We Need to Talk About Democracy

We all think we know what a democracy is, don’t we? Growing up, the common retort to somebody poking their nose into your business was “It’s a free country!” and we all instinctively knew what we meant. Had we been asked to expand on our assertion we would no doubt have deployed the D word as ultimate proof that as long as we weren’t hurting anybody else we could do or say pretty much what we liked. That’s democracy, we assured ourselves.

Turns out that’s more like anarchy, although until the Sex Pistols came along with their half-baked take on the national character few had any notion of what anarchy really meant. But as the years rolled by we began to invoke democracy more and more whenever we wished to justify a life of peaceful hedonism, bankrolled by the ambitious pursuit of gainful employment. It’s a free country… democracy, innit?

It turns out that despite what we might think we know, democracy doesn’t work the way we always assumed it did. For a start, the popular definition of democracy – governance according to the wishes of the majority – is only one possible interpretation. And these days that version is called ‘populism’ and derided as a far right, mob rule irrelevance. And given that ‘the far right’ is now everybody who voted for Brexit and Boris, this type of democracy is now a horrible distortion of the original intention.

No, no; what we have is ‘representative democracy’, which is little removed from an autocracy – governance by a single person who holds all the power – when all the representatives seek election via a supposed democratic process of one man, one vote, only to then conform to a hive mentality in office. The whole of the western world appears to have a political class which is broadly in agreement with itself, and broadly out of synch with its electorate.

It’s a good trick if you can pull it off and they have been doing it for years. Telling themselves that letting the population at large make important decisions about which they understand little, the elected representatives (who themselves barely know more) make decisions guided by a political staff class who appear to overwhelmingly hold one set of values. We see it in the broadcast media, the civil service, the education system and even in the lawyers. We are actually governed by bureaucracy, while the bureaucrats themselves claim to be mere functionaries.

But if they are simply the pen pushers, who pulls their strings? There has long been plenty of evidence for a form of plutocracy, whereby the real power lies with those who have all the money. But ask yourself this; if you already have all the money the existing system obviously works in your favour, so why would you risk upsetting the apple cart by taking control? Nope, I don’t buy the New World Order theories at all; people who are that successful are often incapable of the kind of cooperation that would require. Competitive, suspicious, prone to paranoia; I think they would quickly fall out and break any such consensus.

Government... it's simple

All of which leads me back to the same conclusions I’ve been arriving at every time I look at this. For all the good intention to govern by common consent the best system we can devise is one in which nearly everybody is regularly disappointed. But just as with any set of rules, some can find a way to turn them to their advantage. In an atmosphere of mutual suspicion, when governance is more by trial and error, there is one group who rarely suffer, no matter how incompetent or venal they are; we call this group 'politicians'. Democracy? No. If anything, we are governed by a Mediocracy.

Unrepresentative Democracy

Few successful companies are even remotely egalitarian and no empire ever was. The organisational structures which have brought the greatest human triumphs have not – including the few instances of individual genius – been collaborative, inclusive collectives but dictatorial, hierarchical and about as far removed from democracy as it is possible to envisage. A few employers exercise a form of benign stewardship of their workers’ welfare but in the main the drive for that concern has to come from above.

Worker’s rights exist not because of the innate goodness in all employers’ hearts but because governments have imposed laws and monitored standards. But wait, from whence do governments get this authority? Traditionally, via hereditary roots, or bloody coups, but in the west, in the main, via the illusion of democracy. True democracy cannot exist beyond small groups of people with aligned interests; a trades union, for instance or what has become the unspeakable evil that is the nuclear family.

Interestingly, the very people who were despotically responsible for the downfall of powerful unions are also the destroyers of traditional families (except, of course, for certain culturally enriching family models whose sovereignty is inviolable). Because democracy is dangerous, as we are finding out at first hand. Direct democracy, when it fails to produce undeniable majorities is divisive, especially when it lays bare the stark differences between those who have benefitted from the current system and those who feel they have lost out.

We call the current system ‘representative democracy’, but who does it represent? It is abundantly clear that the fabled man-in-the-street does not possess the knowledge, the expertise or the interest to make objective decisions, or form valid opinions about almost every likely subject which is the normal concern of government. How is it possible that Josephine Bloggski could have a hand in shaping, say, foreign policy? How can a semi-literate be allowed to contribute to the education debate? And of course, how dared the former Prime Minister allow a democratic ballot of these unfit participants over EU membership, especially when it returned ‘the wrong result’.

