Strike!

The Labour Party should be sitting pretty on what would appear to be a near unassailable chance of winning the next general election. But never underestimate any political party’s ability to sabotage its own chances, principally by not understanding what the country actually needs; ideology only gets you so far, but ultimately you need to have actual policies which can really work, which can’t immediately be hijacked and subverted.

So, what is Labour doing amid the multiple crises which assail us? It appears to be morphing into Margaret Thatcher’s Tories. Wes Streeting has been on the stump saying that Labour is going to get tough with the health unions and that reform of the NHS is needed, not continued acquiescence to its demands. Now embarked on this trajectory, will it also have to come down hard on the very people who have long funded the party?

Postal workers, nurses, rail transport, bus drivers, Border Farce, university lecturers, barristers, school staff, baggage handlers, firefighters… all have had or will be having a go at attacking the government through the medium of creating chaos and bringing about the prospect of real harm to innocent old you and me. The problem is, of course, that the piggy bank has been smashed open and raided too many times. It doesn’t matter who did it – it’s a bit late for that – we are flat broke.

Does anybody think that any rational employer would squeeze and squeeze every last bit of loyalty from their workforce if there was an easy way to simply pay them more? Oh, seriously? Come on, the robber barons are long gone, replaced by administrations so sensitive to the soft needs of their delicate charges that they employ diversity coordinators and equality managers and decolonialisation evangelists and pay them handsomely for their odious grift.

But surely it is globalism and its impersonal exploitation of needs that is at the centre of all this. Inequality is not just a structural feature of corporate Britain, it is an inevitable outcome of supranational greed and the unchecked power of giant world-connected behemoths, who dictate to governments and effectively stifle local attempts to become independent of their reach.

The internet is – or can be - a force for good, but is just as effective a force for propaganda. The type of propaganda which tells you that you can’t walk alone, you can’t buck the zeitgeist, you can’t survive without Google, or Facebook, or TikTok, or whatever social media is harvesting your every thought. This is where a political movement founded on the individual could really be a game-changer. A party going into battle for the common man. Whoever heard of such a thing?

Coming out with tough talk against the health unions could be a master stroke for Labour, but it could also be a death knell to its campaign if it turns its back on its own red wall. Something has to change, for sure, but as ever it is unlikely to change for the poorly educated, low aspiration masses. For them, the majority of the population, the options to go it alone, to reduce their costs, defend their wages and manage their lives, remains stubbornly out of reach. This winter is set to be one of discontent indeed.

Please Ignore

If you have read about, watched, listened to or even merely wondered whatever the fuck the Sussexes are banging on about you are part of the problem. Sadly, as much as I loathe the ludicrous royal soap opera, even I have not managed to ignore it altogether and the fact that I am writing this means that I am at least partly culpable, too. In exactly the same vein, I heard on some R4 show the other day that Love Island is one of the most successful TV franchises ever.

What is wrong with us as a species that the zenith of popular culture celebrates and magnifies the worst instincts we possess? Driven by a prurient and morbid curiosity, we are mere fodder for facile, voyeuristic, lowest-common-denominator pap which neither educates nor truly informs. We are lower as a life form as a result. The Netflix ‘documentary’ (Fiction? Fantasy?) about the whining ex-royals (who nevertheless retain titles they don’t deserve) is just another low spot.

And there, I did what you do, I have a fucking opinion on something that I would be better off being completely ignorant about. So what do I do? Do I – like many – continue to have an opinion about something I steadfastly refuse to pretend to be interested in? Or should I dip a toe in the water and ‘do the research’? Wait, what am I thinking? I’d rather stick pins in my eyes, yet here I am, somehow trying to justify my own contradictory reactions.

I will resist reading about, hearing about or watching anything whatsoever to do with the hideous couple. I certainly don’t care what happens to them and still less what they think about it all. But all I have to do is open up a newspaper, turn on the radio or television or – heaven forfend – browse the gawdy baubles of the internet and there it is, splashed like projectile vomit all over the place.

