Keep Britain Tidy

What have the bland sound bites The Big Society and One Nation got in common? Yes, you got it, they are meaningless bits of noise exploited for one reason and one reason only – to garner votes for grasping politicians who have no idea who their voters are and what they really want. When Winston Churchill delivered his wartime speeches on the radio he had a captive audience with a collective need for hope and strong leadership. As a result he became a national hero and a renowned world figure… and the socialists still threw him out when the war was won.

The bitter lesson was learned and since then, in the name of progress, governments have demanded less of the electorate while promising ever more. The job of government is no longer to lead but to provide, to the extent that, for a worryingly large proportion of the population, absolutely everything about their lives is a matter for Parliament to decide. And when I say everything I am hardly overstating the fact. The NHS delivers them, social services monitor them, they are schooled by the state, supplied with unheeded sex education and when they have finally outgrown the ever more outlandish government schemes to keep them in pointless schooling, they are handed over to the Job Centre and the DWP to manage their adult lives.

Even those who do find work have an expectation that the government will shield them from harm, actual or imagined; that their every breathing moment will be cosseted and coddled. The trains will run, electricity will always be there, private companies will not be allowed to make undue profits from them, neighbours, their dogs and their children will be controlled. And when it comes to fighting them on the beaches, stuff that; it’s the government’s job and society is to blame.

This is what Margaret Thatcher meant when she talked about society – there is no over-arching, independent thing – society is made up of you and you and you. And if you simply refuse to take responsibility we get what Joan Bakewell’s documentary Our Dirty Nation highlighted last night; litter. Litter in all its forms is not just the waste you throw away but the human jetsam that washes up on the shore of our big society. Our prisons, drug clinics, sink estates and no-go areas are peopled with the dregs of a system that isn’t functioning because everybody thinks it’s somebody else’s problem, even though it is obviously a problem for us all.

The clear and obvious answer to keeping Britain tidy is litter snipers – they’ll soon get the message – but I expect there will be some namby-pamby health and safety objection to it. And on reflection, maybe prevention is better than cure. Which brings me briefly to the situation in ForemostSchool near Harrogate, where staff have suffered 67 assaults in just eighteen months. Although this is a school for pupils with ‘behavioural difficulties’ it is indicative of what happens when the question is always “what is the government going to do?” and it is only going to get worse.

But it strikes me that it is all about how people grow up and the influences they absorb along the way. Given that we have little control over those influences the answer lies further back in the timeline and prevention is the key. Every single one of society’s ills can be solved by getting rid of society altogether. And as society is made up of people and people can’t help themselves, the only way humanity’s deficiencies are going to be addressed is for us to become extinct. I've already done my bit and avoided making kids. If everybody does the same it will eventually solve the human litter problem once and for all. 

Small Talk

I'm not really sure I understand humans at all. I mean, what’s the point anyway when as soon as you get to know one it grows old and dies, taking your secrets with it to the grave. Or is that pets? I get confused.

Take food. I used to marvel at the way people would eulogise over a new type of processed cheese slice, gushing out their praise and drooling at the thought, longing for their next encounter. I’d try said cheese, find it, well, a bit cheese-like, shrug and get on with my life. People, eh? What a bunch of tossers. 

But that isn't it. It isn't that I am out of step with other people’s aspirations and lifestyle choices at all, I seem to be out of step with their perceptions of others’ perceptions. Which sounds a bit mad, so I’d better try to explain. An example here from my past, from the days when I cared: 

I’m on the edge of a conversation; a bunch of people I know (let’s call them ‘friends’ for want of any better term) went out last night. They went to a new pub and it was abso-fucking-lutely brilliant; the best night of their lives to behold such wonders, “You MUST go!”. So, a few weeks later I have the opportunity to try out this Nirvanic experience for myself. I go. It turns out to be just another pub and – just as with all other pubs – it’s a big, noisy, uncomfortable place where wankers try to outshout each other and strangers spill drinks in my path. Are my ‘friends’ mad? Were they on drugs? Why was, well, that, the best thing they’d ever done? 

I harbour feelings of enmity and feelings of separateness. I am not like other people – they thought this was brilliant, I know it’s shit. But, of course, because I’m different, I keep my observations to myself... until the day I reveal my utter confoundedness to one of these ‘friends’. They seem somewhat taken aback at my impression of their impressions of the place. “It’s just a pub,” they say, “I don’t see what the fuss is about.”

