Gone fishin'

While the anti-clerical and anti-religious make hay about large chunks of the Catholic Church in Ireland’s complicity with child abusing priests by hiding or excusing them, I’d prefer to take a quick look today about how our very own Supreme Primate has recently been inadvertently encouraging some of God’s children to despise other of God’s children here in the balmy North West of England by hiding or excusing their crimes and misdemeanours.

Archbishop of Canterbury in plea to politicians: Don’t play race card

By Tom Moseley »

THE ARCHBISHOP of Canterbury has called on all candidates at next year’s general election “not to play the race card”.

Snap.

Archbishop Dr Rowan Williams said he had been “inspired” by his trip to Lancashire, where he met civic and religious leaders in Burnley, Blackburn and Preston.

Speaking to the Lancashire Telegraph, he insisted the Church was doing all it could to improve community relations and address far right political parties like the British National Party.

Yes. All those honour killings and separatism and, of course, the bankrupting of the State’s finances and indebting our children to the taxman and the inflationeer’s greed unto the umpteenth generation, that’s all the “far right’s” fault.

Dr Williams said Lancashire had “lots of challenges and diversity”.

Challenge. Diversity. Challenge.Diversity. Challenge.Diversity. Challenge.Diversity.Yorkshire’s just as diverse, tha knows.

You’d have to be crazy or truly evil not to see the good in all of this.

Asked about community relations, with the recent Cantle Report into Blackburn labelling it one of the most divided…

I say ‘divided’. You say ‘diverse’. Potato. Aloo.

Say, there can’t be any connection between this and all the violence, can there?

"But if it’s just about putting up the shutters it’s not going to work.”

But…Fisk. Fisk. Fisk. Blah. Blah. Blah.

Then, like a voice from Heaven, I remembered what EU Referendum had posted about recently: citing Nick Cohen, an honest Leftist of integrity and gracious good humour.

Indeed, the standard web author rarely sees the need to spell out what his or her side believes in and argue for it in the marketplace of ideas….

and …

In Britain, Guido Fawkes, a conservative blog that is so successful it has twice the readership of the New Statesman, does not argue for right-wing policies. Like most other conservative bloggers, he takes their inherent merit for granted and devotes his time to disparaging the Left. Instead of conducting a thorough debate on why its government has failed, Left-wing blogs imitate the Right and respond in kind.

(Thinks.)

Okay, so assuming that we all agree, or are prepared to stipulate for the moment, that the present A-B of C is a cultural Marxist, for whom all the complex problems and feelings involved are because “Divisions come about because of economics or a perceived sense of injustice” and who wishes to lead a hollowed-out dhimmmi church of moral relativists and the willfully blind… what then can we say that’s positive, that argues for something that conservatives can get alongside?

What would I (who am not a Christian) want to hear a confident and faithful Archbishop of Canterbury say about immigration, culture, and the Queen’s Peace?

What might a humble but determined heir of Saint Augustine; of Wulfred; of the great Thomases - Becket and Cranmer say about these matters today?

I think he’d start with something about his faith.

I believe in the words of Jesus Christ, as preached by my church down the generations:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are the meek: for they shall possess the land.

Blessed are they who mourn: for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice: for they shall have their fill.

Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the clean of heart: for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.

Blessed are they that suffer persecution for justice' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

And from ancient Leviticus we have; “Love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD,” and later we have The Great Commandment throughout the New Testament: “For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”

The Church has preached and taught these ideas for two thousand years as the core of what we believe. Whenever the Church ands the faithful have not acted according to these holy words, then we were in the wrong. When we have followed them as we were commanded, then we were at least seeking to be right.

For most every Sunday and Christmas, Lent and Easter for two thousand years the Church had based its teaching and has intended to act according to Christ’s commandment in the belief that people matter irrespective of: their usefulness to others; or their social rank; or their sex; or their relationship to those in power; or their nationality or; eventually, of their faith. Much of the morality by which British people live today is derived directly from Christian teachings.

I think that such a man might go on to say something about the history of Christianity and Christendom.

Christianity has waxed and waned in these islands of ours for 1,500 years and more, but as it survived and changed, it has grown to great power and influence over the minds of our people. The faith has had to face many grave problems and, on some occasions has been, or been present, at some of the gravest problems.

