Shorthand

It’s everywhere you look. The handy labelling of anything you like as anything you want it to sound like. Tips are now reframed, gloriously, as ‘life hacks’, imbuing them with a vitality they rarely deserve; all those click-bait pages telling you how you can’t live without them. Since the word ‘essential’ was attached to entirely unnecessary things back in the 80s, ancient artisan lore has been repackaged as if it were newly discovered intelligence from a distant galaxy.

The knowledge that was once handed down in the family now appears as revealed texts from the lost books of ancient cultures, otherwise known as the Internet; the place where everybody goes to slap each other on the back, form cult-like echo chambers and invent ever more ridiculous shorthand for perfectly normal things. Stick an ‘i’ or an ‘e’ in front of a perfectly ordinary doohickie and watch it become an overnight sensation of new-age awesomeness.

Likewise, in social discourse, there has always been an inter-generational disconnect, the young necessarily wanting to confound and conceal from their elders the exciting [perfectly normal] things they are getting up to. The invention of new words, or the recycling of very old ones is nothing new. And thus ‘chillin’ makes idleness sound productive, just as some have convinced themselves that ‘social media influencer’ is a worthwhile way of avoiding a real job.

Words are also used as weapons and an annoying interlocutor can be dismissed as a racist, a fascist, or even go for the jugular with a 'literally Hitler'. One of the interesting ways in which the demented left is currently tackling their cognitive dissonance over the embracing of islam – an ideology entirely at odds with everything they think they believe in – is to pretend that the biggest threat to society right now is far right extremism.

They label everything they can’t comprehend as ‘far right’ without the slightest consideration of what they believe the far right to be. (If you examine the ‘far right’ you’ll find it is, essentially, communism with more tattoos.) This would be absolutely fine, if everybody possessed the intellect to rise above it and see it for the hollow and insubstantial branding it really is. We all do it, by the way, left and right, old and young alike.

Governments do it too, and then it gets problematic. In an effort to communicate with the hoi polloi, government spokesmen and women alter their speech patterns and use words in ways that perfectly illustrate how unfamiliar they are with them. Politicians never look less in control of their brief than when they try to adopt the accents and idiom of ‘the youth’ with whom they are trying to connect. When Tony Blair took off his tie, it was meant to signal ‘look at me; I’m just like you!’, but when he compounded this with his adoption of the glottal stop he just came over as yet another plank trying to con the masses.

And of course we’re doing it all over again with the pandemic. Already today I have seen doctors trying to persuade people to have the vaccination being described as Nazis. Terms like ‘clotshot’ and ‘killer vaccine’ only serve to over-simplify everything while revealing your credentials to all who read. On the other side, it transpires, shorthand such as 'anti-vaxxer' and 'rabid conspiracy theorist' enrages many who may have perfectly legitimate grounds for their caution.

Mind your language!

The truth doesn’t seem to matter in any of this, and the adoption of the right collection of phrases identifies you as being on one side or the other just as readily as does a badge or a placard. It seems to be a default setting for Human Mk 1, to coin a phrase, but I’m not convinced it is all that helpful. I’m even suspicious that some people take up a side based on which has the cooler language, the slicker patois, rather than what that side actually stands for. There’s nowt so queer as folk.

The Search for Sanity

There has always been an uneasy relationship between dreams and reality. What we want and what we can achieve are not – as the inspirational speakers suggest – one and the same. “All you have to do is to believe in yourself and you can be whatever you want to be.” That’ the mantra, but it is as flawed as flawed can be. Yes, if you are a gifted and enthusiastic athlete, with the right musculature, nervous system, drive and training, you might get to compete in the Olympics. And then get beaten by a man in a dress.

The multicultural dream must have seemed like an ideal solution to everything, to the twonks who dreamed it up. Just imagine an incredible blend of all the talents, all the flair, all the vibrant cultural contributions; all mixed up to add zest to our national ambitions. But while academic professionals, experts in their fields, with a secular attitude to life and a hunger for knowledge might mingle well, the reality for many is sheer misery. Unmanaged immigration has brought squalor, graft, modern slavery and terror to our shores.

