Hancock’s Half Hour

Matt Hancock has resigned because he got caught, not for any other reason. Like human beings everywhere he had both strengths and weaknesses, and a weakness revealed ended his tenure as Health Secretary. Most of us would not lose our job over an affair, but in his case the hypocrisy of telling the nation to maintain distance while he indulged in the most intimate of contact was just, frankly, taking the piss.

But Boris Johnson was typically weak; he should have sacked Hancock as soon as he knew. Saying it’s all right, mate, we’ve got this, was not good enough. Abruptly declaring the matter closed was so naïve as to suggest that he, also, is now occupying a position he doesn’t deserve. Being quick is not the same as being decisive. And the price we all pay is the appointment of the insipid Sajid Javid to Hancock’s former role.

But it’s all over now, surely, the pandemic; if not actually, then for all practical purposes. Javid will get to preside ineffectually over a crumbling abandonment of lockdown restrictions, rather than an organised return to normality. On the back of Hancock’s handiwork, millions will just ignore the rules, regardless of any risk.

The government has rather suddenly become that supply teacher who can’t control the class. And rather than the touted ‘building back better’ the Johnson team will more likely have its hands full just trying to go back to what we had before. So much for the great reset; it was more like a two-year pause, just when it looked like we were finally crawling out of the ten-year sub-prime recession.

But a pause is what we need right now. The dash for net-zero will cripple many already poor families as energy prices soar and personal transport becomes too expensive for the masses. Instead of seeking to show off at COP 26 this autumn, with whizzy initiatives to lead the world, a sober government would be reflecting on the difficulty in controlling the behaviour of the masses when they can’t even control the behaviour of one randy individual.

Project Boris was already something of a circus – send in the clowns, indeed – but it says much about the country when the best that was available was a posturing fool with a penchant for Latin and a history of debauchery. And the alternative is Labour, a party which is desperate for power but has managed to alienate every part of its voter base.

Britain deserves better than this, or do we? Looking at the moral makeup of the nation, the unruly and the feckless, the greedy, the grasping, the idle and the entitled, is it any wonder that we ended up with a governing class which looks every bit as useless as we do?

Rule Breakers

My mate (I know, I was surprised, too!) was looking at golf club membership. “Wow,” he said, “it’s only £66 a month and you get unlimited golf!” I patiently explained that this didn’t include green fees. “But it says ‘from £66 a month – unlimited golf’. It says it right here.” He passed over his smartphone. A judicious search revealed that if he played three full rounds a week, every week, it would work out cheaper than paying the higher rate of guest fees.

Undeterred he went on to say “Ah, yes, but I’d be a member!” And of course, I then asked him why he would want to be, at which he was a little stumped for an answer. Priority booking? Yes, but then as we generally play twilight rounds after work and it was rare that we couldn’t find a tee time, this was hardly the decider. Eventually he concluded that maybe membership right now wasn’t that big a deal but later, on retirement, it might make a lot more sense.

And this is the world we inhabit, we humans. A world where assumptions can lead us to bad decisions. Or where too readily accepting at face value something we are told, either directly or by word of mouth, can lead us to erroneous understanding. But we don’t always have an inner voice, or indeed a human sounding board, to caution us against those hasty assumptions.

Which is why I was somewhat bemused to see a Tweeter assert, unchallenged, that Matt Hancock had literally said that if you were not vaccinated you would not be eligible to be treated by the NHS. Now, I have no idea what was actually said, nor do I care, but I do know that such a statement would be an absolute end to anybody’s political career. I mean, despite all the calls over the years for it to be otherwise the NHS will still treat you for all manner of self-inflicted maladies; smokers, fatties, the stupid…

They are certainly not going to deny you treatment for an aversion to taking a prophylactic, no matter what your reasons. After all, they will even fix you up after you have made serial botched attempts to fix it yourself – homeopathy, crystals, diet fads and the like… even blind faith – all of which can sometimes make the original disorder magnitudes worse. So let’s have no more of this nonsense (he said, naively).

But here’s the problem. It’s all about ‘freedom’ and for some they imagine they grew up in a free society, where everybody could pretty much do as they pleased without restraint, up to the point where their behaviour infringed other people’s liberties. I don’t really see all this as any different, it’s just that the boundaries of where your activities affect others has changed. Today even words can wound, apparently.

As with many other issues in the time of covid, I am not going to adopt a position on so-called vaccine passports; I am merely going to ask, why not? We carry a licence to drive, a passport to travel and various other identifiers which allow us access to money, public transport and boozers; if such activities demand assurance of our credentials, is it wholly unreasonable that some businesses might want to scrutinise who uses their services?

