Halalapocalypse Now

Much hullabaloo in the news again about the introduction by stealth of halal-butchered meat in most of Britain’s supermarkets, restaurants and take-away joints (although it is doubtful whether your standard kebab ever experienced life as a recognisable animal). Of course kosher and halal, to all but adherents of those religious certitudes, are the exact same thing; the detail and distinctions don’t matter one jot. It is just jolly well not the way things are done in Good Old Blighty. Except, it turns out, it is and has been for some time.

Whereas the devout, however misguided, are compelled to only consume meat slaughtered in the way their god insists (although for the life of me I cannot think of a single rational reason why – and for that matter, how would they know otherwise?) the rest of us simply want to assuage our flesh-devouring guilt by being assured that the meat didn’t suffer on the way to the plate. Having said that, on the whole we’d prefer to maintain the fiction that meat grows right there on supermarket shelves rather than confront the whole issue of our own animal appetites.

Faced with doing something the Captain Mainwarings of Westminster suffer a dithery unease about being found guilty of that most concocted of modern sins – islamophobia. The greater mass of the population meanwhile harbours misgivings about eating something that not only may have suffered unduly, but has also had the voodoo of the halal blessing muttered over it during its ordeal; incantations from the same religion which has inspired atrocities the world over and is currently the motivation for the kidnap and enslavement of 200 schoolgirls in Nigeria.

Rather than cause a fuss, the establishment has done, once again, what it always does with islam and has quietly acquiesced, banking on simple ignorance to maintain the silence of the non-muslim population. Easier to say and do nothing than stand up to the quarrelsome minority expressing yet another grievance about our infidel ways. The British equivalent of calling for beheadings and stonings is to meekly insist that ‘something must be done’ to protect us from this thing! I suppose it momentarily distracts us from tackling the much more sensitive issue of organised grooming gangs.

Yet I feel unease about this clamour for central government action. The information is now out there and the solution, if we can be bothered to pursue it, is to revert to self-reliance. You won’t do it, but you could start using local butchers again, thus putting pressure on supermarkets to fight harder for your custom. To offset higher prices you could (but you won’t) choose to eat less meat, after all doctors keep telling us we should. Hell, you could even consider becoming a vegetarian – a swede-ophile – anybody fancy a mango?

It's just halalarious!

But no, damn it, we demand even more food labelling. Demand; that word is music to the ears of politicians. It gives them permission to compel. Make crime illegal! Stop calling me names! Demand that somebody else look out for your welfare and you are stepping into the shackles you say you want to slip. Labour has already made clear its agenda to control what you eat- the halal row plays straight into those ambitions. It’s almost inevitable that hastily drafted laws end up being abused and end up doing the opposite of what was intended. Soon it will become illegal to discriminate against halal - before long we’ll be adding meatist to the never-shortening list of hate crimes.

Compulsion; it’s the wet dream of socialists with their enterprise-strangling minimum wages, quotas, shortlists and prohibitions, all introduced with their smug air of intellectual self-confidence. But stop a minute and ask yourselves, is that what you really want? When what you want from government is to be told how to behave and what to think you end up with the kind of leaders who believe they can pass off a Harry Enfield sketch as a serious Party Election Broadcast.

Rough Trade

Trade. It’s an honest word, implying as it does that something is exchanged for something else in a deal that is beneficial to both sides. I have something you want to possess, you have something that likewise I crave, let’s organise the handover and go on our way. For goods and direct services this is surely the only reasonable way of operating - you get what you want as long as you can pay for it. This is how human beings have interacted forever and a weighing up of relative values enters into all our decisions.

From the fundamentals of choosing a mate all the way through to building civilisations the deal is the thing. Even an underhand deal is still a form of trade, albeit one hinging on the employment of graft – ‘bribery and other corrupt practices used to secure illicit advantages or gains in politics or business’. Capitalism, say the socialists, is bad because vested interests will always hijack the markets for their own gain. Better let the state run everything, then we can set fair prices and level the playing field. But let the state take control and you remove everybody’s ability to trade in what is important to them as individuals. Collectivism is anti-trade, anti-enterprise.

