We need to talk about Abdul

I caught a tiny bit of Nigel Farage on GB News, interviewing a representative of Amnesty over the influx of migrants via the dinghy flotilla which daily arrives on our shores. Naturally, Mr Amnesty had no questions to ask regarding the legitimacy of theses arrivals, claiming that at least two-thirds will be found to have legally defensible claims to asylum. The rest, of course, he will leave to the inertia of our immigration system, knowing they will be given leave to remain and then conveniently forgotten about.

Local residents in Kent are appalled, with many feeling they are under an invasion which is not being appropriately met by the British government. But, if reports are to be believed, Boris Johnson himself regards illegal immigrants as ‘future taxpayers’ if only they can be given the right to reside here as British citizens. There are many wrongs in that statement alone, but it feeds into a fundamentally false economic premise that we need mass immigration. We don’t.

For every legitimate, cultured, educated refugee who seeks asylum, integrates into British society and becomes a net contributor to the nation’s wealth and wellbeing, there are untold thousands who bring us nothing. Even a net-neutral taxpayer (somebody who pays just under £10k per year in tax and national insurance - salary around £43k) only has to produce a single child to create a net cost for the next 20 years. (And the children of a certain culture rarely go on to become high achievers.)

The Malthusians may well be right, and a far better way of managing affairs might be to limit the population, concentrating on bettering the skills of those who are capable of using their minds and better rewarding those who are most suited to using their hands. I grew up in a Britain where an average-wage worker with a nuclear family could afford to buy a house, but Thatcher’s property-owning democracy seems further away than ever.

The country’s vision and ambitions from the 1980s have been successively torn up, derided and ditched by a series of governments for whom the sole purpose of the electorate is to elect them. And it does not look like getting any better, any time soon. The distractions of the covid affair, the climate crisis, the desire to accuse every Caucasian of racism, and any number of issues of interest only to vanishingly tiny minorities have not changed the clear reality that Britain has fallen.

People like Mr Amnesty and all the other generally leftist forces are engaged in a campaign to legitimise mass immigration from unhelpful, backward cultures as some noble mission. Almost all of these migrants are muslims, fleeing muslim regimes, but they bring the thinking of those regimes with them. Rapists don’t care if the children they rape have progressive parents; if the women they abuse campaigned to bring them here; if the taxpayer they vow to subjugate pay more each year to feed their own enormous broods. They don't care; we, their benefactors, are also the dirty infidels they despise.

They are DEADLY serious.

At the same time as western leaders ignore the pleas of their people and bring in ever more sub-minimum wage, kebab-economy, unskilled ingrates in the name of a ‘skills shortage’, we are seeing other thinkers heralding the age of AI and automation making labour near obsolete. So, what will we do with the tens of millions of adherents of islam when there is no longer any work to keep their beheading hands occupied? We really need to think again.

Buggered

As the heralded end to Covid restrictions has come and gone and predictably under-delivered, the chatter turns to the carnage caused by the continuance of test and trace. As an idea to prevent the spread of infection it has laudable aims. But given the choice, many will refuse to use it, or else ignore its advice. If you get paid by the hour and you can’t work from home and you have mouths to pour food into, why would you respond to a machine telling you to self-isolate when you are fit enough to put in a shift?

When it comes to doing your duty by your country you have to be persuaded that your sacrifice is worth it. For a great many, protecting a third party from a harm which seems slight and a probability which is small, sacrificing your ability to make a living is too high a price to pay. Men who would lay down their lives for their country are unconvinced that staying off work to protect Janice in the office from getting a sniffle is a noble effort that anybody will recognise or reward.

Underlying all the chaos is the burgeoning suspicion that something is off. We couldn’t afford social care yet the government put half the workforce on furlough for a year. We can’t build enough houses for our own people but we continue to import hundreds of thousands of migrants, many of whom will breed but never work. The wearing of Christian religious symbology is considered offensive to muslims, but mass gang rape by muslims is excused as a mere cultural foible.

It goes on: the vanishingly small proportion who are genuinely transgender are treated like royalty, but women who don’t want biological men in their private spaces are vilified as hate campaigners. Statues of historical benefactors are torn down and tributes to violent criminals installed in their place. And everywhere across the left the madness of critical race theory has driven white academics insane while black activists have become power-crazed.

The world is pretty mental right now, with the west appearing to fight many battles on many ever-shifting fronts. So it is little wonder that people, driven batty by lockdowns and masks and social distancing and unfathomable ‘bubbles’ are looking for reasons. And you don’t have to look very far; Twitter appears to be operating as a machine to generate irrationality.