And I’m stunned; but you were one of the ones saying it was the best night of your life, that you could have happily died, having experienced the full extent of what it means to be human. “Oh, I think you’re exaggerating,” they say and change the subject. The fuck? 

It’s taken years of this kind of bullshit for me to finally work out what’s wrong. It's not you, it's me; I'm too emotionally honest about these things. I go out, I get drunk, I have a reasonable time and in the morning I say so. It was, you know, it was okay. Really, it was fun… and then I got drunk and went home – JUST LIKE YOU ALL DID! The bit I never understood was how shallow and meaningless that next-day small talk is meant to be. 

Lazy orators use superlatives as punctuation. ‘It was an okay night.’ does not make for a conversation, apparently. For a conversation – this isn't a debate, dummy! – you have to lie, exaggerate, outdo each others’ tittle tattle, banter, grunts, etc. THAT’s where I got it wrong. Nobody ever taught me this. And so I'm going to tell you the truth. Like I was brung up to do. 

Small talk is exactly that; it is meaningless. It’s small. It means nothing, it's so small. Nothing. There, got it? This means you can exaggerate until your arse falls off. You can exaggerate a million times until; you are blue in the face, until you quite literally die and it’s all right. It’s not only acceptable, it’s the way things are. 

So, that’s the bit I've had wrong for fifty-odd years. It’s not that people are so easily wowed by the mundane, not that they crave squeezy cheese at all. But to admit all this would be to face up to the mundanity of existence, which, let’s face it, would be downright depressing. So, to pretend it’s all better than it is, everybody else – hear that? everybody but me – simply lies about their life and everybody else colludes with that lie and then forgets all about it. 

But what about the BIG talk? This morning you should be talking about economics and Europe and immigration and welfare. You should be getting angry about the government passing bills that extend the powers to enact justice in secret. You should be working out what you will do to help get us avert economic Armageddon. Wait! Where are you going? What are you laughing at now? Eh? Eh? Tell me!! 

Great party, dude!

Sod it. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. We had a party on Twitter last night – it was, well it was just, wow, you know, I mean it was just BRILLIANT!!

All for One and All for Me!

When I was a lad my dad voted Labour. Why? Because, in his words, he was a labourer and therefore he genuinely believed this party must represent him. But what I saw on the news every night was a country gripped by strike fever. Union shop stewards cracked whips and everybody downed tools on the merest whim. They went on strike over the length of tea breaks, the unfair expectations of business owners demanding quality output, attendance and some actual work and on many points of Marxist principle involving what they saw as the duties of enterprise towards its most expensive yet often most defective component.

Companies were hamstrung by over-manning, under-skilling, demarcation, working to rule and the ever-present threat of a crippling walk out because some useless oxygen thief had been dismissed on legitimate grounds but without months of union-led negotiations, time wasting obfuscation and campaigns at national level. Dad was never in a union and the Labour Party has never done a single thing to his benefit in any way whatsoever, yet some bizarre tribal loyalty kept him voting for them until he finally stopped bothering several decades ago. Now, of course, he wouldn't have to worry about who to vote for because in the popular phrase, it doesn't matter who you vote for, the government always gets in. 

Possibly nothing better illustrates this than the current prevarication over our relationship with the European Union. As the electorate overwhelmingly insists it wants a say, every political faction is doing its level best to deny that option. As a significant proportion of the population has deep concerns over the membership foisted upon us 40 years ago, so every way we turn we are denied the right to express those concerns. 

Vote Labour or Lib-Dem and Europe will prevail. The Conservatives have already embarked upon a five-year war of words to batter the voters into delivering the pre-ordained consensus, should they get re-elected – it’s easy making a promise you’re unlikely to have to make good on. And if you vote for the only party which openly demands a yes/no, in/out referendum it is almost certain that Labour will gain a majority in 2015. (No wonder Ed Miliband hasn't got any policies – he simply doesn't need any.) 

So, where does that leave us? The European Union is a vast, Socialist enterprise which drives down education and behavioural standards and employment opportunities for its poorest, keeps the middle classes onside by effectively enslaving them to a life on kick-backs and seeks to pay for it all by punitive taxation of those who can most easily up-sticks and leave. It is a crackpot model, it’s unsustainable and it will result in armed conflict at local, national and international level at some point. I doubt very much that Mr Obummer will want to wade in to help sort out the mess he seems so keen on provoking. So what’s to do? 

