Currying Favour

The Independent, ever watchful for a story which gives them some form of validation, have found another straw to clutch. This time it is “Brexit Kills Curry” as they try to pin the alleged demise of the UK curry industry on Brexit. The reasons given, apparently supplied by the Bangladesh Caterers Association, are that the price of ingredients has risen due to the fall in the value of the pound and that, post-Brexit, they will be unable to afford to import curry chefs.

Eric Pickles’ famous ‘curry college’ venture of 2011 appears to have stalled because too few sons of existing curry house owners want to follow father into the kitchen to earn third-world wages for unsocial hours. But Brexit? Do behave; the curry community is the architect of its own reported demise and maybe if there were fewer incidences of faecal ingredients, suspect meat, filthy premises or of takeaways being used as fronts for some of the other activities that are now closely associated with said community, the industry might survive.

But who cares? We used to cook curry in Britain long before there were what we insist on calling Indian restaurants (even though the majority are actually staffed by immigrants from Pakistan or Bangladesh, a good number of whom are illegally in the country anyway). And that was back when the only easily accessible ingredient was ‘curry powder’ whose formula was something of a mystery. Now, however, pretty much anybody with a grasp of basic cooking can rustle up a meal fit for a Raja.

Many anti-Brexiteers love stories like this, where they can claim that leaving the EU will effectively be time travel, turning the clock back to *insert-decade-that-most-represents-your-contempt-for-Britain*. But you can’t easily erase people’s memories, remove their more recently acquired skills, or alter their tastes; all the scare stories about cuisines being lost are bunk. Sure, we will probably struggle to produce proper French bread, but we’re not going to have to subsist on spaghetti hoops on toast.

Industries rise and fall all the time – how many coopers are still in business in your neck of the woods? And does anybody remember when you rented your television set? Floppy discs, analogue photo film, typewriters, encyclopaedias... the list goes on and on and while nostalgia may impart warm, fuzzy feelings for some things lost, once they’re gone, they’re usually gone for good. And have you seen what you can do with your telephone these days? Once you work out that you can make your own curry, to your own taste, whenever you wish and cheaper... without the added shit, contempt and corruption, there may be no going back.

Fried chicken shops, Pizza parlours, kebab emporia, the whole takeaway industry is among the symptoms of the sickness that has taken hols in this land. Fundamentally it is the belief that we can’t do things for ourselves. Our governments have lied to us that low-paid immigrant labour is essential for the economy and because education has become propaganda too few people are competent to do the maths and uncover the lie. We can’t live without coffee on the go, it seems, for which we need to fund an entire high street of Starbucks and Costas, all of them staffed almost exclusively by foreigners. What is wrong with us?

Curry - as British as the Raj

Stop using Brexit as an excuse. If you want expensive coffee and the full, flock wallpaper, slightly racist Punjabi experience then good luck to you. But stop pretending that every little thing that goes wrong is because of people you despise expressing their wish to be independent. And stop imagining that the British are incapable of finding solutions. Go on, prove yourselves wrong and cook yourself a curry.

Peace on Earth...

And lo from the east came three wise men. Wise, for they knew that in the west their every demand would be met. Followed they the twelve shining stars until the land that is milk and honey revealed itself in the form of fiction-free handover arrangements between the people traffickers of old Galilee and the world AD (Africa Depopulated). Their cups runneth over and their fatted calves be slaughtered, for none in the new world would lift a hand to stay their every desire.

Came they to a stable. Well, a converted stable, in a London mews, with no comfort save for central heating and a rent-free roof... and a nearby Starbucks. And they saw that it was good. And so it came to pass that the magi ended their long journey with gifts of gold, which caused the neighbours to be frankly incensed and cry myrrh-der. Whence forth came such ire, asketh they; and with such passive aggressive politeness? How little they understood of this strange new land.

So it was that these three wise elders – though their new passports identifieth them as children - sought out others of their kind to spread the message of great joy through diversity. Soon they had gathered as great and diverse a crowd as this island could provide and all within three streets of the local foodbank. What wondrous world of plenty was this that could feed and house so many and what sacrifice was made by the natives, many of whom gave up their own homes thus to provide?

