Pigs in Cloverfield

   What do the words actually mean?

Spoiler alert. Today I might give away the plot of a major SFX blockbuster for those who haven’t seen it yet, and shame on you if that is so.

   So I did it right last month.

   Along came a tiny pay increment from the Bloated Bureaucracy for which I work. Having shed two whole layers of management without any loss of efficiency that I can see; as well as several non-useless lower-ranked bosses whom we do rather miss; the deletion of several layers of useless checking and all-round pointless waffle means that there’s a banana from the aforementioned BB as compensation for now having to use the BB next door’s frankly insane web servers. But a few extra quid a month - with care - can make a difference in the world before they abolish my slice of the BB a few years from now and I have to return to relocating glistening, cheese-crowned bread snacks around Castle City’s glittering nightscape…and you private sector types will all get to cheer about that while shivering around your braziers full of Carbon Trust leaflets and waiting for the wind to blow and the rotors to start turning again for a bit. 

   Thus I could plan ahead a little bit and rearrange my finances. Out came the Excel spreadsheet, with my new, higher net wage (thank you, O generous taxpayers,) at the top and then the big bills shading through middling to low bills at the bottom…just like the ordering of the chapters in the Koran but without all that Jew-killing and girl-hurting in perpetuity.

   Having been the dopey victim and collaborator in an, ahem, disordered financial regime in a previous life I’m utterly coprophobic about going overdrawn and am now a major obsessive on the subject of personal financial planning, and I now budget ever-more anally as the Cat Who Hoards the Cream… Imagine me alphabetising my classic shoe horn collection and add the Sterling symbol and decimal points. Financially, I’m now Columbus in Zombieland and a black monthly spreadsheet bottom line is Cardio for Cats.

  So… Leave a margin untouched for the inescapable price rises: motor insurance, mobile phone bill, pro-rata Child Support, and then, what? Oh. Admit that inflation is every bit as awful in the Real World as it is in all the Tory textbooks and top up Tiny Northwester’s pocket money and pass on her regular college savings for her to squander right here in the barn at Claire’s Accessories or by sending vegan food parcels to #occupyyeovil or whatever before the Pound hits Reichsmark levels, or at least the 1970s Lira. Missing the Lira yet, signore e signori?

Sign up for a middling subscription to Love Film – why buy utter dross when you can send it back and get different utter dross, and so on and so forth, repeat as necessary? Note to politicians, the Greeks had a word for this idea, I think. It’s on the tip of my tongue… No; it’s gone. Maybe it’ll come to me later.

   Ooh, a few quid freed up for a children’s hospice to add to my existing charities and the church that I support via the Joy of Direct Debits.  Not being a saint, I literally can not imagine what it is like to be a child, or the parent of that child, who is definitely going to die young. And did you know that children’s hospices are mostly privately funded? For all its mammoth funding, irreproachable public image and a million-strong army of unionised employees set to go on strike next week, the few children who definitely won’t get to spend the Christmas after next at all get barely a look-in from the National Health Service. Think of that; just about the most helpless and hopeless and harmless people in the kingdom have to rattle the tin and trust to our better instincts or the tenderness of the consciences our parents taught us to use. Imagine: raffles and doorstep collections for doomed children and their already-grieving parents – after all, the health service portion of our taxes are buying us much more important stuff than that kind of luxury, right? Five a day advice and stop smoking advice is all well and good to help problems that might possibly occur one day…but easing the last months of a definitely doomed childhood as best we can? Not so much.

   So far, so tender-hearted. But lo! What’s this? In addition to asking for an extra wedge to capitalise on its current level of support on  a par with the Lib-Dems, and on top of my annual subscription needing renewal, dear old UKIP only actually wanted a regular monthly payment to continue its Awful Work, that’s all. Well, what with the price of Alcan going through the roof and hats being styled on the roomy side this season…. Plus all those wavy Freedom Association Douglas Bader haircuts don’t come cheap, you know; appearances to the contrary.

After the three-line whip from Cast Iron Dave and the unfolding Eurogeddon, I don’t suppose there’s much traction to be had with the voters via, say, the Taxpayers’ Alliance, God bless them; not in the short time we have left as anything like a free country. So, bung a few more regional trading tokens to the ‘Kippers as a patriotic chore and hope it makes a difference. If I want freedom, I suppose there’s no getting around the fact that I ought to dig a little less shallowly into the linty heart of darkness that is the Northwester trouser pocket because our nation’s Freedom Ain’t Free. Alright then: ‘Isn’t.’ ‘Aren’t.’  Whichever. Democracy (that’s the word I was looking for!); you must pay for it yourself.