Well, because, in this case, the pressure coming from this same demos forced his hand, but this was a rare event and may have spelled the end of referenda in the west altogether. The ruling classes (for they increasingly come from entitled origins) across the western world have looked on in horror at the Brexit debacle. If the birthplace of representative democracy could suffer this embarrassment, they wonder, could it also befall us? Of course, some quarters have not abandoned pretend direct democracy yet; they are calling for the referendum to end all referendums, because a ‘People’s Vote’ that returns the correct result would be the mighty door that shuts out the format forever.

But who does ‘representative democracy’ actually represent? Not the voters, for certain. This is one reason that proportional representation will never again be considered, at least never by those who gain from first-past-the-post. The referendum outcome is re-enacted every five years in every marginal constituency with the result that whoever charms the larger number of voters then has five years to ignore their slim majorities in favour of whatever Parliament decides.

As long as this system exists, be prepared for huge discrepancies between what governments say is happening and what people see is happening. Just one, simple example of how yawning that gap is this: Ruth Davidson has just said that wearing the burka is no different from wearing a crucifix. How astonishingly naïve is that? And how astonishingly ignorant of the fears and concerns of those who put her in post. Brexit, Trump and the so-called ‘rise of the right’ are all democratic reactions to the increasingly undemocratic way our world is ordered. Can’t you feel the strain?

Democratic Deficit

Another week, another round of Brexit, the fantasy rise of the far right, the deification of the NHS and many pointless exchanges between people whose moral and intellectual vantage points are so disparate that seeing eye to eye would involve scaffolding. Honestly, it’s amazing we can even approach concord on anything at all. Oh, sure we all want peace and love, man, but why do we have to disagree so much on who we have to butcher to achieve it? And who gets to call the shots?

I was viciously mauled on Twitter by somebody calling themselves a ‘democratic socialist’ for not agreeing that every bad thing in the land was the fault of the Tories and that Jeremy Corbyn would change all of human history when he ascended to his holy throne. ‘Viciously mauled’ is, of course, code for ‘called a racist/sexist/all-purpose-bigot’ by somebody with no other weapons. Apt because, as is by now well-established, socialism doesn’t coexist comfortably with democracy and changing history is a fairly straightforward process when you have access to all the books, including one full of matches.

Democracy is an interesting notion; everybody applauds it when the vote goes their way, but denounces it when it doesn’t. So far, so very human, but what’s the alternative? And how do we decide what is and what isn’t democracy? For instance, here in the UK we have what we refer to as Parliamentary Democracy which means we have a periodic electoral bun fight and then the party with the most members of Parliament gets to ignore the people who put it in power. Being British we put up with this because we know our place.

Supposedly, we elect individual members who best support our interests as a constituency, but in reality we tend to vote for the party we think is most on our side. We do this from a low-information base and then we look on with horror and incomprehension as they then administer the power we gave them in ‘the wrong way’. No truly representative sample of voters, from any party, voted for the social changes wrought over the last two decades. So instead a minority ideology was unimpeded in paving the way for the closest thing to actually asking the demos we have ever had; the referendum.

A clear majority, albeit a small one, voted for a course of action. But the losing side insist on believing that every abstention is a tacit vote against the result; or that the votes of people yet to be born should be taken into account, because, of course, it’s their future as much as it ours. By that measure a massive majority did not vote for the motion and therefore must have voted against. Turning that argument on its head, of course, an even larger majority must have not voted against the motion and must, therefore... oh, you get the point.

But we don’t need to tot up imaginary votes to see the contradictions of democracy; it seems that even then you only include actual ballots cast you can end up with undesirable outcomes. As I write this, exit polls have the Italian 5 Star movement set to gain the largest vote share and thus an opportunity to control the make-up of the next government. But regardless of this election, what if, say, 40% voted for one party and 30% each voted for another two? If neither minority party will work with the winners, they could join forces and form a joint majority, meaning that in effect the party that 70% did not vote for puts a Prime Minister in place.

Your vote counts... for nothing.