Given that all modern world governments seem hell-bent on some version of the socialist model, where the numbers of undeserving are increased at the expense of the worthy there seems to be only one sensible option. Look after number one; I'm alright, Jack; every man for himself. I'm unhappy enough about giving up my hard-earned to British social parasites; I'm buggered if I'm going to be buggered for the benefit of a bunch of Bulgarians as well.

Mine! All mine!

Starting now I'm reducing my taxable income by any legal means possible, giving nothing to charity ever again, hoarding my resources and hiding whatever I can. I shall aim to move to where multiculturalism is still pointed at and derided and I plan to consume only what I need, eking out what little I do have for the benefit of me and mine alone... and those with the outstretched hands can go fuck themselves!  

Mansion? What mansion?

Charles Dickens had Mr Micawber say, "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery." Decent parents tell their children that if they work very hard at school, they can get a good job, save up their money and buy a nice house to live in.

In anything like a civilised society you work, you pay the tax you have to, you live within your means and you save what you can. Then you get to do what you want with what's left after you have already paid your share. Pretty soon, you learn that the harder you work, the more you pay, but even that is bearable if, at the end, with a few sacrifices along the way, you get to lead a comfortable retirement.

Unlike some parts of the world  nobody is going to fire rockets at you, or shoot you, or drive you from your home with pitchforks and fire. We used to use the phrase, "An Englishman's home is his castle". Not any more, it seems. Because, once again, having run out of other people's money, the spectre of a mansion tax has raised its ugly, spiteful head.

If anything epitomises the politics of envy that is the main plank of Socialism this is surely it. The thrifty, working, middle classes pay and pay and pay. But they also take less; they tend to use less in terms of public services such as transport, health, education and legal aid. They cost the police and the courts system less because they behave. All in all it's this so-called 'squeezed middle' that bears the brunt; being penalised yet again, in order to cover the endless costs of the huddled, ignorant masses that teem and breed like vermin.

The mansion tax principle is nothing less than state-sponsored theft. To extract yet more from those good citizens who have strived to better themselves; who may be just as cash-strapped as those who have squandered - are they now to be punished for their thrift? Vince Cable said: "There needs to be a sense of fairness, and these best-off people in society have got to contribute more." 

No, Vince, no. It's not fair. They have already contributed far more than is fair. You've already extracted all the tax you were due or were able to. The tax system is far too complicated and every change delivers yet more legal opportunities to opt out of paying. The tax credit system is ludicrous - take with one hand and appear to give back with another? Isn't it about time the government took responsibility and sorted that out?

Mr Micawber also said "something will turn up". I can only hope he's right... and that it's the next flight out of here.

So, what did Jimmy fix for you?

I go away for two weeks and you're STILL all talking about Mr Savile's predatory sexual tendencies in tones of horror and surprise and guess what? Out of the wormy woodpile ooze more and more of the allegedly abused, fuelling more and more calls for inquiries and prosecutions (and compo, obviously) and more and more demands for – yet again – the government to fix things for you, to make it all pretty and nice and happy again. 

The BBC is tying itself up in knots and injunctions are being prepared to stop anybody delving where delving might uncover something secret, dirty… something old and dusty and long forgotten. But what do you want? Do you not remember the 1970s, when all men were declared to be potential rapists? Have you not noticed how few jobs you can hold today without having a criminal records check? Are we already at the point where all men are potential paedophiles? 

The prurience of the human race appears to resist all attempts to set boundaries. So long as that unhealthy curiosity is aimed at high profile members of society and stoked up by the gutter press, spewing semi-literate, baying-mob fodder you all feel secure and smug in your little bubbles of bile. But just look at what you’re really doing. 

Incapable of exercising moral restraint yourselves you call for MORE state control, which will result in MORE suspicion with little evidence. There will be MORE legislation, leading to MORE lawyers; nobody can believe that’s a good thing. Where there are more lawyers there is usually less justice – you get the trial you can afford and wealthy criminals do far less time. 

And what are you really getting outraged by? What age is too young? Stop the countdown when that vein in your temple starts to throb: sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, twelve…? You might want to check your geography (or your preferred century) before you decide. And what else is ‘wrong’? At what point does an admiration for stockings and suspenders (‘full webbing’ in military parlance) tip over into unhealthily kinky? One person’s light, playful restraint is another’s full-on bondage. Anal, anybody? 