Every political event is imbued with meaning; every meeting of leaders and every photocall open to alternative interpretations. Rumours are treated as facts then fetishised as absolutes. And every possible distortion of history is deployed to demonstrate how this is not only orchestrated, but has been in play for decades if not centuries. I am frankly surprised that Nostradamus isn’t credited with predicting it all, nay starting it all.

Social media has become an even more toxic environment than before with any position open to challenge, including no position at all. Shoehorns are being pressed into service to make the wackiest of intentions somehow fit events as observed. And it all comes down to how you view the balance of power and how it affects liberties most of us have never exercised. My life has hardly been affected, but that isn’t good enough, it seems.

What is absolutely clear, however, is that the whole truth will never be known, but even if it was, the myths will persist to obscure it. Some people will grow old believing they have been victims of a global plot to suppress their life chances and will likely hold such grudges to the grave. But just look at it all. For a plot it is pretty aimless. For a tool for control it is all pretty blunt. As a plan to depopulate it has proved hopelessly inefficient.

What? You think anybody is in CONTROL here???

Whatever you think is ‘really’ going on and for whatever reasons you can surmise, what is utterly lacking is a unifying theory which explains everything. Well, I think I have one, and it is this. While there are some pretty nasty people in the world and there are those who seek to exploit others, governments are neither as omnipotent nor competent as any of them would like to believe. Governments don’t so much act as react. And there’s been this bug going around.

Piccaninnies

As the foolish footballing farrago of imaginary hate crime continues to dribble on, the conclusion held, it seems, by all politicians and other bloviating commentators is that we are all racists now. It’s official. And, of course, like every fad, once everybody has got one it ceases to hold any allure. So it is that the rabid pursuit of offence in every single thing has ended up at the only destination possible; Ladies and gentlemen we will shortly be arriving at Worthlessness.

And yet embedded, institutional, systemic, structural racism is on every media tongue. It is touted by the newspapers, by the broadcasters and most especially by social media. Once again, the commentariat misses the point. It’s too late, it’s over, it is yesterday's grievance. Like I imagine a majority of ordinary folk, I am less concerned about racism with every day that passes. Leveraged to gain overtly political advantages, it has ceased to have any relevance beyond the cringing, chattering classes who have boarded the guilt train. No guilt here, and as far as I’m concerned BL simply don't M.

But the bandwagon still has a lingering momentum, as it lurches downhill and trundles towards the gutter of history. Just as with a cornered rat, fighting for life, the struggles and screeches of the race justice warriors become ever more frenzied, ever more strident, as they lose purchase. A few decades ago racism was firmly on the retreat as most people accepted we had a mix of ethnicities in our national make up, but that we were all people after all. But a gradual slide into harmony wasn’t enough for some.

When racism has become a minority proclivity, what is the point of ‘anti-racism’? All it does is create pretend victims in order to foment outrage. But it has overplayed its hand and nobody believes it any more. It is like hope-not-hate which clumsily tries to pour opprobrium over anybody who dares to criticise islam – ersatz blasphemy law in action. Saying you are an anti-racist is not saying you are not a racist; it is saying you have signed up to that new religion of self-loathing, hair shirt wearing anti-white activism.

As an overt ‘anti-racist’ you are literally judging people by the colour of their skin. You are judging those almost 100% non-racist white people to be the opposite of what they are. In fact, you are judging them to be just like you when in reality they are better than you. Not through any entitled, anti-racist, nonsense term such as ‘white privilege; they are better than you because they don’t judge you, they pity you your poverty of ambition. They pity you for your adopted victimhood.

Yesterday, somebody resurrected the text of Boris Johnson’s infamous Piccaninnies article, in which he was taking the piss out of Saint Tony Blair, casting him in the guise of the great white saviour of colonial times, bestriding the globe and bringing salvation to the dusky inhabitants of less enlightened continents. For those who are interested, this article is a handy read because it sets out quite simply why there is nothing to see here.

They'll be banning this next!

But the truth has no place in the discourse of racism. And the abandonment of historical racism is a truth which will not be acknowledged, no matter how long ago. Imagining that they have a superweapon against which the ‘far right’ have no defence, the term racist is used on every occasion to stifle debate. But you know what, fuck them; fuck them all. If the price for being the boy in the crowd is to be slagged off as a racist, bring it on. Marcus Wotsisname is... English. There, I said it, and I don’t care who knows.