It is little wonder that nobody ends up happy. The politicians complain that the electorate doesn’t understand. The voters get to see their hopes betrayed. And ideological minorities get to shout with a far louder voice than they really possess. Democratic outcomes which don’t suit the politicos are denounced as ‘populist’ and therefore very, very stupid and before long you have the potential for revolution. If you are not going to have actual free and fair elections, with votes cast by a population educated and sufficiently informed of the consequences of their choices; and if you are then not going to respect the choices they make, I ask you: democracy, what’s the bloody point?

Dumbocracy

Nobody knows what will happen in the General Election. Nobody. Nobody knows how whatever ruling coalition emerges will govern. Nobody. Nobody has any clear, over-arching vision of how an economy and a society needs to be run in an age when the servant-master hierarchy has disappeared and in its place is a faux-egalitarian mish-mash of ‘rights’ with an ill-defined sense of responsibility. Indeed, individual responsibility has vanished in some sectors altogether and corporate loyalty has been replaced with a nebulous sense of entitlement and individualism. Oddly and contradictorily it is in those on the left, who persistently preach about the power of solidarity, where some of the lowest notions of true common cause reside.

Boris Johnson is right to talk of a new Battle for Britain but entirely confused if he genuinely believes our progressively watered-down version of Conservatism has the answers. Because people have been told for so long that the world is theirs by right they have come to believe it. There is no stigma in the things which would once have been frowned upon – able-bodied worklessness, single teen parenthood, gambling, drinking and cavorting to excess with the expectation that somebody else would always pick up the tab. Neither a borrower nor a lender be? When Labour’s Liam Byrne signalled that there was no money left, the coalition should have begun to really turn the screws, not just fiddled about, ring-fencing this and freezing that.

Of course the profligate administrations of town and county and health and education, faced with necessary budget cuts did what? Did they preserve so-called frontline services for those in most need? Did they maintain the flow of traineeships and steady recruitment at the bottom, while exploring true efficiency savings from their bloated budgets? No, their overpaid non-job leaders went into a union-like huddle and decided that such authorities were run for the benefit of the staff before the users and instead opted for short-termism. Keep the top jobs and non-jobs, come what may and cut provision to make a point to government. “See what you did to the poor and sick” said the £200,000 a year image consultants and performance indicator manipulators, while doing exactly what they blamed the bankers for.

In defence of immigration, the oft-touted statistic that 40% of NHS staff are from overseas should not be praised; it is a damning indictment of the way in which much of the country and its population has been mismanaged. Poor educational outcomes, coupled with unrealistically rising aspirations, lowered moral principles and a perverse belief that recruiting an ever lower paid workforce will somehow result in a limitless flow of funds for public services has left us with a generation poorly equipped to cope with the main fact of working life – that we don’t always get what we want. Except now they don’t even have the option of starting from the bottom.

And why do we have all this? Because we let the children decide; it is the job of a parent to decide how their kids turn out… and it is the job of leaders to lead, not to follow. A fifty-year succession of populist governments has given the people what the focus groups said they wanted, instead of taking the tough decisions and saying no. And the election campaign is too short a time to even begin to educate an electorate to search for the truth and vote with their heads.

The ship of state sails on...

So, come May 7^th we will trot off to the polling booths and we may as well vote blindfold because whatever we call them we’ll get the same indecisive, spineless, vote-whores we always do and if anybody tries to enact real reform they will be ushered out of office before the approval ratings dip a percentage point.. Somebody said that democracy is the least-worst system for governance. But when you realise how democracy usually ends up – government elected by the average; dumbocracy – nobody responsible would ever countenance it. But what’s the alternative?

Wasted Votes...

This country is fucked, isn’t it? Really, when you stop to think about it, whatever was left of The British after the war has been steadily eroded to the point of extinction, a process which is accelerating, if anything, as we stumble from one existential crisis to another. Our sovereignty sold to Brussels, our culture derided and marginalised and in the last twenty years deliberately swamped by the experiment of multiculturalism; a project so misguided that only wholly detached, politically ridiculous, illiberal, ‘progressive’ thinkers swimming in Westminster think-tanks could possibly continue to believe in it.