Answers came there none, but curiosity was piqued and they sought out the truth, for it could be no accident that the stars had surely appeared to them and to them alone. Asking a well-fed Somalian they were told that he had three wives and three houses and the tributes paid due to his many offspring each moon were four-score and many times his annual expectation in his home country. Cameth them next upon a jolly Sudanese who regaled them with tales of great comfort and joy, the state bringing forth bounty beyond all dreams.

“But where are all the native folk?” asked the magi, to which came the reply “They’re all out at work!” And while they laughed and raised their faces to the sky their gaze fell upon a great many banners and lights and shining baubles. “What is this?” they asked, “Why is this miraculous land thus adorned?” At which the Eritreans and the Ethiopians and the Ghanaians regaled them with tales of an old man with a beard who bestowed his bounty on good little children everywhere.

The wise men looked at each other, then grinned. They broke out into belly laughter and hugged each other heartily. “Oh my!” spake they and “Woot!” for great hilarity fell upon them . Eventually, after much thigh slapping and gasping for breath the leader of the trio spake to the small crowd. “Taketh us though for naïve, uneducated dullards? Thinketh that because we are recently come from foreign lands we know not when we are being taken for fools?

The onlookers knew not what to say; this was surely heresy, for here in the land of Tower Hamlets, one gospel was preached above all others. And wasn’t the evidence laying all around? They tried to explain their word, in all sincerity but the wise man feared for their sanity. He sayeth “Pull mine other one, brother. We may have all just disembarked from the boat, but green as we are, even we don’t believe in Jeremy Corbyn!”

On a scale of...

I made one of my rare forays into the world of [gulp] the great unwashed at the weekend, when I made my annual pilgrimage into Tunbridge Wells to walk among my people, take the temperature of the nation and buy those odds and sods which only seem to be offered for sale at this time of the year. Nice and early, easy parking and no huge crowds, I hoped to be in and out before the throngs of seasonal retail worshippers gathered to pray. All was going well until I came to pay for my first purchases.

The keypad into which I had inserted my card asked me to rate my in-store ‘experience’. I looked at the options – coloured icons, with expressions ranging from smiles to frowns but not one of them asking the most important question of all, which should be: “On a scale of one-to-ten, how pissed off are you with constantly being asked to provide commentary on the pettiest of events?” It is everywhere you look these days; feedback on this, feedback on that. It can’t be too far away that we will expect to provide affirmation for every third-party interaction in our lives.

Every online purchase is now followed up by wheedling, needy requests for a pat on the back. Every service delivered is incomplete until you have rated the inconsequential elements which brought it about. No interaction with the apparatus of state is concluded without some form of survey – were you A) satisfied, B) ambivalent, or C) miffed with the three new points on your licence today? Was your speeding conviction dealt with A) efficiently, B) sympathetically, or C) fuck you? Even our own gadgetry colludes to rack up the meaningless statistics: Alexa? Rate my life...

What’s your job? What do you do to bring home the bacon? Do you make a thing that people need? Do you grow, manufacture or distribute food? Do you entertain people? Do you heal them? Or are you a part of the essential backroom machinery that delivers on any of these outcomes? In short, what have you done today which can genuinely be said to add to the profitability, the effectiveness or even the happiness of the organisation you work for? Because if you're not sure, you may be part of the problem.

Does the way you make a living take money or effort away from the front line? Is your role in HR, the legal department or in the furtherance of diversity, inclusion or customer experience facilitation simply a cost to the company and a drain on the emotional resilience of your workforce? Do you earn a crust by facilitating offence, pointing out difference, or prosecuting others for failure to do so? If you are, I hope you are thoroughly ashamed of yourself.

I have three reminder emails sitting in my inbox for something to do with my work. Except it is nothing to do with my work at all. It’s an outsourced human resources frippery which will make not one jot of difference whatsoever to my effectiveness. What it will do is take up some of my time, annoy me a little and then, when I get the inevitable follow-up survey of how I found it I know it is not asking my true opinion. It is asking me to validate their worth. I did that once and then had to ignore for weeks the phone calls and emails requesting more of my time to ask me why I felt the way I’d indicated, even though I had been pretty explicit. They got bored in the end.