As with the golf club, full membership confers rights which turning up uninvited does not. In fact, to keep out the riff-raff, why would you not want a high bar to entry; what’s wrong with a bit of exclusivity? It strikes me that we could apply this general notion to society as a whole. In fact, we once did; people understood the rules, generally played by them and trusted people in authority to exercise their power, if not always wisely, at least evenly.

Of course, there is that tiny issue of trust in power to be dealt with; over the last few decades people have grown more and more suspicious of government intentions, even as governments have paid more and more attention to how they are perceived. Demands from some quarters for more government involvement in society are often at odds with the same people’s demands for this nebulous idea of freedom.

Nothing is ever as simple as those demanding action think it. Freedom from vaccines is traded with fear of illness. Freedom from hurty words comes with a duty to watch your own language. I have no specific solution to offer; I know that what suits me won’t suit everybody. I merely point out that we trade freedom for security and safety all of the time. And this isn’t just about covid; it’s about everything. Whatever it is, don’t join the club if you don’t want to abide by the rules. 

Feeding Frenzy

We’re marching for freedom! Freedom, you say, freedom from what? Tyranny! Oh, okay, fair point… but, er, what tyranny exactly? We are marching for freedom from this oppressive government who are trampling on our human rights! Your human right to protest, for instance? Don’t take the piss, mate; our human rights to live free! Free from death? Don’t twist my words; I know where you’re going with this – you are just another useful idiot for the government!

And so it goes. The marchers, the protesters, the placard-carrying anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, anti-everything brigade are out in force again. And for what? When did protests on the streets of London make any difference? Poll Tax, you say; okay, I’ll reluctantly grant you that. That protest did reverse an eminently sensible policy, poorly sold. But in general all marching really does is reinforce your already cemented beliefs.

Beliefs in quack science, or quack politics; belief that a lone attention-seeker with a simple theory – no matter how questionable - offers a more credible truth than a battalion of scientists, with all their annoying nuance and subtlety and complexity. Conjure up a few barely credible expert witnesses and whistle-blowers and enlist the odd high profile media figure and your alternative version of reality suddenly has wings.

Yesterday, a social media mob of the self-regarding virtuous was out in force, enthusiastically promoting one of their causes célèbres with their annual embarrassing mournfest. The death of Jo Cox, a largely unknown MP from a substantially unheard of constituency, was a godsend for the forces of chaos. And just as with the various confused messaging of the we-won’t-stand-for-this-even-though-we-don’t-really-understand-what-it-is lobby, the anniversary is always hijacked for political point scoring.

In the case of Cox it is the regular airing of an unproven fear of the rise of the far right. Voltaire said that if god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him, and so it is that supposedly modern man still finds it necessary to concoct tales; comforting, simple lies that detract from addressing the uncomfortable, inconvenient truths. The far-right bogeyman is so risibly absent of evidence that it may as well be regarded as a mythical beast, whose many imagined heads are utterly toothless.

One thing has become very clear to me over the last few years of watching polls and politics and seeing the antics of various factions: Mankind does, indeed, seem to need an idol to worship and enemy to abhor. For quite some time now, the fairy-tale believing forces of the left have had an unprecedented tilt at the pragmatic majority of the population, unaligned as most of them are with any particular ideology. Nature, they say, abhors a vacuum, so what better way to fill it than with vacuous soundbites and meaningless slogans.

Repeated often enough, a fabricated assertion that the never-materialised far right threat is far worse than actual exploding islamists, that the cure is worse than the disease, that the left are the saviours of social justice, that the government of the country is somehow in open warfare against its citizens… takes on a credibility that it has not earned. But do I detect signs that the influence of the perpetually offended is on the wane?  

There is more than a hint of desperation in the attempts by the pedlars of lies and political fictions to persuade advertisers to withdraw from the new platform GB News. So terrified are they that people may get to hear ‘things they should not hear’ that it has all become something of a joke. Even as woke PR departments knee-jerk react to the calls to boycott, formerly disengaged customers are suddenly hearing that their preferred brand has a political agenda. Nobody wants that from their skincare supplier; nobody wants that from their flat-pack providers.

Maybe it is a forlorn hope on my part, and maybe I am more optimistic than the reality warrants, but maybe – just maybe - the relentless influence of the left is starting to wane. The lockdowns have given more opportunity than usual for people to reflect. Some have been driven to madness by it all, but many have also become informed and possibly enlightened. As the leftist causes have shambolically engaged in the propaganda feeding frenzy of the last year and a half, are we seeing them truly begin to eat themselves?

Welcome to England

I heard a Tory Party spokesperson on LBC saying she ‘welcomed’ the report suggesting that the Conservatives may be insensitive to muslim communities. She welcomed it because it gave the party an opportunity to address the issues. For my part I am absolutely delighted, but I doubt very much that the party will have the guts to properly address the issues, as big a vote winner as that might be.