Trojan Horse II, the continuing saga of the Rotherham sex abuses, endemic vote rigging in Tower Hamlets and elsewhere… then many other shining examples of kow-towing to disgusting imported practices and the apparent indifference of the ruling classes to a situations they have helped create and continue to allow.

But it’s not all the fault of multicultibollockry; all by ourselves we have allowed insidious weaknesses to invade the UK body corporate – our national mission statement is riddled with the sort of inept and pointless results of blue-sky brain storms that came up with ‘consignia’ to replace a well-established and ancient brand recognised worldwide. Why do they have to fuck about with everything that once made Britain what it was but is now perverted beyond reason? We are diseased and incapable of taking the cure.

The welfare state which keeps people in relative poverty. Working age benefits which drive even the diligent into dependence on handed-back tax credits; the fiction of being rewarded, instead of being robbed less. Social policies which have, for years, offered the utterly worthless underclass sufficient incentive to carry on claiming; a refusal to condemn obviously aberrant behaviour.  Slowly but steadily a once more evenly balanced society has split into the two extremes that ‘social justice’ sought to end; the increasingly small number of movers and shakers on the one end of a seesaw and everybody else on the other. If a thousand of ‘us’ were to disappear from our end the heavyweights at the other would hardly notice, but if one of ‘them’ stepped off the whole sorry mass at the shallow end would plunge still further towards destitution.

And neither Labour nor Conservative seems to understand that the people they claim to represent asked for none of it. Even ‘white Dee’ was on the Today programme saying as much. For all the worthy rhetoric of the Owen Joneses, the formerly working classes are not remotely interested in Marxist eulogising about their sturdy worth. At the arse end of the social scale, for all that they tend to vote Labour, their sentiment is wholly of the right.

Working class people reject multiculturalism, gay marriage and much of the rest of the stuff the metropolitan elite believe is good for them. Equality, yes, but not at the expense of common sense. They also don’t like the EU, which, if Cameron (the lesser of two evils) is returned, they will be bullied and threatened into remaining in. It is little wonder that not one of the party conferences has had anything to say to encourage participation in the universal suffrage which has seemingly done fuck-all to empower those who have it.

What do ordinary people really care about? They care passionately about their families and would kill – yes kill – at the drop of a hat anybody who so much as laid a finger on a hair on their heads. Pakistani rapists? They would lynch them in a heartbeat were it not for the vanishingly thin veneer of civilisation that keeps them, still, believing there may yet be a legal remedy. There won’t be; their concerns and hopes and fears will once again be ignored. 

Boris Johnson’s anti-UKIP stand-up routine is just one more example of the derision and contempt in which ordinary voters' opinions are held. And so we take another step towards a lethargic anarchy that will allow our last shreds of national dignity to be disposed of as worthless. We are not 'sleepwalking' into anything - we can see it full well. Democracy? It’s just a hollow sham.

Look before you leap... but leap if you want.

On the drive in this morning I heard Scottish author Denise Mina, reading her essay on why she supports the NO vote in the imminent Scottish referendum – or as it will come to be known in history as  ‘The day Scotland got independence whichever way it voted’. There is  long and established precedence of asking those who will not be materially affected by an outcome to judge on its sagacity and at least the Today programme was asking people who can string a sentence together, rather than, say, David Beckham.

The United Kingdom has for 300 years had a national identity known as Britishness in which we have had an abundance of that most treasured of New Socialist goals, diversity. It’s possible there is no other unified nation on earth with the breadth of differentness exhibited here, with separate histories, customs, gripes, grievances and petty feuds, yet living together without strife for three centuries. And why? Because above all else we had nationhood, a shared island coastline… one nation under a groovy flag.

So here’s the odd thing about Denise Mina’s plea for unity; she contended that the nation state is a failed paradigm, an inward-looking, insular and excluded method of interacting (or rather not interacting) with the world; that ‘better together’ is an example of how opening borders and down-playing national identity is the key to prosperity in the modern global economy… and therefore Scotland should remain a part of the world-renowned, globe-conquering, yet spectacularly distinct nation called the United Kingdom.