Feedback: Garbage in, garbage out...

This morass of pointless, self-indulgent piffle is one reason why Britain’s overall productivity figures are poor – too much time spent navel gazing, which not only takes you off the assembly line but engenders apathy, disrupts the flow and results in reinforcing the difference between those who do and those who get in the way. Yesterday, Parliament spent half a day trying to decide if Jeremy Corbyn had called Theresa May a stupid woman when I’m pretty sure other matters were somewhat more pressing. In this world of constant affirmation and re-affirmation members of Parliament have to, every five years, ask our opinion of their performance. How do they rate?

Insanity

I have observed a curious thing; in fact we all have. The great and the good, the righteous – some may say self-righteous – who voted to remain in the EU appear to have quite delicate equilibria. Their sense of perspective, already a tad warped by their inability to recognise the antagonistic nature of the project, is so unstable that it can be tipped over into near insanity with very little effort. Like Wile E. Coyote’s boulder balancing on a precipice it seems to take only the slightest bit of leverage to initiate the inevitable. Sometimes, so weak is their resolve that the push comes from within and they spontaneously embark on tirades against the ignorant bastards who stole their dreams.

Like those mad bag people screaming at the traffic the world watches, open-mouthed but careful not to catch their eye, as garments are rent, fists banged against unyielding invisible barriers and tiny feet are stamped in purple-cheeked rage. The Remainer tantrum is now so regular an event I am surprised that municipalities don’t install padded, soundproofed booths in high streets where they can vent their fury in safety. In an earlier age many Remainers would by now have been institutionalised for their own safety.

Weirdest of all, this infantile gasping for attention is given validity by the outbursts of a legion of high-profile figures: Alastair Campbell, Gary Lineker, Jolyon Maugham, AC Grayling, Anna Soubry, Andrew Adonis... the list goes on and on. And on. We not only tolerate their abusive ranting but media, especially social media, seems intent on giving them maximum exposure. And it’s easy to see why, because, like morons on reality television, their delusions make compulsive viewing; we are all Bedlam voyeurs now.

The best instances of the spontaneous inhuman combustion entertainment genre come when they reveal another conspiracy theory, or a trite aphorism as to why they lost the vote despite the many millions of overspend in their campaign, plus the support in kind from every branch of the enraged establishment, worth many millions more. Such outburst aimed at Leavers include, but are not limited to:

·         We didn’t know what we voted for.

·         The Russians made us do it

·         We believed a lie on a bus

·         Old people did it to spite the young

·         We wanted blue passports

Anything but the perfectly rational desire to leave, expressed simply and unadorned by any complex and unachievable mechanism by which we could both leave and remain simultaneously.

When they demand – actually demand – that we explain ourselves and we say; “We voted to leave the EU” they invent some genius counter-argument such as, “Ah, but what sort of Brexit did you vote for? You never specified what you really wanted, did you?” Or “You never had a plan!” and (but only after many, many months of trying to conjure up such a bogeyman) “But what about the Irish border?” Well, what about it? You don’t want one, the Irish don’t want one, how about... not having one?

Meanwhile we ignorant Brexiteers go about our business. We have no time to waste in trying to justify or explain the thing we have explained a million times over. We don’t want to be ruled by the EU; that’s it. But, they think, this must be a trap! And then from this they posit that every single one of the 17.4 million who voted to leave must have each had a different Brexit in mind. Only in the minds of Remainers can a simple expression of a single desire become a Gordian knot of a problem, impossible to solve.  

This is the source of the Nile of their delirium. In their heads they are the only rational people in the country; that one thought alone is entirely irrational, but they don’t stop there. Like religious ‘scholars’ they seek to come up with ever more outlandish stories to explain the inexplicable while ignoring the simple but elegant solution right in front of them. Like intelligent design versus evolution, one requires an article of faith while the truth merely needs to be acknowledged. There is no god and Brexit means Brexit; it means we leave. If you haven’t got it by now all we can hope for is your speedy recovery once you finally realise that rescue spaceship is never coming.