Because, once you go down this road everything will be codified, classified and criminalised. Youthful indiscretions and experiments will stay with you forever. Two fifteen-year olds are caught in flagrante delicto - when he’s forty, will it still be on record that he had sex with a fifteen-year old? Not very many years ago this sort of thing would be controlled at a local level. A few stern words, parental correction, the odd threat… an occasional precautionary beating or a running out of town. 

Now, just like jobs, the economy, education, welfare, care, transport, agriculture, planning, policing, justice, arbitration, opening hours, drugs, driving, families, health and bloody safety etc, you want even our social mores to be dictated and regulated by increasingly unelected and sub-competent governments; because you can’t even be bothered to do the slightest thing for yourselves any more… like voting. 

Would you wanna be in his gang?

So, before you all start with the righteous indignation and the holier-than-thou proselytising, have a good long look at whatever it is gets your engine going behind closed doors. And you know who I feel sorriest for? Gary Glitter. All the poor fella wants is to be left alone. He just wants to lead a quiet life and have kids

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.

Budget Regard - Going Cheep

How about this for a radical idea: Instead of government deciding what it wants to do, producing a ridiculously under-estimated budget, going ahead without proper consultation, going ten times over that budget and then increasing our taxes accordingly to pay for it all, how about WE decide how much tax we're going to pay and the government has no choice but to spend within its means. How about that, eh?

In my dreams, I know...

When William Pitt introduced income tax to pay for the Napoleonic wars it was levied at tuppence in the pound (Old pounds. So it started at 1/120 - for the modern scholar, that's less than 1%) ) rising to 10% for those with an income over £200 a year (about £17k at today's rates, but with none of today's modern fripperies to pay for). It was abolished in 1802, only to resurface once more between 1803 and 1816.

Sir Robert Peel brought it back for good in 1842, since when it has been up and down like the proverbial yo-yo and a constant source of tension between government and the governed. As government ambition has soared and spending risen through the ceiling, successive administrations have found ever more inventive ways of taxing you to the hilt. If you die without leaving any realisable assets - that's most of us - you have, effectively been taxed at 100% of your life's income.

So here's my plan. Reduce income tax to a 20% flat rate and cut the fuck out of public spending (for real this time, not pretending to, like they are at the moment). Then, if they want any more, ministers have to personally come to the door of each and every tax payer and explain nicely what they want it for.

Then, they have to stand still for a full minute while you laugh in their face.

Comments are always very welcome.

The problem with families

I see the experts have been at it again with this report into criminality in so-called 'feckless families'. You have to love an expert; they pour millions of pounds and years of research time into discovering what most of us have known all along.

Over the years experts have revealed some 'startling' correlations:

• Children educated at grammar schools go to better universities.
• People who work harder usually earn more money.
• If you pay more in benefits than for work, people will choose benefits.
• Flooding a region with immigrants increases racist attitudes.
• The bigger the government the greater the cluster-fuck
• The European Onion[sic] - see above. And now,
• Problem families are, ahem, 'a problem'

The 1942 Beveridge Report identified five "Giant Evils" in society. (How much better if that had been 'Five Giant Elvises'?) These were named as squalor, ignorance, want, idleness and disease. And Louise Casey's £448million, three-year study has discovered what the neighbors would have told her in minutes - the five giant evils have proved to be more resilient than all the misguided efforts to eradicate them.

Charles Darwin posited the principle of natural selection, in which nature favours the survival of those mutations most suited to exploit their environment. In this case the environment is the welfare state and it seems the fittest mutations are the very same incestuous, abusive, criminal scum themselves. Many of nature's most successful species are parasites, which not only manufacture more copies of themselves, but do it at a faster rate than anything else. (Is this starting to sound familiar yet?)

For years governments have engaged in sticking plaster policies - treating the symptoms, not the disease - in the hope that the ailment might clear up on its own. (Or sometimes in the certain knowledge that they'd only be in the job for a couple more years, so sod it.) But after decades of increasingly expensive treatments it's clear the cancer has spread. 