But look again at the definition of graft; it includes politics because whether you are on the right or the left, corruption appears to be at the very heart of politics itself. Humans are made to trade and whether it’s politics or business, work or play, some are better at it than others. Few deals are completely balanced –it’s not what something is worth, it’s what you are prepared to pay for it. And successive governments have always been prepared to pay over the odds for peace and quiet rather than tackle the harder, less popular tasks:

You see it with the welfare state. Rather than educate and try to develop a workforce to match the skill demands it was deemed more cost effective in the short term to allow a dependant underclass to develop. But the reason programmes like Benefit Street have come about is that the price has risen too high for those who ultimately pay for it – everybody else. Those who are forced to pay in to the state, accept it – up to a point – as the price for a quiet life. But the riots of 2011 showed that some of the people who are rewarded to remain out of sight don’t always honour their part of the contract.

An Ed Miliband, big state economy is doomed to failure. As soon as you interfere too intrusively in commercial markets you swap the people who are skilled in trade – the consumers and the suppliers – for those who are merely skilled in cooking the books. Let politicians set prices and you lose the honest suppliers. If the demand is still there, the black market takes up the slack and both quality and tax revenues fall. In a socialist world the rewards no longer fall to those who are good at making things, but rather those who are good at playing the system. Graft, corruption, sleaze and genuine hardship go hand in hand with disadvantaging ‘those who can’.

In the lexicon of Labour ‘trade’ is a dirty thing. They talk of ‘fat cats’ and ‘millionaire bankers’ and while they still use the word ‘aspiration’ they denigrate the natural order of things whereby some will always rise higher than others. Under Labour it was never the workers that won, it was always those who feigned to bang the drum on their behalf. In his urge to drag us back to the nineteen-seventies Ed seems to forget that back then it was the ‘union barons’ who were the fat cats.  

The meaning of Life

The Protestant Work Ethic could have been invented for me. I’m not saying I work all hours-although I frequently have – just that work has always featured far more centrally in my life than any other activity. Like many of you, possibly most of you, I have had jobs that I enjoyed but, mostly, work has been the thing that gets in the way of doing whatever it is I vaguely think I should be doing; working to live, rather than living to work, or the other way round (the more I read that expression the less I understand it). And it’s not setting me free; far from it, I get almost anxious if I don’t give myself at least the illusion of daily achievement.

Of course, if I believed in a higher power I could ease the pain-in-the-arse by dreaming of my reward in heaven, but what’s the point of deferred gratification if there is no gratification to be had? What am I saving myself for? And none of this is made easier by the passage of time. In every phase of my life my thinking has been dominated by the feeling that if only I can get over this hump, this present difficulty; if only I can just struggle on through, the good times are just around the corner. It’s not helped by occasionally being reminded that ‘life is not a rehearsal’. It’s a bit bloody late for that to be finally sinking in.

Because if this is really all there is it’s astonishing that we don’t regularly herd ourselves over cliffs. I mean, what IS the point of it all? And of course, to rub it in, the television schedules are packed with uplifting stories about people ‘living the dream’ doing exactly what they believe they were put on this earth to do. Don’t you just hate those people? There is nothing quite so smug as those who seem to have found their nirvana, although it’s interesting to note that those who find contentment in work are always more believable than the fragile egos who turn to gurus and the pursuit of enlightenment.

It’s probably a form of remote bullying (hate-watching in today’s parlance) but don’t you get a delicious sense of schadenfreude as you observe those caught up by the holistic hullabaloo slip inexorably towards their inevitable fate; deferred mental breakdown, the only enlightened part of the whole experience being their wallet. It strikes me that if you seek the answer to the mystery of life by paying somebody to tell you - and the class meditating around you - you’re likely to only ever be disappointed, evidenced by those who go on a journey of serial soul-searching only to end up on the psych-wards.

And still the nagging feeling that there must be something else. But what is that gets you out of bed each day? And once up, what gets you through? I marvel that we don’t get more madmen in the streets, shouting at the traffic and gurning at strangers. Life is inherently pointless. Of course, you say, the ultimate purpose of our existence is to have children, to create more life. But surely that is just crazy? That’s not solving the puzzle, it’s just passing it on a generation; and worse, it’s passing the buck to vulnerable new people who didn’t even get a say in whether they wanted to carry this burden.

No wonder then that we have created a world of distractions to avoid confronting the awful void. Men in sheds, women who lunch, fast cars, survival games, cupcakes, allotments, soft furnishings, arts and crafts… judo, or ludo, for that matter. All just harmless ways of passing the time until we find what it is we are really supposed to be doing. I reckon if there’s no purpose to it all we may as well occupy ourselves doing things that make us happy whenever we can, which makes the motivation of those who spend their time being angry all the more perplexing. Life is taxing enough without setting out to making enemies.