The Covid affair was a golden opportunity for Boris Johnson’s government to unite the country against a common enemy. Surely, if we all clap for the NHS, mask up, sanitise and socially distance for a few weeks, we can not only beat this thing, but beat it together. But, after a dismal series of confusing advice, U-turns, clarifications followed by reverse clarifications, well look where we are. When it had a chance to show strong leadership, Project Boris turned an opportunity into a disaster.

And then there is the dash for Net-Zero. Oh my. Forget Covid, immigration, transactivism and all the rest. This is the Daddy of unworkable ambition. The ending of the sale of gas boilers by 2035 has been pushed to 2040. As I recall, they were intending to ban them over a decade ago. Why the shifted goalpost? Because the date, plucked no doubt from thin air by a pimply pre-pubescent government advisor, was unrealistic from the start.

But if that seems like good news, the all-consuming obsession with electric transport appears to be more rabid than ever. Why? After all, we could reduce our actual man-made carbon output to actual zero if we simply became extinct in some Jonestown-like national suicide pact, but it would make not one jot of difference. The Chinese economy alone would probably absorb any reduction we made within a week.

As an example of unrealistic ambition versus achievable reality this has to be up there. When MPs voted for the 80% reduction by 2050 target demanded by the Climate Change Act, back in 2008 many probably assumed that 40 years was enough time to develop the technology and change the behaviours. More importantly, they judged that it was far enough ahead that the fallout would be mopped up by their successors. But in 2019, like a loser at the table, they doubled-down on their gamble and said, “80%? Pah! Let’s shed the lot!”

Why do we live in this artificial world of hyperbole, where every normal thing is amazing and everybody deserves to ‘live their truth’, regardless of ability to achieve it? When people talk of ‘holding the government to account’ they then do nothing whatsoever to actually achieve that aim. Instead they reel off a few slogans, pat themselves on the back, promote each other way beyond their competence and label it achievement. And then reward it further, by elevation to the Lords.

With every illusory sleight of hand, by governments, by ‘influencers’, by wannabes like Femi Oluwole, who inflate their relevance and imagine themselves into a job, we are slowly losing our grip on the here and now, the cold, hard facts. Unreality TV, vacuous ‘slebs’, the endorsing of anti-heroes and vaunting ambition all serve to blur people’s understanding of their limits. Within your means, yes, you should strive to be all you can. But for fuck’s sake, let’s get real again and recognise when we just have to get on with it, recover our sanity, and make do with what we’ve got.

The Little Reset

So much for The Great Reset. The hideously complex wish list of the World Economic Forum never had a chance of getting off the ground. It looks like nothing more than a tidied-up mind-map (another faddish nonsense) resulting from a drug-fuelled weekend among idealists and crazies… and people with far too great a regard for their own influence and power. As a unifying, totalitarian plan for the future it was only ever pie in the sky.

Yes, influencers operate throughout society; from the shouty bloke down the pub, through the fleeting fame of celebrities spouting new age drivel, to the very heart of governments. Your offspring inform you of the imperatives of the day – climate change, human rights, trans activism, socialism, and so on, and you listen indulgently. Government spokespeople spout jargonistic new initiatives to revolutionise society itself. But the ultimate success of change agents has to be measured by results.

And the results are far from the overarching centralised power so many warn against. And look at who is doing the warning: The clearly deranged Kate Shemirani, the serial nutjob David Icke, and Jeremy Corbyn’s even madder older brother. Yes, there are more credible dissenters out there – scientists and doctors and even politicians – but, far from being silenced, they are being heard. Over and over again. In fact, we her little else.

Boris Johnson’s lunatic advisors have come up with some barely credible ideas to ‘save the planet’, but they have been rebuffed and ridiculed as they should be, and nobody has yet been jailed for rinsing their dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. Only today it has been announced that the date for replacing gas boilers has been pushed back another five years. To my recollection this is the fourth or fifth time that unrealistic ambition has been postponed.