And yet, Christianity has proved to be a solution for many of life’s hardships and injustices.

The pagan religious cults that predated Christianity were in large measure a curse to their practitioners and their neighbours alike. Human and animal sacrifice; slave-raiding one’s neighbours; frequent rape and murderous oath-breaking; the belief in gods and local spirits who terrified those who dwelt amongst them; infanticide; widow-burning – all were held to be vile by the Church Fathers in these four countries of ours, and all were later suppressed by Christian princes and their servants so that some, at least, of those horrors were banished forever. Those Christian princes and their servants were not always gentle and often acted cruelly in their work, it is true. I do not excuse that, but I ask you also to think that when the Millennium Bridge’s foundations were laid down in the city of Lancaster, how many young girls were thrown into the concrete to appease the River Lune’s spirit?

And every Sunday, Christ’s message of universal love and peace was preached to the people throughout the Dark Ages.

It is also true that the Church made war on Islam during the Crusades, and though its atrocities against Muslims, Jews, and other Christians alike were inexcusable and remain so to this day, the Crusades themselves were wars against the descendants of the conquerors of formerly Christian lands. But we can choose to do things better today, as we now take Christ’s Great Commandment seriously.

Whilst the mediaeval Church and its agents often persecuted Jews as the result of parts of the gospel stories and also out of local hatreds and personal greed and the foul legend of the Blood Libel, and even as massacre and exile from England were crimes against the Jews, the Church still held that child sacrifice was wrong for Christians and some priests and bishops struggled against local recidivism. There was the notion, ever-present if often ignored by venial priests and corrupt magistrates that the lives of all the people were worth something - at least to God.

Then Christians warred on other Christians during the Reformation and the Counter Reformation, and long and terrible were the century and a half of Western Christendom’s civil wars. Brutality in larger-scale warfare than had been fought since the fall of Rome left Europe blood-soaked and exhausted, and yet the Europeans (Oh solemn pride in this European inheritance!) learned to partly separate the affairs of State from those of the Church, and in so doing took the sword from the hands of the men who should be working for peace, and left it in the hands of the nation-states, commonwealths and empires that made our modern world. These Wars of Religion also saw Jews settled quite deliberately in Britain once more; to our great profit, as a result of other, older and authentic Christian teachings about the Jews and their special place in God’s plan. And so love thy neighbour became a policy goal for those who wanted so much to live peacefully and profitably with other kinds of Christians.

But the Reformed Church and the Catholics alike warred on pagans once more as clerical orders and secular authorities and free enterprise alike exported African animists into the New World to work in its sweltering fields and awful mines and the sugar mills that were a material Hell on Earth. And every Sunday, love thy neighbour was preached to slave owners and slaves alike until some evangelical Anglicans and Quakers chose to take those words literally and then, for the first time in four thousand years and more, slavery was abolished in Europe and some of its colonies as freedom began to spring from Christian musket muzzles and Christian cannon and Christian bayonets.

Love thy neighbour has been extended; ever more refined and ever more detailed and demanding in its application, to apply to former enemies of official Christendom in these islands such as the Catholics; to factory workers and children and the uneducated and for a Middle Eastern homeland for the Jews; to supporting the equality of women eventually and after much clerical opposition and very much after the fact that others had largely achieved it (or having talked about achieving it).

And these holy words have long since been incumbent of the Christian faithful to apply to the faithful of other religions.

Leviticus 19:34 teaches us further "But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God"). …Leviticus 19:34 universalizes the edict of Leviticus 19:18 from "one of your people" to all of humankind.

This is the faith and the world it has made that I stand for.

He might say something about the world that his faith has built.

So our nation, for all its faults, and the faults of the people living in it, is a place aflame with the idea that people matter; that they count for something here and now because God has taught us that we all matter to Him.

Our morality politics and are awash with the idea that law and power should serve an essentially Christian mission; to protect the meek, to search for justice, to aim for peace. And this is how the British describe themselves when they are feeling good about themselves; the height of approval is to say of a man ‘He’s a good chap,’ or of a woman ‘She’s very kind.’ Note that this riverbed Christianity does not praise worldly success such as fame and fortune, or the cleverness of mind, or beauty, or being at the height intellectual fashion, but rather the ability to fit in, to get along, to be a neighbour.