A message to young people.

I’m not ‘old’ yet, but to you I’m probably as ancient as that mosque which has been there on the corner of your street from the beginning of time. (Fun Fact: the mosque is probably a third of my age) Long before the European Union existed (although many years after it had been conceived as a means of taking away sovereignty by stealth) I worked overseas. Friends of mine did gap years abroad and at university some of my fellow students were exchange students or, you know, just foreign, fee-paying fellows.

Since the beginning of the postal service people had pen-pals all around the world (pen pals were Facebook friends in which you had to invest some actual effort) and visits were often seen as an extended part of that communication. You may be surprised to learn that Britons, far from being imprisoned within this moated island, were the most travelled people on the planet. Visit a national museum some time, but avoid the politically correct, right-on exhibits designed to feed your prejudices against empire.

The history you have been brought up with is, if not precisely ‘wrong’, framed to make you hate your country of birth. In fact, scrub that, it is wrong. The social politics you have been inculcated with is predicated on the basis that white Europeans are responsible for every bad thing in the world and preeminent in this evil are the bloodthirsty devils of England. But I see something you do not see; that the history I was taught has been erased in front of my eyes to be replaced by the revisionist nonsense your heads are filled with.

The British were overwhelmingly a force for a greater good and at no time has our island been ‘a nation of immigrants’ any more than any other great trading nation. We have always imported the best from elsewhere and exported even greater riches abroad - law, governance, culture, civilisation, learning, science... We always had the sovereignty to resist the imposition of people, laws and customs injurious to our national interest, while revelling in a true diversity of thought, experience and aspiration, as opposed to the imposed diversity of ghettoised and hostile monocultures.

The EU has sought to dampen, to control and ultimately to subjugate that great  world-bestriding pioneering spirit and infuse instead a sense of belonging, a sense of allegiance to nowhere except the EU. Ask those subsumed to Mother Russia how that worked out – the Berlin Wall was in place not to keep people out, but to keep them in; see how those formerly imprisoned embraced their new freedoms and abandoned their gaolers.

Brexit is our wall coming down, it is our gift to you, the young, because the future is what you make of it. It is because we are older and have lived on this world and we have seen these things which we bequeath to you, where you have not. This gives you a far greater freedom than the EU’s illusory freedom of movement; we are trying to give you freedom of everything. But are you grateful? Do you even care to listen? What has been done to you to make you imagine that your parents, your grandparents and great grandparents wish you ill? This goes against everything humanity is genetically implored to do.

Daily we hear the shit-stirring Remain rhetoric that says old people always vote to hurt young people. Stop and think about that. You don’t quite grasp that because we were once young, yet you have never been old, we have been where you are; but how can you presume to know what we think? And why would we want you to be poor? On the contrary, we wish you riches, so that in our very old age you can afford to maintain the support our parents enjoyed on retirement. We, far more than you, have a sense of community and a respect for the social contract.

Removing workers rights? Fuck off, we invented them. Rolling back Health and Safety legislation? Have you seen the harm done to small businesses by the overbearing imposition of unthinking regulation to counter the tiniest risk? No wonder UK productivity is poor. As for the nebulous and ever-expanding smorgasbord of entitlement under the heading of Human Rights... where do we start? Once we relied on common decency and the rule of law, now everything that offends your warped perspective is exploited as another money-maker for the corrupt.

Can I call you back? I'm creating happy memories

of my childhood for my father...

It will take many years to halt and then reverse the decline, but this won’t be because of the crippling effects of Brexit. Rather it will be a long journey into light as we recover from the loss of optimism and the blind obeisance to some godly EU commission. We need new teachers, new legislators and a new political class at the very least, but if you put in half the effort you have devoted to bleating about how the old people stole your future into making your own lives better, you will have a long, healthy prosperous life. And one day you will be old, too. I hope the young people of your elder years treat you more kindly.