All I am saying is what I have been saying – and seeing – for years. As little as you think your vote matters, collectively we actually do influence what governments do. They need to be re-elected at some point but in between elections they float the wildest of ideas, possibly in the full awareness that these are just pipe dreams, and I am sure that sometimes they are surprised by what is accepted and what is rejected. We might not get what we think we voted for individually, but we do end up with what a collective voter base elects.

The plain truth is that we all have our ideas about how we would rule the world, ideas that receive a big slap in the face should we dare to air them. Try it for yourself; make a bold statement on social media of the way forward and see the alacrity of those who leap in to tear down your ideas. This is exactly what appears to be happening around every part of the agenda for this proposed great reset. The bits that stand up will be accepted and adopted. The rest will just be abandoned.

Governments, especially democracies, have a terrible track record in enacting controlled change, no matter how benevolent their intentions. (I really don’t subscribe to the biblical notion of ‘evil’, and never have.) Of far greater efficacy are the movements started by charismatic individuals, as incredible as they may be. I was reminded today of Joseph Smith, who claimed to have been visited by God and as a result founded the Mormon Church. Now, that is crazy, but today there are over 16 million of them, all following a made-up religion. (For the avoidance of any doubt, all religions are inventions of man.)

I’m not alarmed at all. I remain unconcerned about all the clamour in the world today. People are rejecting perfectly good advice and believing the outlandish. But at the same time, other people are listening to alternative voices to the official channels, some of which are undoubtedly sound, while some of the official advice has been shown to be unreliable. How do you decide what is correct and what is not? I suspect we are are all driven more by apparent consensus than fact, no matter how much we tell ourselves otherwise.

On every subject of concern – climate change, Covid, communism, energy, population, social engineering, and so on and so on – there are as many opinions as there are individuals. An argument that appears to hold water today will be dismissed tomorrow and in a week you may be amazed you ever endorsed it. This will never change, but, as for the much-vaunted great reset, it’s already been reset. Well done, you freedom warriors, you!

Personal Madness

There are a lot of screechy voices about at the moment, stirring up unrest and unease and creating a climate of hysterical fear. “It’s all about control. It’s about influencing behaviour! The elites want you compliant and controlled!” Put like that it certainly seems sinister but wasn’t it always thus? What government doesn’t want a population who generally behave responsibly, pay their taxes and stay out of trouble? What employer doesn’t want a workforce that turns up on time and does what is expected?

And don’t we all engage in influencing behaviour throughout our lives? Most parents school their young to be good little humans, don’t they? We alter our own behaviour in order to influence others when we want them to like us, to buy from us, or when we perceive a threat to our safety. We seek to influence political direction by using our votes – and political agents seek to influence us to give our vote to one party or another.

It’s move and counter move – whenever ‘alternative’ ‘free thinking’ movements spring up it isn’t long before the emblems of individuality become mass produced and turn into uniforms. It happens all the time. In fact, it would be extremely odd if governments weren’t trying to influence our behaviour – to lead more productive lives, to be better educated, to look after our health better, to be more resilient to changing circumstances. Save more, exercise more, spend more, play more; for goodness sake, be happier!

And just because you want to believe you are being coerced negatively doesn’t mean you are or you aren’t. Your dog spits out its medicine and views you with suspicion. Your cat goes into hiding when it spies the dreaded vet cage. Your kids ‘hate’ you when you deny them their ‘human rights’ to do whatever they want to do. And yet all you want is the best for them. Is it not possible that governments are just behaving as you do yourself?

Humanity is possibly defined by its deliberate attempts to engineer consensus – the lion just eats you, but the human persuades you to eat yourself. A healthy dose of cynicism alerts us to the possibility of harm, but it doesn’t take much for that to tip over into paranoia, especially when you can go online and find others – plenty of others – who appear to think the same. The weaponisation of what has been termed ‘motivated reasoning’ has been well studied in recent years, especially since Trump’s conspiracy-fuelled presidency.

There is a natural human tendency to believe whatever satisfies our preconceptions, regardless of its veracity, and the Internet is awash with fodder for the hungry. It has been referred to as an ‘infodemic’, a preponderance of information, misinformation and deliberate disinformation to satisfy whatever validation you crave. And some succumb to the collective narcissism that pervades groups with noble aims to restore ‘freedom’. Who doesn’t want to be a freedom fighter, eh?