In these lands and amongst this country’s neighbours and its former colonies we extend the courtesy that is the everyday form and manifestation of Christian neighbourliness to our visitors and those who have settled amongst us…Or at least most of us try to though we often fail too; being fallible and weak.

Love thy neighbour is what happens when our diplomats agree that prisoners of war should be treated decently, and when soldiers are trained to do so, and when they do so under great stress and after cruel provocation. It’s also what happens when our soldiers fail to do so, and when other seek to redress that failure. Love thy neighbour is real when we give to charity, or are kind to strangers we meet, and when we choose to be polite to fools and unruly children who are not related to us. Love thy neighbour underlies the deepest motives of socialism and liberalism and much of conservatism – and even libertarianism in its respect for the individual (inherited and distant as that lineage is to the rationalist mind.) Love thy neighbour underpins much of patriotism and nationalism, too, by definition, and it need not imply and hate strangers, too.

Love thy neighbour is the foundation of the peaceful way we live because it has been put into a myriad of our laws to constrain the deeds and to control wherever possible the intentions of the sociable but often selfish or parochial species that we human beings are. Freedom itself can not be tolerated by those who fail to embrace the outer lesson of love thy neighbour which is that we are all here to lead our own lives and that this matters very much to God.

It’s not that Love thy neighbour or something very much like it is unique to Christianity: modern and mediaeval Judaism, some forms of Buddhism and Hinduism, and the very earliest teachings of Islam contain similar notions. But Christianity has it at its core, and the history of this country for a millennium and a half has been coloured by that religion.

I wish that such a Primate might conclude.

The laws and customs that have grown up under centuries of imperfect striving to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ are part of an ecology that contains rightful thinking; teaching the Gospels; respecting when their message has been fulfilled; and regretting and hoping to improve when it has not.

All we ask of each other and of our neighbours old and new, no matter what they believe and Whom they worship, is to live according to those customs and laws so that they too will share in a national community that sees strangers and colleagues; children and women and foreigners; the rich and the poor alike as worthy of respect and continued life. That’s all that we should ask - though the Church offers more to those who will take it.

Christian society does not ask much of its inhabitants, and it cannot compel us to truly love our neighbours in our hearts because only God can demand that, but it is mightily entitled to insist that all people should act as if they did not hate one another.

So we demand that everyone here must live by those laws and customs and not put personal or sectarian aims above public morality.

Primordial soup kitchen

Just now, not two hours ago, I heard the economic heart of the culture wars beating in the ever-reliable BBC.

They had some professor on Radio Four's Money Box programme who explained what was clearly startling news to both the programme's presenter Paul Lewis and to the interviewer: a generic metropolitan-accented woman whose name, alas, I did not catch. The professor (presumably of economics, and sorry again because I missed his name in the excitement of the moment) revealed on air that in fact the large pay packages and especially the big bonuses that banks pay to their highest-rewarded employees come from - wait for it - you and me.
Lewis had to step back from a moment to confirm for an eagerly attentive nation that, contrary to whatever he presumed the general public had previously believed, banks pay their employees from turnover generated by the lending and borrowing of our money. Our money.
I'm not quite sure where he imagined we think these remuneration packages come from but Lewis is nothing if not a consummate professional and so he restrained his shock and, (one suspects) his grief, well enough and let the recorded interview go on.

The professor explained quite calmly and without the slightest hint of sensationalism that the banks (and this is our own British banks, dear Reader: the ones we are familiar with and through which we do business every single day and that we had hitherto regarded as models of propriety and, via their local high street branches, as household words and even as neighbours and almost as family) charge fees to the corporations for whom many of us work, and from whom many of us buy our goods and services.

Now the interviewer had - as our own ancient ancestors did in the brutally competitive evolutionary crucible of the warm Silurian seas - developed a rudimentary brain, and so she asked the professor if, since there were winners in this remarkable and clearly quite savage process, surely there must be losers too?
The professor explained gently that yes, we may indeed find our wage packets a little light because our employers consent to pay bank charges and thus they make less profit than otherwise. Such bank-using companies have to compensate their shareholders by not increasing our wages quite as much. On the other hand, the firms we buy stuff from have to increase the prices of the goods and services that they sell to us.
And they still call this country 'England.'