Even hoping that the possible bill proposed by Conservative MP Bob Seeley to strip them of their titles is to engage in the topic, when my most heartfelt desire in this regard would be to see them not only defenestrated from the highest royal window but to be banished to exile and every trace of their existence to be expunged from memory. See how impossible it is to just ignore it all?

Amused we are not.

Amid the concerns over climate change, the current freeze and the cost of heating, inflation outstripping wages faster than any other time this century, the coming energy drought, the unstoppable influx of unwanted illegal migrants… In the face of all this how can it be true that the most pressing matter for the nation is what a pair of spoiled offence-mongers and race-baiters think about the in-laws? We don’t deserve the ability to communicate, do we?

Minor Worries

Coal mining is back, but of course the green-meanies oppose it on wholly unsubstantiated grounds, as is the modern paradigm. There are only two sexes, but contrary to all known biology you can choose from an ever-expanding list of genders, possibly a different one for every individual on Earth. We have a major skills shortage, but current educational orthodoxy posits that we need to encourage more soft and nebulous puffery at the expense of useful hard skills.

The contradictions are winning; in every area of human endeavour the lived experience of real, successful human beings is rejected in favour of a new emphasis on feelings. The environmentalists can warp the figures to make hugely expensive engineering mistakes appear to be cost-effective panaceas for all the climate ills. Likewise, the lawyers can make a virtue out of protecting the ‘human rights’ of those who openly encroach on the genuine rights of decent-living people.

The world, as many have observed for many years, is upside down. Why teach your kids self-reliance, hard work and persistence when they can ‘earn’ a perfectly decent living grifting off the largesse of the idiot state? All they have to do is to get onboard with the doctrines of the age and bang those little drums for all they are worth. Then, when those skins have worn through, they should be well-versed in how to take a simple cause-and-effect case and turn it into a whole new outrage.

Jane Fonda says that climate change is caused by racism and misogyny. The history buffs have uncovered the ‘truth’ that Britain is a black heritage country, built entirely by diversity, excluding white diversity, naturally. Maths and science are racist, as is all art, and of course every last brass farthing of profit was earned off the backs of slaves. White man’s burden? They didn’t know the half of it back then and the demands for reparations are only just beginning.

No matter what you think you lived through there will be somebody to tell you that the evidence of your own eyes is worthless. And just like good old Mr Goebbels, they will keep on telling you until you shut the fuck up and get out your wallet. With all the frivolous demands the state makes of my taxes it is a wonder we have any working infrastructure left at all. Nurse, I need a diversity consultant, urgently!

So who gives a fuck about opening up a coal mine, and why worry about little old ‘The UK’ trying to mitigate climate change when nobody else gives a damn? The government has put virtue-signalling green fantasies before realism and protecting the security, safety, wealth and quality of life of the nation’s beleaguered population. And woe betide should you speak out about the emperor’s new clothes. I have but one thing to say to all of this, and I believe I speak for the majority: they can all just fuck off.

Careful with that axe, Eugene

 Adam Rutherford, the BBC’s favourite geneticist, currently has a series on Radio Four – Bad Blood – about the evils of eugenics. So popular was it at one time that parents in 1920s USA appropriated the term itself to name their children. Then along came Hitler and the practice fell out of favour. But, come on, is the notion all that bad, really? We can’t be unique amongst all species that humanity cannot be improved upon by a bit of selective breeding.

And of course, the wealthy very much do breed selectively, and for the same reasons. Why would you not want to improve your bloodline? Did not wealthy families engage in arranged marriages to exactly that end? Do not companies partner with other agencies to improve their chances of success and longevity? Did the west not ban sibling marriage because of the negative effects on genetics? And surely the multicultural dream of New Labour is an exercise [largely failed] in human engineering on a massive scale?

But no, the use of the word eugenics today is much like the use of the word racism. It is an instant put-down to those who dare to suppose that the human race could do better. And while we might not know the ultimate recipe for success, few among us will have never harboured the opinion that certain people should be discouraged from breeding. But try to set out an argument for ‘better’ management of our human stock and you will be backed into a corner by accusations of being a eugenicist.