Long after the facts are laid bare, picked over, interpreted and disseminated, there will be some, perhaps many, who will genuinely believe that they resisted a sinister new world order attempt to shackle them to the yoke. It wouldn’t surprise me if the weekend Freedom Marches continue long after Covid has been forgotten, becoming a regular family day out for the disaffected. We do, after all, seem to have become a nation of protesters of late.

Believe whatever you wish, but just think about the smorgasbord of plate-ready theories out there for your perusal. Wherever you look, somebody is busy joining the dots, exposing the deceits, aligning the planets, waking up, or just plain making mischief. Why should you adopt just one theory when there are so many to choose from? And hey, with a bit of creativity, maybe you, too, can come up with a new twist? A customised madness, all to yourself.

Tommy

The country has largely forgotten about ‘Tommy Robinson’, the controversial but undoubtedly brave man who spoke up against muslim provocation and violence and paid a heavy price for it. You may – irrationally – hate the man (hatred is an irrational and emotional response which benefits nobody) but he was emblematic of the need to stand up against a tide of frightening change, a change evidently unchallenged by those whose role it is to keep us all safe.

Naturally, the powers that be were, and remain, horrified by his very existence. In the complete absence of action on their part, how dare this upstart be capable of galvanising others into forming a resistance? How dare somebody – a low, uncouth somebody at that – say the things that must not be said? How dare an unelected figurehead do the things the elected dare not do?

Whatever you think of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon he did command the floor at the Oxford Union, having been invited there to be made a figure of ridicule. He engaged with a number of muslim groups, mostly hostile to him, in order to better understand what was happening. He was set up, time after time, and he was provoked far too often, as he later recognised himself, to physically fight back. But he learned from this.

He was very publicly vilified, long after he denounced the English Defence League, which he acknowledged had attracted the wrong type of people and had the wrong type of approach. If you wish to meet violence with violence you need the forces of state on your side, something he never had. Indeed, there was a prolonged period when it seemed that the police were under orders to prevent him from having anything approaching a normal life.

As a result of concerted actions by the police themselves, various disturbing muslim activist groups such as Tell Mama and Hate not Hope he was harangued and harassed wherever he went. He was denied platforms, as one by one his social media accounts were shut down. He was jailed several times, often on grounds which seemed tenuous at best, and appeared to be handed down sentences far in excess, one imagines, of those that would be dealt to a muslim transgressor. Hell, there is no doubt about it; he was targeted by agents of the state.

Not to defend him, because he did do some stupid, vainglorious things, but for what it is worth I tend to be on his side. What he is against is something we should all be against. How he went about it might not seem wise, but how many of us would have carried on, as he has, in pursuit of something he believes in? He has had his family life wrecked, been made bankrupt and had his ability to earn an honest living effectively taken away.

Why am I writing this now, when everybody has quietly forgotten all about him? He is in the news again because he has been landed with ridiculously high costs in his latest unequal brush with the law. Ask yourself whether a single penny would have been demanded had the adversaries in this case been the other way round. Or, you know, don’t bother; you have probably already adopted a position on the man you hate as Yaxley-Lennon.

Was he seeking a place in history? Maybe, I think part of him is driven by the modern obsession with fame. Is he a far-right terrorist, as many will claim? I don’t think so; the term terrorist is applied far too readily by security forces determined to pretend there is a balanced threat to society. Is he really just a nasty thuggish piece of work? Quite possibly, at the start of this crusade, but I think he has become thoughtful and genuinely concerned and has grown into somebody with real, useful insights into this struggle, who ought to at least be listened to.

Where does all this end?

But a far more important question to ask is why is he? People like this, would-be heroes, don’t arise out of nowhere. The threat he tried to counter is not only still there, it is growing and remains unchecked. If anything, it looms larger now than anything, as public concerns turns to the millions of people we let into this country without any concern for whether they pose a threat to our way of life. It doesn’t matter if you hate Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the fact is this country needs a Tommy Robinson. We broke this one; who will be next?