But the interviewer had perfectly adapted to her Left-liberal environment by growing a thick, bony coat or sheath of stupidity and immediately asked the professor if he thought that bank workers' earnings ought to be limited or (by implication) forbidden, above a certain level.
He replied that he did not think such a thing should be done by statute, but I may never know exactly how he recommended top bankers' pay to be controlled because at that stage I felt an almost divine inspiration to go off somewhere and scream for a while and I can't listen to the interview again because repeats of it are constrained by the BBC's rights restrictions.

So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen.
Our cosy and previously comforting notions about our homelands' financial life have been ripped asunder and exposed as a yawing chasm of bloodthirsty evildoing. The gallant but always keen minds of our cultural Marxist national broadcaster expressed quiet shock at discovering that the profit motive is even now reaching its deadly tentacles into the very heart of our domestic lives like some greedy archaic nautiloid feasting on trilobites and sea scorpions. These journalists can only imagine trade as a predatory zero sum game, and today they also displayed their firm conviction that the cure must, as a first resort, be regulatory.

But remember, don't have nightmares.

We now return you to our regular pogroms.


Picture from here.

BBC: best ever headline

How on earth did I miss it last year? Did I miss it at all, or are approaching old age and anger messing with my memories like Willow interfering with Tara in her sleep?

Perhaps I blogged furiously about it at the time, but supermarket budget vodka and absolutely everything that President Obama, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and the BBC have done since have wiped that spurt of fury from my recollections.

Perhaps it was because it was my birthday and I was therefore eating a curry with Mrs. Northwester and watching The Matrix or The Thirteenth Warrior or some other towering cultural item that (half) explains but (mostly) disappoints as a metaphor for our times.

Anyway, it might amuse readers to think on’t and chuckle about the BBC’s pallid cultural relativism and its moral compass stuck due Left. Are you ready for this? Are you sitting comfortably?

Then I’ll begin.

“Some Imams 'biased against women’”

Many women felt they did not get a fair hearing under Sharia law

A Muslim think tank has found some UK Imams discriminate against women when enforcing Islamic Sharia law.

Whatever next, O my lucky readers? What other discomforting situations might the Gramscian BBC disingenuously camouflage, soften, and excuse in their mission to see us all onto the slave block or into the graveyard?

Suggestions, please, as some of you have been in good inventive form this week. I’ll start us off, as it’s Friday and all.

“Some Russians ‘were a bit peckish’ under Soviet Communism.”

Many citizens of the new USSR had less to eat than the minimum recommended daily calorific amount more than once in the early years after the Bolshevik Revolution. Historical research has uncovered contemporary accounts describing the absence of some foodstuffs from Soviet-era village shops and department stores on more than one occasion.

Don't have a cow, man

Ross discusses Labour's latest genocidal focus-groupthink half-arsed non-science plan to ruin the country, and the Awful Fate it's brought upon mankind.

As usual, the brief piece cuts the mustard a treat.

Volley of the dolls

When I was a little kid my parents bought me an Action Man (TM) soldier.

Well, it was for Christmas and I probably only mentioned my wish to own the doll en passant five or six thousand times during that December. In the middle 1960’s teachers were intelligent enough to listen to what children said and to respond appropriately.

Unfortunately, teachers back then were also rather badly paid and so rather than buy one early and expensively from the well-stocked suburban local toy shop they waited until the holidays and rushed to the local big town’s department store – by which time only the German infantryman was left, which they duly bought for me as one of their under-the-tree parental presents rather than one of the Father Christmas in the stocking by the fire gifts.

A German soldier, huh? Figures, you might say knowing my politics....

Actually, I had rather wanted the American GI or the British Tommy or better yet the French, um, 1940-issue POW, or collaborator, or fast-swimming future Gaullist, as Dad was a French teacher and at that time I regarded everything French as excitingly exotic and the epitome of heroism, as indeed was Dad in my eyes. At six I thought that France was cooler than Thunderbirds.

Anyway, small mercies. The Schmeisser machine pistol that came with the boots and the helmet and the pack was smarter looking than the British Sten gun and way cooler than the American Thompson that my friends’ soldiers were equipped with, in my tiny opinion, and so I got on with playing with the model and pretended that it was a Resistant or a British spy, and killed many, many invisible real Germans. So that was okay.