Our own nationhood is the product of centuries of shared endeavour and as much as the federalists would plead otherwise it works – or has worked - because we do have that shared idea of Britishness. In fact the utter failure of and the misery brought about by enforced multiculturalism is at the root of much of what ails us. The breakdown of national boundaries is not, whatever anybody tells you, an unremittingly good thing. In fact, all over Europe, much of the unrest is as a direct result of the inability of countries to maintain their own borders; geographically, economically and most of all, culturally.

Nationhood works; it just does. Whether that entity is a small island or a huge continent it is a very human instinct to cleave to one’s own and borders will be erected one way or another. If you don’t believe in nationhood, how long before you start to believe you should also break up the family unit, as the communists have advocated for a century and a half and as socialists have tried to pretend they haven’t? They are not your children they are the state’s children; is that where we end up?

Either way, you'll still be a country.

I don’t know which way is the best way for you, Scotland; you’re obviously unhappy in this increasingly loveless marriage. But if it is self-determination and the ability to manage your own aspirations without interference from those who don’t have your interests at heart you still have two choices. You are already a country in your own right, so you can opt to become a smaller nation better able to exercise democracy, or you can remain a part of a larger nation which has its own question to answer about independence. Either way, yes or no, the nation state is still the only valid option for a free people.

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! 

Exterminate?

In Davos, a bunch of jokers who believe, or at least proclaim, that they represent the populations of the First World are meeting to discuss… what, exactly? What conclusions have they pre-planned to arrive at and what decisions will be made which will affect us all, yet have no basis in anything remotely linked to democracy? In fact how many of the world’s ‘leading’ countries can even lay claim to the dubious distinction of being truly democratic?

Following the current LibDem determination to tear themselves apart over the Lord Rennard debacle, former leader Paddy ‘PantsDown’ Ashdown, without a hint of irony, spoke about how ‘the people’ MUST conform to the ‘new standards’ of morality and acceptable behaviour. The people yes, but obviously not the politicians who routinely behave in ways that reveal their susceptibility to the most base of human frailties – greed and lust feature high on an MP’s CV. Surely people in public office should be held to higher standards first?

Labour talk the talk about being the party of the working class… or is it the middle class now? They talk tough on welfare and making work… er work, yet they oppose every measure the coalition has introduced in order to do just that. But this self-proclaimed Party of the People is so far removed from those same people as to be indistinguishable from any other mob in Westminster. While some of its lowly and increasingly elderly back benchers are grounded in the honourable Labour Movement, the glorious leaders have eyes only for power and the prizes power brings – an invitation to Davos, perhaps?

Meanwhile the Conservatives, long supporters of the wealth producers, seek to remain firmly in the wealth confiscating European Union, approval to join which has never been asked of the British people. Even now, reminiscent of the worst kind of conjuring trick, they hope to fool the people into believing a referendum will both be offered and fought on a level field, while the fifth ace is clumsily sticking out of their sleeve. David Cameron must barely be able to contain his glee at the charade of the private members bill, currently being timed out by the supposed opposition tabling a litany of amendments whose transparently flimsy nature oversteps the border of contempt.

What not one of the established parties has is a valid and representative view of the bulk of the people they seek to control. In fact what most people want from government is not interference in the minutiae of their every waking moment, but the freedom to get on and follow their own paths. The last thing happy people living fulfilling lives are interested in is politics. As more and more freedoms are curtailed and behaviours proscribed, even “the government must do something” is more an expression of impotent frustration than any genuine desire for more top-down interference.

Left to their own devices most of the population will sort themselves out. The only state involvement they need or want is light touch regulation and a bit of law and order. But the group that actively need government are the only ones they tend to squabble over. What a shame then that those people most reliant on the state understand and trust authority about as much as they understand and trust joined-up meat. All they want is bland, Turkey-Twizzler dole-dispensers who will maintain their lifestyles regardless of what it costs everybody else.

On all sides the out-of-touch ‘liberal’ types rail against ‘demonisation’ of those wholly on benefits and say to all who listen that they want nothing more than to be in work, that they need our sympathy and support to become productive members of society. But ask anybody who lives on a large council estate and they will point out the criminals, the idle, the dossers and those who pop out sprogs as if they didn’t know how to stop it. The only thing they want is to be left alone with their benefits.

Which way to the conference?