The only way to get rid of many parasites is to destroy the host and even the Labour Party experts are now catching onto the fact that society as a whole is no longer willing to foot the bill. But the host has grown too big and, as the Eagles once said, "They stab it with their steely knives but they just can't kill the beast."

Maybe not. But isn't it about time we starved the fucker to death?

What did your last slave die of?

[singing] Ru-pert, Rupert the bear, everyone sing his name! Nobody was more surprised  than I to hear what Rupert's Bear's friends, the dear old gypsies, have been up to. After all, the loveable Romany rascals are renowned for their deep sense of social justice and their celebration of diversity, with the odd big, fat wedding or bare-knuckle fight thrown in for shits and giggles.

But it seems that, what with the lucky heather and clothes peg trade being in decline and all, this much-maligned, yet gravely misunderstood community has had to reluctantly resort to slavery to make ends meet. Surprised, I said, but really Rupert and I were shocked! I mean we had no idea that these normally exemplary, law-abiding folk, who never do any more harm than cleaning up the odd tonne or two of live copper cable from along the railway embankments as they go about their traditional a-roaming, could ever contemplate such a thing.

Rupert told me he's afraid that, as well as lawless racist thugs, inbred retards and thieves they'll now be branded as slave traders too. I put him straight though and told him that such a thing would be a grave slur on their traditionally peaceable character. They're not slave traders at all, Rupert, I said; they're slave owners. A very different thing altogether, I'm sure you'll agree.

Rupert then asked me how low we have sunk when in the name of diversity we can tolerate these sub-human worms. The same applies, Rupert said, to all those seeking to impose radical Islamic on the UK, plunder our savings, import criminals from the east or squander our national wealth on supporting the European Marxist project. I replied that he couldn't consolidate all these disparate groups into one convenient hate target, but he said he could and he bloody well would. And then he stomped off to go and have a rant with Tiger Lily.

But he has a point, hasn't he? There is something deeply wrong with a society so afraid of giving offence that we shrink from a solemn duty to protect out shores and our citizens and our way of life from such invasions, liberty-taking and wrong-doings. Instead, I work all my life and end up with nothing except an obligation to keep paying for the cunts; whichever particular branch of cuntery they espouse.

So, next time you have a slave turn up at your door and ask, in the traditional Roma accent, "Would y'be after wanting y're droive Tarmacced, bejaysus?" you might want to consider that we're all slaves now and ask yourself how we got into this godawful mess. More particularly, what do we intend to do to dig ourselves out and do we, as a society, actually have the stomach for it?

We put down dangerous animals. Humans are the most dangerous animals there are and more dangerous still when there is no perceived restraint to their activities. Those who most endanger our society, by whatever means, should not be given mere prison sentences, they should be locked down forever, or else transported, preferably to Rockall or a desert, or better still left to dangle from the end of a rope.

Do have a lovely weekend. xxx

Wired!

In my day job I try and play a positive role in maintaining the competence of workers in a pretty straightforward field. Electrical installation work isn’t exactly rocket-surgery[sic] and since the first days of the Wiring Regulations (1882 - 130 years) testing has been a necessary component of the job, yet most practicing sparkies have only a rudimentary grasp of the principles.

Last night I was assessing a supposedly experienced tester. Once the test rig had been safely isolated I left him for ten minutes to get on with it and returned to find nuts and bolts, springs and things, popping and fizzing round the exam room while he wrestled with deadly killer croc-clips and test leads.  It was like a kitten with a ball of wool… and a stick of Semtex. Given that an absolute minimum of dismantling should have been involved, this was like Armageddon; Electricalypse.

Once the fires broke out, I decided to terminate the assessment, enough is enough. His blackened eyebrows still sparked and sizzled slightly and a wisp of smoke rose from his new Afro hairstyle... “How did I do?” he asked, hopefully.

Cut the red wire... NO! The blue!

When you hire an electrician you’d like to think they know what they’re doing, wouldn’t you? Most of them have an impressive sounding list of qualifications but the simplicity of Ohm’s Law is lost as they struggle with the deep and complex relationship between Volts and Amps and Ohms. Yet, it’s easy enough to remember:

Villa = Is x Rubbish

The truth about electricity

If few of these trained professionals can really tell their amp from their elbow, how can they be expected to tell a talented politician from a mere chancer? Or distinguish between a plan for economic doom versus commercial boom? These are the people who choose, once in a blue moon, who gets to make the important decisions as to just exactly how much more money we're going to piss down the European drain. Or to what extent we will continue to emasculate our armed forces. Or how much more of the third world's population we plan to crowd into our precious little island home.

