’, clicked on that and watched my status change from pending to sorted… which was nice. Naturally, I passed on this software glitch to others and now we are officially competent Fire Marshalls. I wonder how much the company pays to have this useless procedural box ticked? I’m guessing it’s not pennies.

Up and down the land, hundreds, thousands, of other companies must do the same. When you add in the pointless social engineering of HR, the Equality & Diversity practitioners, along with Human Rights Lawyers and Environmental Impact Assessors (guessers), there are possibly millions of people involved in these bogus trades, sucking the productivity out of the land. Not to mention the partisan think tanks and polling companies and the commentariat.

All of which is why I have little faith that the Green funding announcement from Boris and Yoko will amount to anything of any use to anybody, let alone assist in ‘saving the planet’. All of it will be hoovered up by the vultures in the Climate Change business, much of it by serial polluters who pretend to have environmentally friendly credentials. Meetings will be had and debates conducted and the conclusion will be that they need yet more funding for more such fruitless time-wasting. I don’t expect to see a penny spent on doing any good.

Just as the cure for the ills of the EU is always more EU, the panacea for a welfare crisis is to throw yet more taxpayers' cash at idlers and cheats, the challenge to the rise of racism is to create yet more ways in which white people are racist and the solution to the immigration invasion is to declare open borders and de-criminalise illegal immigration, the way to tackle climate change is always to spend a fortune studying climate change.

Sod the leaves - fill me with money!

And you know how it always ends up? Ordinary working people who wish no harm to anybody and dutifully pay their taxes, budget for their needs and generally keep their heads below the parapet are berated for their ignorance and their bigotry, and are told what they must not do, or say, or even think. I expect Boris Johnson is experiencing a little of what that feels like right now.

Who Cares?

Dominic Cummings has gone, get over it. We have, and by ‘we’ I mean natural Conservatives, both big and small ‘c’ who care far more for the country and its wellbeing than by whom it is governed. Many lent their votes to Tony Blair when it looked like New Labour might be the fresh new politics. And many lent their vote to Boris when it looked like he might deliver what a majority of forgotten voters had asked for. All have been disappointed.

Now, of course, speculation has exploded. The media has been utterly obsessed with Dominic Cummings as a Svengali figure on whom they can blame all their failings. Their failure to accurately predict election and referendum outcomes. Their failure to accurately portray ordinary working people as thinking beings. Their to-a-man adherence to the dopey and ill-considered social justice doctrines of the last few years. So now they have to carry on being led, not by objective reporting, but by the bias they cannot shake off.

But I don’t think it is all the press’s fault, rather it is the lack of leadership shown by most modern governments. Desperate to be liked and desperate to garner the votes of people who wouldn’t pledge for them if their very lives depended on it, successive party heads have bent like straws in the wind and lapped up every last faddish theory as if it were fact. Appease the Greens, appease the gender-fluid, appease whatever is that ‘the woke’ think they have awoken to.

There isn’t a leader in the civilised world that isn’t prey to dither and in thrall to the polls, when it is the proles they should be looking to, because the silent majority will always be there, no matter how their grandchildren seek to ‘educate’ them. And what the majority want is law and order, a manageable welfare system for those who need it, not those who demand it. They want border controls and they want to believe the government actually has the means – legal, financial and if necessary military – to deal with it decisively.

They want all of this at a price – taxes – that will not break the bank, nor the backs of those who labour to pay it. But governments, instead of reading the runes, are moving further to the clamorous and increasingly splintered left and ignoring the less-oft expressed but far more homogenous and reasonable views of ‘the man on the Clapham omnibus’.

The government should be doing what the majority want, balanced with what is reasonable; they shouldn’t be trying to stomp on the little sparks that are the ultra-minority demands. Those sparks, as bright as they might briefly flare, as loudly as they might crackle, have limited fuel and will die out on their own. They are ideas, not the real needs of the majority; that is the smouldering hot heap of unspent ash at the heart of the fire. Throw fuel on that and watch it blaze. This is the fire that needs tending.

We may have got the wrong dictator

Ultimately it comes down to the fact that the governed are content enough as long as their bellies are full, and they are clothed and housed and kept busy. All the fripperies of progressive idealism will only enrich the juvenile and simplistic theorists who egg on the agitators while doing nothing to meet the basic needs. We must have governance that both recognises this and isn’t afraid to challenge the noisy minority. It is time to bloody some noses. If that sounds like a dictatorship, who cares? Despots can be toppled, unsound ideology not so much.

The Politics of Despair

David Lammy tweeted out in glee about Dominic Cummings’s plan to leave Downing Street by Christmas. He referred to him as a rat, which is par for the course for the party which thinks ‘scum’ is a suitable tag to refer to all who disagree with them. Never was this Thomas Sowell quote so apposite: “It is amazing how many people think that they can answer an argument by attributing bad motives to those who disagree with them. Using this kind of reasoning, you can believe or not believe anything about anything, without having to bother to deal with facts or logic.”

If it were only Lammy it would be bad enough but listen to the language from those who imagine they occupy loftier moral heights. While Conservatives often go painfully out of their way to use the right words, to sound reasonable, logical and sound, the left seem to think they have grounds for more embittered attacks. In the USA the ‘Democrats’ (who, ironically, actually have the word rat in their name) regularly invoke the Devil himself when referring to Republicans (who pleasingly have the word pub in theirs).

In the name of saviouristic socialism, people like Dawn Butler liberally sow racist division and enlists the likes of Lenny Henry – a man we want to like, but who makes it so difficult at times – to the cause. Their loathing for white people even extends to calling non-white Conservatives, ordinary working people at that, coconuts, or Bounties. Had a white commentator used an equivalent phrase to describe white people who act black the clamour would not cease until that person had been ‘cancelled’.

But the rub is this; in all the years of social programmes, welfare initiatives, the drive for diversity before excellence and the refusal to accept the necessary duality of success and failure in endeavour, the supposed problems have only got worse. Give people a handout and all you get in return is more hands out. Once they may have said ‘please, sir’, but now it is a demand, often with menaces.

Rather than accept this simple observed truth, that the politics of envy simply creates more envy, they double down and tell the less well-off that the rich are only rich because of greed, connections and some bizarre desire to keep the poor, poor. And like religious acolytes they follow the script at all times until the liturgy becomes embedded. Confronting the clear truth that what makes rich people richer is the masses being able to spend, and spend willingly, would be like effecting an exorcism to cast out what has possessed them

Irony is never far away when doctrinal politics (or religion, for that matter) abounds and the great irony is that once people gain a little wealth they no longer want socialism so it is  a self-defeating dogma, unless… Unless it fails, in which case you blame the failure on the great Satan of capitalism, indeed you make a name for yourself by doing exactly that and then you call yourself Owen Jones, set up a Patreon account and attempt to enrich yourself by banging the drum of despair.

Thus the primary tool of socialism is failure, repeated failure. And what better way to span the generations than to have entire sectors of society who serially fail to improve their lot and pass their misery down to their offspring, then blame it on those who actually pay for their subsistence? It is of little surprise that some of the fiercest advocates of capitalism are former socialists who have made something of their lives. Or as most of us know them, adults.