Be afraid...

Maybe it’s a kind of madness comparable with those who seek the sunny uplands of religion to assuage their life fears, but why anybody would make their raison d'être the alienation of themselves from both sides on the sex-war battlefield baffles me. The unfathomable Caroline Criado-Perez has been out on manoeuvres again, upsetting both men and women for no other purpose I can surmise than to keep herself from thinking about the true insignificance of life. Well, Caroline, whatever your pain, I don’t have the answers – perhaps Kirsty Wark’s documentary on Thursday will shed some light on it all. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do. 

Nobody Knows

I’ve learned a lot of things from the internet. It’s a marvellously democratic vehicle for getting facts and opinions out there. Despite its detractors, Wikipedia alone is a wonder, never mind project Guttenberg, the Library of Congress, Hansard and the Oxford English Dictionary. It has been estimated that it would take an individual, reading at 200 words a minute, something in the order of four and a half billion years to read it all… by which time, of course, there would be so much more of it.

But what if - and this will rock your world - not everything people wrote on the internet was actually true? I know! For instance the fact that it would take you four and a half billion years to read all of it just popped into my head. I made it up. But there have been estimates made, not one single one of which stands up to any determined scrutiny. I just made that up as well but think about it; nobody knows how many words there are out there and how many are in an easily readable form. Even if we did know the number it still requires the ridiculous construct of a single person reading 200 words a minute every minute of every day for four and a half billion years. It is a ‘factoid’ and of no use to anybody.

Did I say ‘marvellously democratic’? I believe I did and this illustrates one of the fundamental problems with democracy on the scale we try and practice it in the UK. The last few days of scrapping over UKIP, Jeremy Clarkson, Ed Miliband’s latest attempts at being taken seriously, AstraZeneca and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all have been a flurry of obfuscation, misdirection, disinformation, contortion and distortion. Oh, and downright lies of course. The problem? How do you sift through the source material - even if it is made available - and come to a decision?

Before you accept a new headline do you honestly believe you have carried out extensive research into its veracity and have come to a conclusion based on facts, economic reality and an impartial weighing up of the pros and cons? Or is it more likely that you have taken it at face value and adopted a stance based on which side you have already decided to be? In almost every case it will be the latter, despite the fact that this makes no sense. No political party has the monopoly on wisdom or stupidity, efficiency or ineptitude. Labour don’t want people equally poor, the Tories don’t exist purely for the betterment of the rich and UKIP really, really don’t hate anybody. (I’m still trying to get a ‘fix’ on those pesky LibDems.)

They all believe they have at least some of the answers but you don’t really want to know what those answers are. You just want to cheer on your side, to which end you will get out the bunting for whatever presses your particular partisan buttons. Some of you are so far off being objective you should only be allowed plastic scissors and school glue.

So, let’s examine reaction to the bald truth that the population of the UK will increase by 250,000 a year for the next ten years, much of it due to inward migration. Do you:

A) Hail it as a good thing. These people are coming here to work, which shows the economy is growing and British industry is getting back on its feet again.

B) Shout about how this government has reneged on its promise to limit immigration to the tens of thousands which proves you cannot trust the Tories with protecting our borders.

C) Thank goodness all the hateful racist talk has not prevented immigrants from seeking to make Britain their home. Without them our NHS, our whole infrastructure and YOUR pensions would not survive.

D) Insist that unrestricted unskilled immigration is harming the life chances of our young people and putting an unbearable strain on our services.

The trouble is that every single one of those statements is perfectly reasonable depending on what you believe yet not one of them is the unalloyed truth. Not only that, but they are merely repeating assertions made by others; these are not your thoughts, not your opinions, because you neither know the truth nor are most of you equipped to handle it. Our so-called democracy is based not on your ability to make decisions but on your ability to be taken in by one political tribe or another.

So wake up. You are never more than ten feet from a rat? Palpable bollocks. A million people in Britain would starve without food banks? Cynical soundbite – show me the starving. Reform the EU and offer an in/out referendum? I’ll believe it when I see it. Three million jobs depend on the EU? Even the man who wrote that report says it is untrue. You owe it to yourself to examine every unknowable generalisation and challenge every assertion.

I’ve learned a lot of things from the internet. One of the things I’ve learned is that as a species we don’t really give a shit about the facts. That population growth figure? Nobody even knows the actual population of the UK. How on earth can they claim to have the first idea of how it is likely to change in the future? Yes, I made that up too. Democracy? You can’t handle democracy! 