So, while the political classes squabble over the small number of people who need their charity but won’t vote, the largely uncomplaining majority work on, wondering just when a politician, any politician, will say a single thing to suggest that they understand. When Davos concludes that what the world needs now is love, sweet love, more wind turbines and more EU-style ‘democracy’ it might be helpful to remember that politicians on the whole represent nobody but themselves.

The Falkirk Dilemma

In these straitened times, choices have to be made. Over the last winter the opposition made much play of the supposed fact that some families had to decide whether to heat or eat their children*(*This may not be true). They went on to make political capital from the fear that lifestyles had to be altered and choices made; capital they then went on to squander by continuing to behave as they always did, as revealed in the recent Falkirk ‘crisis’. Maybe we should all be changing our behaviour in any case; the last twenty years of believing we could have everything has made us all fat and lazy.

You can go all out for thrift – an approach championed by the Frugal Queen who has set a challenge to live as cheaply, in monetary terms, as practicable, eventually to live a debt-free, sustainable lifestyle. Or you could just decide to live within your means and make simple choices following a cost-benefit analysis, or whatever the young and trendy consultants are calling it these days. In other words, how much bang are you getting for your buck? (And how is Buck these days?)

For instance, I no longer lease a private Learjet to travel to Birmingham. A bit of research showed that after paying the £2000 per hour, plus the airport fees, parking, standby charges and all the rest, it still takes two hours door-to-door. It turns out I can do that journey in my car, for about £20 in fuel – who knew? And even better, I don’t have to book it in advance, lodge flight plans, or put up with airport delays. It’s amazing what you can learn… if you can be arsed.

So, this CBA, how does it work? Easy really, all you do is compare the relative costs and benefits of competing choices. Take for instance, booze or books: A paperback costs about the same as a half-decent new-world wine, so which should you choose? Let’s examine the relevant facts:

That book will entertain you for perhaps a dozen hours over several days, if not weeks, you’ll be transported to another world, or possibly learn something life-enhancing and at the end of the ride you’ll still have the book. Opting for a bottle of wine, however, you will be lucky to spin it out for two hours, after which you’ll yearn for more. You may give in to that urge and pick up some fattening fast food to accompany it, as a result of which you’ll wake up late, feeling like shit having put on weight and taken another step toward hopeless addiction and the possibility of developing chronic, life-shortening medical conditions. See how CBA reveals the solution to your dilemma? Now the choice is a no-brainer; Shiraz or a nice Pinotage?

Another example - Telly or Training? One of the evils of our twenty-four-seven, media flooded lives is the danger of stagnating, slumped in front of a screen, watching mindless pap as muscles atrophy and joints seize up. Bed sores are a distinct possibility, along with blurred vision and tinnitus and in extremis becoming biologically fused with the settee. Of course, the benefits of regular exercise are well documented. It helps maintain a healthy body, prolonging active life and a feeling of well-being and even smug superiority over lesser mortals. A vigorous workout can leave you feeling lifted; the rush from those endorphins flooding your brain is said to be better than sex. A healthy, happier, longer-living you. On the other hand, gym membership costs a fortune and you’re already paying the telly licence fee anyway so, no contest, Kyle it is.

Red Len or Supermen?

See? It’s so easy anybody can do it. And this could also be the way forward for the party funding debate. The choices are simple: Continue with systems that mean disproportionate influence is gained by larger donors, individually or en masse, thus attracting the criticisms of bias, corruption, fraud and the creation of puppet leaders and a disenfranchised general electorate. Or, radically overhaul the system so that voters’ preferences are properly responded to and democracy is restored? I’m not holding my breath.

Proper Propaganda

I don’t go out of my way to upset people, really I don’t. I just tell it how I see it and let them make up their own minds. I lose quite a few followers that way but I’ve always reasoned it doesn’t matter; it’s their loss. So, I leave the blog for a few days and what do I find on my return? A right bloody political palaver, that’s what.

We have a coalition ‘government’ (for want of a better word) at the moment, in case you hadn’t noticed. I ask whether you’ve noticed because it’s important. Any form of leadership needs to have at the very least a teensy, tiny bit of a clue where it wishes to venture in the mighty ship of state. Where would be the navigators of one of Her Majesty’s sleek, grey messengers of death if they were all working from different charts?