   So this is what free and responsible people do, isn’t it? They prioritise and budget and make sacrifices, large and small, for what they hold to be important and just and take their chances on choosing right and making a difference.

   Then I read this.

Political parties should get an extra £23m of taxpayers’ money to reduce reliance on “big money” donations, an independent inquiry has said.

   To say that I was upset about this would be an understatement akin to describing the 1998 US film version of Godzilla as the story of a French Polynesian tourist’s all-you-can-eat weekend for one in New York City.

   As an intellectual exercise and as an ammunition-saving alternative to avoid unseemly brushes with the court system, I thought I’d try a mind-game and see if there were any conservative reasons why the taxpayer funding of political parties might in some way be better (or at least no worse, which is also a conservative value) than the current arrangements.

   So: is there any way that a conservative or any other freedom-lover can describe this egregious idea as better than what we have right now?

   Shall we try ‘preventing radical change’ for a good, Burkean starter?

Sudden, radical change of those in power often bring both inexperienced and ignorant rulers, who may have little understanding of how the system of government works, and thus may destroy some or all of what is good (or even merely functional) in a country. Think Russian Revolution: think French Revolution; think Iranian Revolution, think Weimar Republic. Given that the proposed system is clearly designed, if it is instituted at all, in such as way as to only finance the main three nationwide parties and the establishment parties of the devolved assemblies, such a move might indeed be viewed as ‘conservative’ ; assuming that conservative means ‘achieving an absence of political change as the paramount objective.’ But what is the ‘independent’ inquiry afraid of? An incoming Revolutionary Guard pouring into Westminster on the high tide of public funding and destroying every cherished institution built up over forty years and more of liberal Britain? How could allowing a little bit more funding (if a more open system of state funding were considered) destroy the tapeworm presence of left-liberal hegemony in our major national and regional parties? Perhaps, if funded by a Texas oil millionaire with a Merchant Ivory complex or an eccentric Aussie expat who wants to bring the Heir to Blair’s Britain to its knees in order to recommission a big-budget CGI reimagining of the Tellygoons from the Old County’s State broadcaster and that an UKIP-dominated House of Commons is the only arrangement that can realise such dreams, how could even the injection of, say, fifty million pounds in unmarked Obamacredits or Bondi Bucks  overcome generations of prejudice and tribal voting in any meaningful way? Assuming that it really is ‘big money donations’ that have corrupted our political process, that is. Given our hilariously-named working class’s solidarity with Labour and that memories of Great Granddad queuing in the snow for a daily wage have allowed our last remaining labouring classes to mortgage their own and my children’s futures to pay for the Indian space programme and a 50% youth ‘higher education’ intake, I can’t see a few flag-waving chumps like me, however well financed, turning the UK into the Norris McWhirter Reich. And a ‘right-wing’ ‘Conservative’ party whose members stand still for the abolition of the Royal Navy and whose leadership helps to install a couple of Islamist governments in North Africa as the Incredible Shrinking RAF closes the door with its arse on the way out… Will people like me really restore the memorising of times tables in primary schools and reintroduce the shilling and red telephone boxes just because we were given a few hundred thousand quid to beguile the British People into making an Awful Mistake? 

Oh, and given that the Good Friday ‘process’ has worked so hard to place the sponsors and formerly active members of Fenian and Loyalist terrorist groups into permanent, shared power in Northern Ireland; carried there as they were on a river of US dollars and EU finance, and amidst opera-level political class paeans to the moderation and conciliatory behaviour of the IRA itself, isn’t fear of radical (and therefore harmful) political change just a little weak, as arguments go? 

But I don’t think even Cameron would have the conservative nous to support this move in such terms.

"All three main parties now depend on large donations from a very small number of rich individuals or organisations for the funds necessary for their survival," Sir Christopher said. "This cannot be healthy for democracy."

   But simply capping such donations and inviting the establishment parties to cut their coat according to their cloth doesn’t seem to have occurred to Sir Kit; just as one corrupt MP paying his son out of expenses for work he didn’t do led to a blanket ban on ever paying family members for parliamentary support work. They can screw their more expensive secretaries from now on, since their wives can’t work alongside them almost for peanuts.

Is it willful ignorance or actual brain damage that keeps our owners from seeing that the government itself, if not hedged around with checks and balances and established limits and overseen by representatives chosen from the populace at large; is a special interest in its own right? After all, if the government pays for scientists to do specific kinds of research, it is likely that over time much of what you will get is government science: that is, ‘science’ that recognises and supports governmental attitudes, policies and power. So the government-funded political parties, even without their existing, bone-marrow statism, will tend sooner or later to identify with and uphold the powers of government over and above the interests and wishes of the people. The people are, after all, those for whose welfare government is supposed to serve in the first place – however badly.  So this will, almost certainly, lead to greater statism within the establishment parties. Except for the SNP, of course, which doesn’t seem to have a single molecule of respect for private endeavour in its body.