One-man-one-vote democracy doesn't seem such a good idea now, does it?

Reet Elite

Much has been spat out of the internet about the 1%, the supposed ruling elite who control virtually all of the world’s wealth and are engaged in a heinous plot to subjugate the working man forever. Speaking from a position at the arse end of the remaining 99% I say good luck to them. I wish it were true. It’s not. In fact, it’s bollocks.

If the top earners, industrialists and entrepreneurs could even be bothered to address the situation they would long ago have worked out that their position could be made perpetually tenable by ensuring the 99% didn’t get pissed off enough to turn to armed revolt. They would set up businesses in deprived areas, fund schools and hospitals and enable social mobility through education to ensure fresh new blood arrived, eventually, at the top. Facilitate aspiration – that would be the clever move.

But they don’t do that. Because - just as you and I would – having made/inherited/lucked-into their pile they are rightly enjoying it. And the system that allows this state of affairs to continue is not capitalism, it’s socialism. Capitalism is the system that distributes according to ability. Socialism tries to ‘correct’ what it fairly sees as injustice by levying punitive tariffs against those who create and thus attain for themselves, wealth. In other words, biting the hand that feeds.

But socialism goes even further, seeing any form of meritocracy as elitism, a structure it has decided, without any sensible debate, is always, but always, wrong. If education is (and it undoubtedly is) the way up, how do you forgive the way in which education has been handled since ever more left-leaning governments (whatever they've actually called themselves) have been in charge?

Grammar schools, which gave a leg up for the working man's son? Elitist, therefore wrong. Technical colleges, where the artisan-inclined apprentice learned his trade? Even worse, condemning working men to, er… work. Cut them down forthwith. Polytechnics, where the less academic could nonetheless gain a footing in administration and business skills, communication, practical engineering and management? Poor men’s universities! Smacks of hierarchy – get rid.

And so on. In a bid to even up life’s chances the leftist agenda drives education standards forever down. Or are the employers (the nasty, elitist wealth creators, remember?) all wrong? Why does Michael Gove attract so much vilification from the left when he proposes a re-boot back to when the education machine was actually working? And why do the proponents of educational technology insist that the catastrophic introduction of ever more expensive distractions in an effort to ‘engage’ the kids is NOT complicit in the downward trend in school-leavers’ ability?

(See the original at Stripgenerator)

 I’d like to think that the Socialists are merely misguided, but maybe I’ve misjudged them and Socialism is, after all, a big plot to subjugate the masses?

The cutting edge of white heat, blue sky durch Technik

Now, when it comes to computers and suchlike I’m no expert, yet I ain’t no slouch either, but have you ever noticed how all this progress is weighing us down? Yesterday, for example, I spent pretty much the whole day transferring files and programmes from one computer to another. Yes, yes, I know, local storage is so ‘noughties’, dude. Like, get with the cloud, man. Put your life on the cloud and you can access it from anywhere via any platform.

Yes and so can anybody else, or – more likely – you’ll have no access when you actually need it. And besides, if a workaday hacker can get at your cloudy inner secrets, so could the government, which is a sobering thought. Whoa there boy, back up a bit. “What are you hiding?” you’re all thinking now. (See? That’s what the government wants you to think!)

Nothing! Nothing, but… it’s a bit like writing down everything about your life in a diary and handing it to a ‘homeless’ for safekeeping. He might try to sell your secrets or your identity. Or he might just browse through it. No problem, you’ve got security on it, right? Or he might just lose it. Or. More likely you’ll never find that tramp again.

Am I likening the government to a tramp? Yes, I believe I am. A dirty, smelly vagrant, whose very existence repulses you, yet you can’t let out of your sight because otherwise he’ll be into your pockets for your keys. Then he and his mates will steal your car and squat in your property before you can say George Osborne. The point is, you can’t just tell the world everything about yourself and not expect consequences. You need a bit of security.

So, passwords. You’re not supposed to use a memorable password – you know, anything you might actually remember? Nor should you write it down, or use it for more than one site… and then you should change it every few weeks. But, it’s not like you need many passwords, is it? After your online banking, there’s not much to worry about is there? Okay, so you might have more than one bank account and maybe a share account, an ISA, or SIPP.