The running joke amongst us war-mongering boys (slugs and snails and puppy dogs tails and all that) was that Action Man had no married quarters at all. Not even married eighths or married sixteenths. Toys don’t, of course: just a coy curve in the plastic that could have been the outline of the with-it Y-fronts. Still, it was funny.

I’ve shared the joke since then with men and women who were girls and boys of my generations. Action Man (along with his all-American big brother GI Joe) was The Private with No Parts: The Captain Without Pips: the humble British soldier who never carried a Field Marshall’s baton in his kit bag.

He’s a pop culture icon that folk of my generation recognise, and Action Man with his rifle-gripping hands, prominent cheek scar (and boot-brush hair in the expensive models) represented the essence of European and colonial martial pride and strength. Former enemies, of course, depending on which version your parents bought for you, but definitely proud inhabitants of something that I didn’t know back then was western civilisation.

Now it’s 2009 and the world’s most famous female doll is out there rooting for Islam, the suppression of women, and a children’s charity...

Boycott Burqa Barbie

What will they think of next? A be-headed doll?

That’s right. I am talking about the new Burqa Barbie doll which is now on display in Florence, Italy, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Barbie doll. As my colleague over at weaselzippers wonders: Will clean-cut Ken now come (pun intended, ‘tis mine) with four burqa’ed Barbie doll wives?

…. After all, the Burqa Barbie is being auctioned off for the Save the Children charity.

Save the Children? Surely, you must be jesting. I would like to save the children from this as well as from every other Barbie doll…

Barbies are always anatomically impossible: their feet are pre-shaped for high heels, their breasts are high, firm, and perky—like Playboy dolls or surgically enhanced Hollywood stars. Bikini Barbie.

These dolls were so retro—or so I always thought. Well, shut my mouth, those were the good old days of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll. Now, Barbie is swathed, shrouded, in a burqa; now, she is even more hopelessly retro.

A woman, a girl, in a chador, chadari, burqa, cannot see that well. You cannot hear what she is saying. She cannot hear you. A woman in a burqa can’t run, or even walk that well. She stumbles. Inside, she has to balance a baby, a shopping bag, maybe a pair of glasses perched on her nose, slipping. If it’s hot, she is sweltering. If it’s sunny, she is still deprived of sunlight and Vitamin D. The burqa violates a woman’s human rights. It poses a danger to a woman’s health, both mental and medical.

The bikini and the burqa: What ever happened to women’s freedom?

I’ll tell you. While the bikini (especially as a symbol of pornography, prostitution, and promiscuity) was nevah (I say this with my best Barbra Streisand Brooklyn accent) a symbol of freedom, the western secular state never forced any woman to wear one; nor did her family. And, if a woman refused to wear a bikini, no one flogged, stoned, or honor murdered her. These things are happening to girls and women today all over the Islamic/Islamist world. They are happening in the West as well when young Muslim girls refuse to wear a modest headscarf.

More…

Lenin boasted that the capitalists would sell the communists the rope to with which they would hang them. This is just a generation before that, but still and all one of those cases when the free market allows cultural poison into our lives.

Okay, this is for a charity, so it must be alright, and it doesn’t seem to be a production model, so no sweat. Mattel aren’t going to be encouraging little girls to think it’s okay to have dolls that spend their lives in burkas. Is it? I mean, there’re probably lots of companies making dolls for little girls who want to be neither seen nor heard, right?

Surely this is just harmless fun, just like Action Man always was, yeah?

Hey, we’ve even got a British Barbie (TM) fan that thinks’ it’s all just lovely, and thus wins The Golden Scourge, the prestigious TJ.AT? trophy that goes to the lucky winner of our Dhimmi of the Month Competition, for this glorious little bit of cultural cringe.

The company director of Laird Assessors from The Wirral, Cheshire, said: 'Bring it on Burkha Barbie, I think this is a great idea.

'I think this is really important for girls, wherever they are from they should have the opportunity to play with a Barbie that they feel represents them.

'I know Barbie was something seen as bad before as an image for girls, but in actual fact the message with Barbie for women is you can be whatever you want to be.

'I have a Barbie in a wheelchair that was only out for six weeks.'