Our prisons are crowded and had we still mental asylums they would be overflowing, except all of their potential inmates are out on the streets in plain view. The slums are back, teeming with human detritus with little in the way of prospects, and as our refusal to tackle the monster of uneven population growth grows more stubborn, the problem grows with it.

Our lower orders – for there really are such things – are idle, displaced in the labour market by people with whom we share little in the way of common bonds or culture. Our entire country is flooded with unproductive drones at a time when we are being told that the demand for low-skilled labour is diminishing, yet can’t be met by our own. And isn’t this entire exercise itself a form of national eugenics, replacing our actual indigenous population with a different breeding stock? It is little wonder that better off native born Brits are deciding, whether for financial or societal reasons, to limit their families.

The government’s response? Cuts everywhere. In infrastructure, in health and social care, in policing, in education, in energy security. The list goes on but one thing is for certain, it is not getting better for any but a select few. The country is unrecognisable from only a few decades ago, maybe even just two decades ago. The one thing which is not being cut is immigration. If the axe is to fall anywhere it really ought to be used to split apart all the false arguments used to silence us. Cut the crap and let us have those verboten debates, or else watch the whole thing fall further into disarray and dismemberment.

Greenhouse Gas

In case anybody is labouring under the delusion that their children’s future is in jeopardy because of climate change, let me administer a big slap to bring you to your senses. You don’t know, and I certainly don’t know, what the next 50 years will bring. The climate scientists are pretty sure about what will happen in general over the next few centuries, but even they are in the dark when it comes to 2030, or 40, or 50 because NOBODY knows.

Allowing your children to blackmail you into rash actions is as foolish as allowing our government to dash headlong into embracing supposed ‘green’ solutions, at a ruinous cost to the economy. The world is full of amazing, wonderful things. It will be equally full of such things when its average temperature is 2 or 3 or 5 degrees higher than today. The risk to our future is not climate change – that’s happening, and we’d better adapt to it. But a far bigger risk to our immediate future is the ridiculous and unachievable ‘net-zero’ gamble.

Opportunities are huge, right now, for any charlatan in the guise of a green evangelist, to milk the taxpayer for £billions through false promises to alleviate unknowable threats. Only this morning I heard on the BBC World Service programme ‘Tech Tent’ an entrepreneur telling the world how solar would soon be the cheapest energy available. He neglected to mention that it is also one of the least efficient and only very few homes are energy-lean enough to run on solar and battery alone. For most people their solar installations may break even financially over their lifetime, but they will have negligible effect on the climate. If anything, the focus should be on energy consumption, but that is already being rationed by the price mechanism.

But what about the wind you ask? Various news outlets have been excited by Ripple Energy and their scheme for people to buy shares in wind harvesting. It looks good, possibly too good. But behind the hype is the reality and a good primer into how we are all being conned by the green energy revolution is this article by Matt Ridley in the Spectator. I have taken the liberty of posting up most of it on my own blog site simply because the Spectator is a subscription service, but the original can be viewed here.

What is truly dispiriting is that almost everything you hear in the news, in the documentaries, in commentary and on social media is driven by opinion, or worse, zealotry. There is a Facebook group I follow in which delighted adopters post up universally good news about their solar installations. But when you do the numbers it turns out that a sort of pious hope is heavily tipping the scales. And none of this is any good for the people who need it the most, the energy-poor.

Locked into higher tariffs due to the uncertainties of the market, energy ignorant and helpless against the corporate machine, just as in every other area of life they are locked out of the Brave New World. And it will get worse, as schemes like Sadiq Khan’s plan to penalise the motorist anywhere inside the M25 are taken up by other cities in turn. Denied cost-effective heating in the future, such as gas, life is going to get a whole lot more expensive for those (as always) who can least afford it. And so on, and so on.

And when, in ten, twenty, thirty years’ time it is revealed that all of this pain was for nothing who will hold their hands up and take the blame? When not one step of progress has been made in limiting the increase in global temperature, who will admit they were wrong, and that the sacrifices people were forced to make were too large and too ineffective? You know who… nobody.