And maybe you have online accounts for gas, electric, water, council tax. Oh yes, there’s also Google, Amazon, eBay, YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, Twitter, Facebook… and your multiple email accounts, or instant messaging… and Skype, of course. Still, that’s not too many to remember, is it? Ah but, what about every online merchant you’ve ever bought from? They all want you to register your fake email address so they can bombard you with spam, don’t they?

Right then, multiple log-ins, each with a different password – not written down – that you change every few weeks. Quite a task, but I have a great system. All my dozens of passwords are generated for me by a script I wrote to spew out randomised strong combinations at irregular intervals for each and every account. Now all I have to do is call up that program every time I need to log in and it does it for me!

It’s so secure even I don’t know the log-in details. You could waterboard me for hours and I could never tell. The only thing I’ll ever need is the password to access my programme. Now, if I ever forgot that, boy I’d be in real trouble… which is why I’ve written it down on a Post-it note and stuck it to my screen.

That A level.

I suppose you have to be, or know somebody, from The Black Country to understand this joke. It goes like this and it has to be told in the local accent. Ready?

"Ah kid's got wun of them A-levels. In carpentry."

"Aa-ah?"

"Aaa. 'Ee put some shelves up and 'ee ses, "That a' level"."

Ba-da-and furthermore-bing! Plenty more where that came from. (I guess you had to be there... or more precisely, here. For clarification, watch Doreen's Story.)

'A' used to stand for 'Advanced'. That is, an advanced qualification capable of being attained by only the better scholars. Now, however, the 'A' clearly stands for 'Average'... if a large proportion of pupils passes them that's what they are, by definition. (One sort of average at any rate - this would need no explaining to a proper 'A' level maths scholar, but probably 'means' nothing to today's A-plus-double-plus-good clones.)

Beneath the A-level stood a solid tier of achievement known as the 'O' (ordinary) level. And beneath that, for those not destined for the groves of academe, the Certificate of Secondary Education, or CSE... the qualification for the thick kids. Not an issue, by the way; more a badge of honour for those who were going to hit things with big hammers, pull stuff out of the ground, or have babies for Britain.

Well, I was there when they ripped it all up. When the progressive  educationalists (I lump the 'ists' together so you can see the full force of my disdain: psychologist, sociologist, therapist, criminologist, apologist… rapist) ripped the still-beating heart out of Britain's proven, highly esteemed fit-for-purpose, education system. So pernicious were the changes that a future colleague of mine was sent back by his father from London to Guyana in order to undergo a 'proper British education' in a former colony that had yet to ‘benefit’ from ‘progress’.

Because ‘progress’ invariably seem to mean ‘regress’. Progress in transport means that the average speed of traffic in London today is a fraction of what it was a hundred years ago. Progress means that you no longer have to rely on a human being to miscalculate your electricity bill – we have machines now that can fuck it up so much quicker. Progress – in the absence of any accelerated human cranial evolution – means that we replace achievement with the illusion of achievement.

So, Michael Gove’s desire to put the ‘A’ back into A-levels has to be applauded, if not actually completely believed. His heart is undeniably in the right place, but he will be thwarted by the liberal intelligentsia who, despite their lofty, egalitarian posturing have wrought nothing but harm to our entire society.

Oh yes, liberal fuckwits, I’m gunning for you. You, with nothing to lose, have experimented with several generations of Britons and now see the mess you’ve left us in? Bereft of decent public education, available to all, it is you who have left the nation in the hands of the kind of career politicians we have today, scions of the very privileged classes – on both sides of the house – that you sought to crush.

 If Michael Gove truly wants to achieve political immortality he should put all his efforts into the very illiberal and definitely non-intellectually-taxing enterprise of fucking the lot of you right up the arse.

The Sultan of Swing

As the week ends forget pastygate. And you might want to consider stockpiling petrol for an entirely different reason, for a new threat to the nation’s sanity has emerged. ‘Gorgeous’ George Galloway is the new Ayatollah of Bradfordistan, once a proud, northern mill town, now a burgeoning suburb of Karachi.