So what in the name of Clusterfucks Incorporated is going on when, fresh from his paper round, The Boy Clegg demands we steal more from the rich a proposal which then has to be roundly slapped down by George Osborne, the bloke with his actual hands on the purse strings. Who is steering this bloody thing? Does anybody know?

We will never understand the politics of common consent in this country – what we used to imagine was democracy - because we’re free to believe what we want, yet remarkably ill-equipped to tell fact from fiction. I used to think that if politicians just told the truth we’d all make intelligent decisions and vote for the party with the best policies. Think again.

Take Al Murray and his successful Pub Landlord character. This was supposed to be a beautiful bit of British fun-poking at the bigotries of the little Englander, but just as Johnny Speight learned many years before, the great bigoted British public sided largely with the Alf Garnet character. We have travelled nowhere… although Al must have done very nicely out of it. 

It has sod-all to do with policy and nothing whatsoever to do with truth.

prop·a·gan·da/ˌpräpəˈgandə/
   Noun

1. Information, esp. of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicise a particular political   cause or point of view. 
2. The dissemination of such information as a political strategy.

The Left have won the propaganda war, fought on party battle lines drawn up over half a century ago, because now those on the right – especially those IN the right – dare not even pop a pate above the parapet for fear of having it blown clean off. The current government don’t yet seem to have thoroughly grasped that whatever the solution is (and no economist knows) you have to be in office to achieve it. And the last thing you need is a divided front.

The game might yet have been winnable, but then along came Tim – I make millions out of your gullibility – Yeo, to blow the entire ship out of the water. With his dirty thumb in as many pies as the Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee can bake, he is the very epitome of the mostly fictional Nasty Tory Fairy Story the left have promulgated so well.
 

So, well done Tim. One can only conclude that your future fortunes lie in a victory for the other side. You arrogant, cheating, swindling twat.

None as blind

So, they're going to have an inquiry into the blacker-than-black hearts of the evil bankers who dared to lend the money that allowed the greed of ordinary mortals to get the better of them and bring economic Armageddon to the known world? As with so much in politics the outcome has already been decided and now we just want a token witch or two to burn at stake.

In education, a clamour for evolution-denying, ever-better results led us down the path of progressive teaching methods and voodoo assessment principles to give us GCSEs in Trolley-Dollying and the highest graduate unemployment rate ever seen. Despite the obvious distractions and unproven efficacy of edu-tech, governments threw ever more precious money at 'educators' in the full knowledge it would be wasted on such toys. From a news article today "The public has been forced to endure years of denials that grade inflation exists even though they can see it 'with their own eyes'..."

On immigration, despite the obvious overcrowding, the resentment and the subsequent ghettoisation' the last government took us to the clearly visible, uneasy and antagonistic relationship with certain problem communities. Their answer? The thought crime of racism now ranks alongside murder in severity of prosecution and the ship of state presses blindly ahead with this multicultural madness.

Give the public their say and hanging would be brought back in a heartbeat. Instead we have somehow found ourselves in a culture where pursuing the victim instead of the criminal gives the police and the courts the results on which they are ultimately judged. Thieves go unpunished, but at least the ethnic poetry targets are met.

And so on and so forth... Diversity, inclusion, differentiation and a whole legion of 'isms' to obfuscate, excuse and evade the plain and simple truth that democracy died a long time ago.

The great unwashed are certainly unfit to actually run the country - Nobody wants a GCSE-Grade-C-er in charge of a bank, a corporation, the army or the NHS. But stupid as we clearly are, even we know the simple Sir Humphrey* truth that an inquiry will achieve the square root of fuck-all. Look at Leveson - what has that achieved other than being an expensive, diversionary spectacle for those sitting at home all day?

The public largely turns a blind eye to the lumbering machinations of state. As long as they get their gin and 'baccy they can largely be relied upon not to get involved. After all, who really cares if the world keeps turning and life goes on much as before? The government (and opposition, for that matter) has always counted on the natural political apathy of the proletariat to let them get on with their tinkering and legislating and interfering.

But we mushrooms can only take so much. Keep us in the dark and feed us shit, for sure... but don't shove it in our face.

Mushrooms at the gates!

(*If you don't know who Sir Humphrey is you're probably not old enough to be reading this. Run along now and play nicely!)