That couldn’t possibly be Graduate Recruitment Consultant Who Had A Boyfriend Barbie.,or Swedish Girl Who Didn’t Have A Boyfriend Barbie.

In fact, I suspect it’s Teenager Who Had A Boyfriend Barbie.

Not to be confused with Majestically Stupid, Doll-Brained Bint Barbie.

Hey, kids, let’s have a competition, shall we? Just compose four shortish English sentences; including the phrases “I think,” “I think”, ”I know” and “ I have” respectively, and see just how much brass-bound, copper-bottomed, or gold-plated self-delusion and fact-free wishful thinking you can mange in 86 words or fewer.

Still, back to Action Man: the Anglo-American free man archetype with no tackle and little political leadership to tackle girl-killing psychos and their pals worldwide.

Is he such an unrealistic example of the Free world’s anti-terrorist thinking when you compare him with reality?

When a top US General whose troops have been murdered by a well-known and yet tolerated and indulged Islamist inside the military says this: "What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy," said Gen. Casey, the Army's chief of staff, "but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here.", and our own, our very own, (and why don’t we send it to Afghanistan naked) Ministry of Sitting on Defence spends scarce cash on burkas for British women soldiers – who don’t wear them at work - and also when some of our police spend a day dressed in the bloody things to snuggle up to the communidee (TM), I’m not 100% sure that poor old Action Man’s so unrealistic a figure these days.

I mean, what’s he got to lose?

Come on now, gentles. What’s the most politically incorrect doll model and brand name we can think of?

I’ll start with Gitmo Ken action figure: complete with facecloth, water jug, and Innocent Wedding Guest Malik (illustrated here prone). Batteries not included.

Resistance 2: Fall of The Man?

Well, my UK Independence Party membership pack has finally arrived, complete with its top-secret cipher key to send clandestine anti-EU information to their ultra-high-tech underground headquarters in Newton Abbot - a name heavy with the grisly redolence of clandestine fanaticism and byzantine global webs of conspiracy well-funded by sinister military-industrial conglomerates and men in cardigans named Colin.

The covering letter explained that the delay in sending me the stuff was because under the Party’s constitution new members must not be recruited during leadership elections for obvious reasons and the person who posts out the membership packs was himself standing for the post of Grand Dragon and Supreme Arch-Pencil Monitor.

I’m sure I’ll be able to contribute something to the Party’s publicity activities for next year’s General Election and have ticked several volunteer boxes on the prepaid return card:

# Stuffing envelopes.

# Canvassing both of your best friends at the bowling green clubhouse.

# Leafleting council housing estates at 5 AM the day after Benefits Thursdays.

# Phoning the barmy granny who promised to vote for us just as long as Enoch said it would be okay. (And he did too. Enoch’s the best-spoken parrot I’ve ever trained.)

I’m not so sure about some of the other suggested activities, and there’s a box of matches and a very detailed plan of some large building with the word Reichstag crossed out and Louise Weiss Building written above it in green ink.

To complicate matters, it appears that the towering glory of the European Parliament has not one but two venues so there’s also a Michelin Guide map to the Espace Léopold and the first four chapters torn from a distance-learning manual called Piloting the European Airbus for Fun and Prophet.

I’m definitely not going in for those two options - not with my back. But let’s face it, if they asked for a Vodka-Soused You Tube Heroic Last Stands Movie Montages Browser And Suicide Late-Night Amazon Cheesy War-Film DVD Shopper then by next summer my name would be as famous as…well, that chap who was entirely innocent of attacking the World Trade Centre despite what his martyrdom video, his father, his organisation and hundreds of thousands of cheering but offended moderate men, black-masked women and beardless youths dancing in the streets throughout the Middle East and Asia 11/12 September 2001 seemed to indicate, but which you never see on the BBC these days for some reason.

The lapel badge they’ve sent is the smallest party political badge I’ve ever seen in my life. I imagine that The Nazi Paedophile Kitten-Drowning Accordionist Front sports larger slogan buttons than UKIP. Still it’s quality schmutter, if tiny.

I also have a UKIP nom de guerre, which is Vangor the Vengeance-Wreaker which goes with my other aliases rather well. Of course when I’m at work or using my credit card I’m known by my true name, and when I’m describing the seedy, corrupt and criminal life of North Britain I go by North Northwester. When, on the other hand, I’m chronicling the lives and times of a galaxy-wide space civilisation I go by North N. Wester, and in the evenings and weekends and I let my hair down and relax with a few friends it’s Mistress Agonista, Queen of Pain.