Galloway said, 'By the grace of God we have won the most sensational victory in British political history'. The madness of King George knows no bounds and no doubt fatwahs and favours will soon be issuing forth as he sits in Gadaffi-like splendour, eating dates in his big tent in Bradford’s Green Square. He may even invite his arch enemy Tony Blair for a photo opportunity. For George has cast off his sins and adopted the one true faith, the faith turned to by many another beleaguered pugilist. George has adopted the faith of ‘hismam’, righteous self-worship in the name of publicity.

The former Marxist, communist, head-the-ball and out-and-out swivel-eyed lunatic has benefited – according to the losing Labour faction – from a drop in support for the conservatives. It’s not their week, I know, but even I can’t imagine a former Conservative supporter switching sides to an unconvincing, cat-imitating, Big Brother reject. No, there has to be another reason for the high apparent reversal of voter apathy.

Maybe George’s kitty-cat tongue has had a workout licking all those stamps for the not-at-all-suspiciously large postal ballot? And who was that agile, yet stocky, burka-clad figure seen dashing from booth to booth in a last minute voting frenzy; one photographic ID, yet thousands of identities? (It’s a local custom) 

We may never know, but one thing is for certain. Bradford is no longer a British city that has simply lost its identity. It will forever be known as a city that has lost its mind and gone stark, staring mad. Respect? George Galloway? My arse!

But the government must look to their laurels. The entirely avoidable disasters of the last week are nothing compared to this travesty. One thing's for sure - if this can happen, anything can happen. Remember, every household in the land now has a can of petrol standing by. Man the barricades, the infidel is at the gates.

PS: For every ethnic, religious or historical inaccuracy in this article I offer no apology whatsoever. It's my blog and I can write what I like for comic effect. 

PPS: So there.

Taxing times

Well I've read a lot of stuff over the last two days regarding the so-called "cash-for-access" affair, like it's any sort of news. One side calls out names, the other side replies, "Yo' momma!". Then the newspapers get in on it and, of course, it's a free-for-all which has the delightful effect of utterly obscuring right and wrong whilst simultaneously polarising opinion further. 'The Left' gleefully points and shouts, "same old Tories", 'The Right' starts naming Labour millionaires and counter attacks with "cash for honours". And of course, just as one columnist argues for the status quo, more or less, another argues for public funding.

Amid the din the losers are always the same losers. The people paying for the party, whichever party they believe in; the tax payer. Income tax, national insurance, corporation and capital gains taxes. Import taxes, export taxes, road fund licence, VAT, stamp duties,  television licence, council tax... Then there's the tax you pay on income you've earned from savings and investments (if you can afford to save) from money you've already paid tax on and even when you're dead there are numerous ways the exchequer can get its hands on your dosh. If you die with no net worth then your ultimate tax rate was 100% as every penny has gone back into circulation.

We pay public servants out of taxation and then take back some of that pay... as tax. We pay tax on purchases of goods by those same departments. We tax private sector workers to pay pensions, then tax those same pensions. And the state employs extra people to collect the taxes from people paid by the state, which includes themselves. And on top of all that the treasury takes in tax from every possible source, then hands it back to the very same people as tax credits, child benefits, etc, and employs still more people to work out how much goes where. And it's all Napoleon's fault.

So, what went wrong? Why do we pay so much frigging tax? The first question, surely, has to be, if it's not for fighting Napoleon, what is it all for?

"From each according to his ability," plagiarised Marx, "to each according to his needs." A laudable sentiment, you might think, coming from a time when peasants were starving (although the soundbite was an alteration of an earlier call for rewards to be commensurate with effort). This seems to have transmuted into "You work your balls off, because you can - and we can make you - while he sits on his arse because he feels like it."

Instead of thinking "what can we spend all these taxes on?" governments should be thinking,"Is Napoleon still out there and can't we cut back a bit?" When 'need' covers such things as TV subscriptions, the classification of obesity as a disability and broadband for all, something radical has to change. And, yes, we're neatly back to population control.

Given that a large part of the tax take is spent paying people to pay it back to people who gave it in the first place. And that large government departments spend fortunes on themselves, their advisers and their advisers' advisers. And a large part of government time seems to be spent on justifying how they got the cash, where it's gone and why, isn't the solution obvious? The tax burden can reduced across the board by reducing the part of the population most responsible for wasting it.

So, a call to arms against a sea of troubles. Once more unto the breach, dear friends. Yes, my loyal subjects, in the United Dingdom there will be no need for big government. The cull begins in Westminster!

Follow me! I'll be right behind you!