Harmanised

“Ed, we have a problem” Harriet was in one of ‘those’ moods and the temperature round the shadow cabinet table plummeted suddenly as she peered, hawk-like over her reading glasses. Ed, who had been practising his stately look for the televised debates he had just unwittingly signed up to in a two-minute exchange with Nigel Farage on the Andrew Marr show, looked startled.

“But Hattie,” he began

“Don’t call me Hattie. I’m serious.”

“But, Harriet, he sort of took me by surprise, with his down-to-earth, working-bloke patter. He just doesn’t play by the rules.”

“I’m not talking about Farage, although that is another shit storm you’re walking into, I’m talking about this!” Harriet flung a piece of paper onto the desk. It was covered in crossings out, highlighted sections and scribbled annotations. “What on earth were you thinking?”

Ed glanced at the document. He recognised it immediately “But, but that’s my ten-point contract with the people of Britain! That’s what I, we, believe in, what we stand for!”

”Have you actually read it?” challenged Harriet.

“Of course I have. I wrote it!”

Harriet gave him a withering look, took back the paper and began to read it out loud. The rest of the shadow cabinet variously adopted poses that they thought conveyed the politically correct responses, careful to conceal their real allegiances and their true thoughts. It did not do to have a personal opinion ever since the cosy conservatism of New Labour had been abandoned in favour of a return to the socialist dream. Suddenly, they all looked a lot like a North Korean audience.

“It says here: We will 1.Freeze gas and electricity bills until 2017 and reform the energy market”

“It’s a very popular policy!” blurted out Ed before being silenced with a stare.

“Which has already put people’s fuel bills UP and likely to do so again. And what about number 2.Get 200,000 homes built a year by 2020? Where? How? And in any case that will only just about keep up with the numbers of immigrants coming in to build them.”

Ed was rattled, “Ah, but what about pledge 3.Stop families that rent being ripped off and help them plan for the future with new long term predictable tenancies.”

“Do you actually read the papers at all, Ed? Even our own economists are tearing into you on that. Even David  bloody Blanchflower for fuck’s sake and he’s as red and nutty as they come!” Harriet was getting into her stride “And look at number 4.Cut income tax for hardworking people through a lower 10p starting tax rate, and introduce a 50p top rate of tax as we pay off the deficit in a fair way. Are. You. Mad? First we cut the 10p rate now we bring it back. And everybody knows the 50p rate was a Gordon Brown gimmick, but what on earth were you thinking with ‘hard working people’? That’s the bloody Tory line, you idiot. We’re supposed to be banging on about the squeezed middle!”

“Yes but…”

“Don’t you ‘yes but’ me you moron. Think about it; hard working people? That suggests that some of them don’t work hard. And what if that perceived split is on racial grounds? Hard working Poles, as opposed to skiving Brits? No wonder Farage had you for breakfast. And what about 9.Tackle the abuse of migrant labour to undercut wages by banning recruitment agencies that only hire foreign workers and pressing for stronger controls in Europe?”

“What about it? That’s a great, popular policy!”

“Yes it is. It’s UKIP’s great popular policy you fool! We just had Barbara Roche orchestrate a great racist smear campaign and now you start talking about ‘foreign workers’? You racist! And anyway, did you not see the massive twatting I got on twitter yesterday over Jeremy bloody Clarkson. We daren’t mention anything about race now, for fear of looking like we’re poking a great steaming turd of a hate debate.”

"It turns out that almost nobody actually believes that Clarkson is a venom-spitting Ku Klux Klan flag-bearer and the harder we try and make that stuff stick, the more ridiculous we end up looking."

“But…”

“But nothing. Ban this, enforce that, magic up jobs out of thin air… cut regulations by what, bringing in even MORE regulations? And how about 6.Make work pay by strengthening the Minimum Wage and providing tax breaks to firms that boost pay through the Living Wage? Be honest, we haven’t a clue what this actually even means.”

“I have been very clear…”

“There you go again. Everybody knows now that when a politician says this it means they have been anything BUT clear and they’re hoping anybody listening will just think they must have got the wrong end of the stick. By the time they’ve figured it out, you’ve already moved on to another policy.”

“But, Harriet, this is our contract with the country. Vote Labour to make Britain better off.”

“If this is all you've got it looks like the country will be a lot better off without Labour.”