Very soon I’ll have to email the local Party boss and offer my services under the name that’s written on my birth certificate.

And that’s the time I was really dreading: the point when I finally had to commit to actually doing something to persuade the residents of Castle City to come to their front doors and listen to the possibility of voting for someone other than The Statist Super-Taxing Federast Slushy Party - now available in four almost identical flavours: Mint, Raspberry, Banana and Blueberry.

All that time spent away from hearth and home and actual conservative thought and people with a discernible belief-system wisdom…to come home weary one hot Thursday evening to fall asleep exhausted and then awake to a Cameronian ‘Conservative’ victory and the knowledge that it had all been wasted and that nothing in the results would indicate to dim-bulb marginal Tory MPs that Callmedave’s Ted Heath deracinating corporatism 2.0 had been the final sellout and that they’d better damned well shape up and practice something actually resembling conservatism or else face electoral obliteration next time.

That would be the last nail in the coffin for national self-government, justice, genuine freedom and the possibility of honest administration in Britain for another generation.

But now…

David Cameron not taking election victory for granted

David Cameron has made it clear he is not taking an election victory for granted and slapped down a senior colleague for suggesting a Labour win would be better for Britain than the uncertainty of a hung parliament…. A new poll showed that Labour had cut the lead over the Conservatives to just six points, raising the prospect of no party being able to secure a majority at next year's general election.

Mr Cameron publicly disowned comments from Ken Clarke, his front bench colleague, for suggesting recently that a Labour win would be preferable to a hung parliament. The former chancellor and current shadow business secretary argued that at a time of grave economic difficulties the uncertainty it would create could be disastrous.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven.
Works fine with ‘middle aged’, too.

Bring it on.

Illustration from Ripten here.

D.I.V.O.R.C.E.

Consider a marriage.

The woman involved is unhappy and as her friend you want to give her the best possible advice.

She started seeing the man some years ago and, though not spectacular as romances go, it seemed solid enough at first and she became ever more hopeful about it. The man was charming and respectful towards the woman’s interests and needs, and though he didn’t share them all with her, he allowed her a great deal of freedom to so her own thing; such as spending time with with her family and friends and he never insisted, as some boyfriends do, that she organise her entire life wholly subordinate to his. He was kind to her children from a previous relationship and he always allowed her time and space in their shared home for those kids to play and grow and entertain their own friends.

It looked good, and they cohabited for several years happily enough while waiting to see whether something deeper would be a good idea. And it was fine, it really was. They lived their lives together quite harmoniously and with self-restraint when the inevitable disagreements about laundry and what to eat tonight and so on occurred. They never wholly merged their finances – she always kept most of her earnings and paid for clothes and toiletries and transportation and suchlike to fit her busy lifestyle while he lived within his means as well as any man can do such a thing. Only a few bills were paid in common: rent; a monthly food budget; shared utilities costs and a modest property insurance policy against fire and theft, though it was the woman’s best friend (and niece) Sam who got them a very good deal on burglar and fire alarms and he even let them share her emergency link to the police station in case of a break-in.

Eventually, they took the plunge and decided to get married. Well, she’d known him her whole life as they grew up in the same neighbourhood and though he had been an unruly youth and had, indeed, been involved along with his family in a series of lengthy property quarrels against the woman and her family, he was obviously a reformed character: well-educated and peaceable, sociable and gentle.

It all started to go wrong soon after the wedding. Right after the honeymoon the new husband suggested they set up a shared fund from their earnings to cover the regular daily and monthly household expenses, and as they were now husband and wife she readily agreed to this, hearing no alarm bells at this stage – or ignoring them in her happiness and her optimism and her relief on having no longer to share the full burden of parenthood and household management alone. He never quite accounted for where all that money went to, and often she saw very little in return for her monthly payments into their new joint account, she was still very much in love and she had a tender heart and was prepared to overlook much to keep the peace and stay as happy as she felt a new bride ought to be.