For communities in the working class areas aggressively colonised by the islamic assault on our values, the option of voting for a party ‘insensitive’ to the invaders would be a welcome change for the better. Even better yet, were the Conservatives to come out as explicitly and robustly anti-islam, they may never fear losing power again.

One of the reasons the so-called Red Wall is collapsing is precisely because Labour has wholeheartedly embraced the Trojan horse of islam and brought it into the citadel, where it is already engaged in sprees of rape, threats of violence and terror, and demands for special treatment. Labour councils have been all too willing to welcome the graft and corruption that islam brings and the fraudsters have been given the keys to the town treasuries without a fight.

Boris has apologised for ‘offence taken’, a mealy-mouthed platitude, but why apologise at all? And as for Sajid Javid, who called for this ridiculous navel gazing exercise, far from being any sort of victim he is himself an example of muslims being promoted beyond their competence precisely because of his background. Meritocracy, my arse; show the brown card and stand in line for your honours.

Call me what you like, but I believe that the Conservatives should rebrand as the unabashed party of the English. Fair and even-handed, stoic but determined, and resolutely against all who seek to subjugate us. If muslims want to adhere strictly to their faith, this is a distinctly un-British thing to do and it does not belong here. Why should we tolerate the intolerable?

On the other hand if secular islam is indeed possible, then abandon your stupid clothes, translate your holy book into a modern language, get your grasping hands out of our pockets and off our daughters and embrace the twenty-first century. British muslims? No such thing. The British are not religious but observe the harmless values and traditions of low Christianity.

A muslim spokeswoman responds...

If muslims really want to belong here they should leave the desert behind, demolish their super-mosque fortresses, convert to Anglicanism – a religion where a belief in a non-existent supernatural entity is far from a requirement – then turn their back on that church in turn and get down the pub, like everybody else. Fit in, or fuck off. Whatever else they may have screwed up, the Conservatives have nothing to apologise for when it comes to muslims. 

Hobson's Choice

Following the Hartlepool rout and the collapse of Labour support outside London – and even London wasn’t quite the walk in the park that people imagined – the media has been awash with commentary from ‘the usual suspects’. Why the likes of Femi Arsewole, Owen Lenin-Jones, Ash Sarkarstic and various other Junior Common Room gobshites should even be heard, let alone courted by serious media outlets, is something of a mystery.

There is a lot wrong with a world in which people who have no understanding of the common man get paid to pontificate on society and its ills. Are the bookers at the BBC, LBC, TalkRadio and other organs so restricted in their imagination that they can’t get out and ask people who are not paid-up members of ‘part-of-the-problem’? Diane Abbott’s take, for example, was that Starmer should have pushed the very Corbynist manifesto which brought about Labour’s biggest defeat in a lifetime.

It would be astonishing if it wasn’t now a daily occurrence. There seems to be a resolute determination to absolutely drown out the popular voice. Social media, in particular, seems to consist of echo chambers, bubbles of groupthink which occasionally rub up against each other, the ensuing debate being far from healthy. The rigid adherence to party lines, repeating dogma regardless of context, is more akin to religion than reason.

But what is Labour’s response? They are going to hold further navel gazing events in which they will ask the voters what they want then selectively screen the replies to create policies with only party appeal. When voters say they want to restrict illegal immigration, Labour will hear that they want all immigration to be legally recognised. When somebody suggests that islamic rape gangs should be hunted down and shot, Labour will take on board the message that there needs to be more diversity in the makeup of rape gangs.

Ask the people and they will tell you, overwhelmingly, that they abhor almost everything that comes out of Westminster. They will tell you to back policies which put the indigenous British at the forefront, in employment, benefits, medicine and education. They will appeal for swift and decisive justice, with a one law for all approach, not the apparent two-tier policing which appears to accord higher rights to certain ethnicities for fear of causing offence.

When it comes to the movements du jour of the left - Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion, Antifa and all the other openly anti-white organisations – the public at large will not hold back in telling you what they think. On these and a plethora of other unhelpful issues, such as the steady infiltration of left wing thought in schools, the civil service, local authorities, the police… the public have had enough.

But will the Labour Party listen? Of course not; they will hear what they have decided to hear and drown out the reality. Safe inside their own heads they will imagine they are warriors for truth and justice. They will keep on pushing the kind of policy which sets neighbour against neighbour, creates ethnic ghettoes and results in a society in which a dwindling number of net taxpayers fund comfort for the idle.

And the Conservatives will, without any credible opposition, be able to continue to pretend that their tame, lacklustre offerings appeal to the masses. This isn’t good enough. We don’t want two parties offering about the same, just using different words, we want a real choice between a proper Conservative manifesto and a proper Labour one, and right now we are getting neither.