Soft Power

The rebels failed to block the government's intention to do something the electorate actually welcomes – slashing the foreign aid budget. When I say ‘the electorate’ I, of course, refer to the majority of the population, those people whose votes put governments into power but whose opinions thereafter are unsolicited and routinely ignored. If governments could do away with elections altogether they probably would.

But there are other people with votes. Many fewer people but with more important votes – they think – than the lowly hoi polloi. These far more worthy, far more moral people often hold views which are incompatible with the masses they rule over. Every few years they court the power-giving votes of the great unwashed; we’re listening, they say, but we won’t remember what you said after we take charge.

And then they spend our collective money without asking whether we want it spent. To justify foreign aid they talk of soft power. We are buying influence, they say, we are standing tall on the world stage, we are oiling the wheels of international trade. Well, if we have something worth trading why do we need to offer bribes? Who are we trying to influence and why? Have they never noticed that those despotic regimes they prop up in return for arms sales actually hate us?

Foreign aid, they say, is a small price to pay to retain our standing, and to assist the poorest people in the world. Well, how about dealing with the poorest people in the UK first? Show us how buying gold-plated Mercedes for corrupt dictators translates into roofs over the heads of our homeless. Show us how, for every cruise missile B.O.G.O.F. token we send abroad exactly how much is poured into UK social care.

Why not be open about it, instead of deciding that we mere voters will never understand how oh-so-clever you all are? You never know, a little bit of honesty could go a long, long way. But what am I saying? Despite all the talk of transparency over the last few decades the machinations of government are as opaque as ever. I get that there must be secrets; I don’t get why we often appear to reward those who despise us before we take care of our own. 

If the politicians can’t see it, the electorate is all too aware of the massive disconnect between power and the people, and foreign aid is just another one of those policies which appears to be a one-way, wrong-way street. We open the door to invasive immigration, we create dependencies we can't afford. We are less safe, not more secure, as a result of some of our foreign policy.

Those worthies who wish to continue funding foreign despots can always throw their money at the innumerable charities founded to do exactly that. They can see the larger part of their personal donations pour into the greedy pockets of the directors, and maybe in doing so they will experience the dismay the rest of us see when the taxes we have no choice about paying are frittered away. For the majority, however, charity must surely begin at home.

Beautiful?

In 1966, while queuing for an ice cream I overheard the football World Cup final score on somebody's transistor radio and went back to tell the family. I don’t remember being jubilant, elated, or any other emotion, I just remember hearing the news and passing the information back to the others on the beach. I was 8 years old. I imagine I was pleased but I truly don’t recall.

I’ve never been a massive football fan; a bit crappy as a schoolboy and, if truth be told, never all that much of a team player. It strikes me that teams work best under firm leadership and an ordered hierarchy, whereas in business and politics, in society itself, teamwork is often invoked when in reality it is very much dog-eat-dog; the individual gets the glory, but praising the team is seen as part of the ritual.

Most people are not really in teams, no matter how much the word is used; you get on with your job, your life and you generally succeed or fail all on your own. But in sport it has to be different; a bunch of talented individuals will rarely win against a disciplined and practised team effort. From school side to local club to the Premier League, people adopt, at various removes, a vicarious sharing of the prizes.

And in international sport the national team becomes emblematic of the nation itself. This may be at the heart of the English problem. We don’t want the team to represent politics, social strife, or egalitarianism; we just want the win. We don’t want footballers as social commentators, as saints or shining examples. We just want them to be damned good at the game and to bring home the trophies.

I don’t really know much about football; I don’t much care. But over the years I have become less invested in the national game as I have seen how much it seems to mean to people I don’t think I would thankful to team up with. I don’t know the players and I lack the lexicon to pontificate over a pint about how much better the match would have gone had I been in charge (unlike so many armchair coaches and managers.

But I do feel qualified to comment on the use of sport in politics and my view is quite simple; it should play no part. I know that’s a forlorn and naïve hope and sport will be used to any political end to which it can be bent, but it is tedious and predictable when it happens. Last night, today, the air is rent with cries of racism. Oh, give me a break.

Football and politics - bollocktics!

Why do people not realise that professional sportsmen, while they may be physically at the peak of their powers, rarely possess the intellect and grace to speak for the nation? While mature thought and an educated world view is not beyond their ultimate reach, it is way beyond the credible grasp of a man-child who plays a game for a living. By putting an agenda not supported by all front and centre, the so-called beautiful game can turn very ugly indeed.