But it kept on getting worse. He never finished the tasks around their home that he promised to do. He’d take large sums out of the joint account and soon paint trays and rollers and wallpaper would appear (and wallpaper not always to the woman’s taste), but he never did a proper job and rarely completed anything. He had never undertaken his share of the household tasks from the start even when they were just living together, but back then he was trying to make a living in a new venture that was only just getting off the ground after a series of spectacular business failures, and she was a generous soul and had forgiven him much in return for his continued love and companionship. But as soon as they were married he found ever more complex and implausible reasons why he shouldn’t do the washing up or pay for the week’s food, and he insisted that she sort out the trash in a finicky way that hurt the poor woman’s back and exposed her to nasty weather and wasted time and energy she could have been spending with her children.

He started socializing and doing shady business deals with dodgy friends and relatives from the seamiest underside of town.

On one occasion she discovered to her horror that he had passed most of their holiday savings in bits and pieces to a notorious thug who lived at the far end of town: a self-destructive wastrel and wife beater with a history of brutal assaults and housebreaking and who was a menace to his friends and neighbours alike, but her husband explained that the man had hit hard times through the spite and envy of his own neighbours and that she should shut up and think of the hooligan’s poor wife and children and not be mean about quite trivial sums of money. One associate he acquired and spent time and money on was an out-and-out gangster who had recently served his parole after convictions for murder, grand theft, blackmail, demanding money with menaces, kidnap and unlawful imprisonment. He had recently come into money and was rebuilding his reputation as a person of influence about town by flashing his cash and muscling in on other peoples’ business - including resurrecting an ancient and now pointless feud with Sam.

She just couldn’t get through to him. She pleaded with him to mend his ways and act responsibly, and several times they went to counselling together and each time he would promise to reform and to take their relationship back to the way it had been in the early days, but each time it seemed that he had lied and each time his behaviour grew worse. He had long since managed to banish her children from their home – they were old enough to stand on their own feet and had children and friends of their own now, but she resented her husband’s unreasonable and harsh criticism of them and his insistence that she cut all financial ties with them. It soon came about that Christmas and birthday visits were pretty much all she was allowed to make to their houses or them to hers. Her husband began to talk about Sam being a bad influence on his wife and the whole neighbourhood and he did all that he could to estrange the two women from each other. he talked about replacing Sam’s shared anti-theft system with one of his own. He even bought part of it but never actually installed it and it sat in its box in the spare room: useless, paid for on credit, as an ever-present reminder to her that her husband might cut her off from whatever security she still had.

One day he came up with a new and extensive list of demands. He ranted for hours about their life and how if she really loved him he’d let her take ever-tighter control of their home and finances. He demanded that she put still more of her earnings into their account and insisted that he should from now on decide when and how it was spent and he pompously declared that from now on he would tell her about it open and above board – but that he and he alone would have the right to decide on the money’s fate, though he would consult her if he had time. He also came up with a list of her treasured hobbies and friendships that he wanted her to curtail or abandon altogether.

That was the last straw.

She argued furiously with him and refused to agree to anything else without getting the advice and support of her own family and the more reasonable members of his. Faced down, he agreed to this, and for a while it seemed good again – even some of his most loyal friends and supporters actually sided with her, and in the end he backed down.

The woman was much relieved and even believed for a short while that shared happiness would be theirs again…until she heard that he was rearranging her life on the sly exactly as he’d previously demanded: stopping direct debits to her favourite charities and her gym club subscription and cancelling a family holiday she’d arranged with Sam and her own children. She found out that he’d even visited the mutual friends who’d originally taken her side and he’d browbeaten and bribed them into agreeing that his demands over her life were reasonable and that she should put up with his controlling agenda now that their own misgivings had been overcome. He did concede that he’d buy her own front door key to come and go as she pleased - but he alone would keep that key and letting her use it would be at his sole discretion.

Now, if you care about this woman and want what’s good for her, you can only have two realistic choices.

You can either encourage her to stand her ground in her own home and draw some line in the sand and say "So far and no further," and hope that she can wear him down over the years, bring him around to her point of view and hope he lets her live her life with a little bit more as she wants to despite his long record of almost unbroken duplicity and backsliding and which therefore might not work... or you can advise her to cut her losses, realize that he’s never going to treat her right, get the hell out of Dodge and get a life.

Vote here for becoming a nag or a doormat.

Vote here to ditch the bastard.