   Now, as a conservative I have no inherent problems with granting privileges for certain groups; the constitutional Monarchy and hereditary Peers, the Church of England;  powers of legitimate force that the police hold that private subjects do not have. A small State broadcaster to conduct overseas propaganda for the benefit of the nation and to make some kind of impartial or honest news coverage available in addition to the bias of private and voluntary news gathering. (Hollow laughter). Public welfare for the unfortunate minority over and above what charity might provide. Tax breaks for married couples better than for those merely cohabiting.

So perhaps political parties might be entitled in some meta-constitutional way to tax revenues - even from people that don’t support them at all. In principle, that is.  

While I really do believe that some institutions are so vital to protecting us that they should operate under different laws from the private citizens, political parties and the think-tanks undertake the policy research needed in opposition and the support networks that help them get elected are supposed to be the squishy, rowdy, competitive, replaceable and above all unofficial parts of the democratic system. They exist to be influenced, joined, replaced, reformed, lobbied, split from, divided and reunited by individual people who use their work and commitment and their finance to check the policies that the leaderships adopt in opposition or office and which they then offer to the voters at election time. I can’t see it being much better if the Tories can start ignoring the City of London (which our economy needs to be prosperous and untouched by the EU more desperately than ever right now) or the Labour Party stops listening to its trade union founders (who sometimes demonstrate a clue or two about what some workers want) or even blocking the Liberal Democrats’ leaders’ ears to the ideas of people who are sometimes dedicated enthusiastic employees of the county council and local education systems, however naff. Political parties are either alliances of interest groups who have to face some kind of political supply and demand, or they become centralising tyrannies of one sort or another.

   But if a closed shop for finance is enforced via taxation (let alone the horror of knowing your taxes go directly to the parties you personally despise rather than their leaderships at least having to pay attention to someone outside the inner circles), then that squishy centre will solidify into a hard and rather nutty core of policy wonk statists who will never take risks or significantly reform institutions and processes that need it, such as paying down the National Debt or actually taking on powerful and dangerous influences such as supranational bodies and over-mighty bureaucracies. Why would they do any such things when an easy life can be had taking the public dole and running elections as beauty contests in which everyone wants world peace, to take good care of the children who are our future, and Europe. Granted, we’ve got that right now, but this new proposal (craftily suggested to be voted on after the next general election rather than obliging the parties to compete for votes by opposing it, QED) will not change that.

   And of course, the party leaders could utterly, utterly ignore their members’ unfashionable policy desires, so that’ll be the end of any idea of EU membership referendums, immigration controls, the effective punishment of criminals, public sector financial prudence, tax cuts ever, visible policeman walking around the neighbourhood,  the dilution of compulsory and capricious ‘progressive’ educational fashions… So, no conservatism, ever, nor hope for the law-abiding and aspirational working class.

   So,  as this will bring no change to the political status quo but we all get to fork out directly for the established parties I ask who will gain from all this? As the Romans said: who in fact is the hypocritical tax-loving, tax-avoiding Irish millionaire?  

   Why, it's the Socialists, the Tories, the Liberal Democrats, Sinn Fein, the Democratic Unionists and the Scottish and Welsh (but not the British) Nationalists.  

   The Political Class alone in all its hidebound and untouchable corruption will come out well from all this.

Which is what ‘Independent Inquiry’ really means.

Picture from here.

PS

Oh, and I’m a real conservative who believes that there are damn few saints left anywhere - so this UKIP queue for the gravy train surprises me not at all:

But UK Independence Party Treasurer Stuart Wheeler, who gave evidence to the inquiry, said there was a danger a "political cartel" would be created - particularly if parties like UKIP were excluded from the taxpayer-funded support.

"It is essential that parties should be defined in such a way that a party like UKIP, which obtained nearly a million votes in the last general election, and which came second, beating both Labour and the LibDems in the European election in 2009, should be included."

Tied up every which way

Orphans of Liberty discusses the suggestion from a police officer that benefits keep people away from committing crime and Peter Hitchens is discomforted by the release of a career criminal so that he can spend time with his family and - presumably – also your possessions.  

I think that the police officer is correct, kind of, even though it is also obvious that he’s missing the point by about one million of your Earth miles. I expect that for those individuals for whom starvation is the only alternative to crime when they are jobless, actually paying benefits will prevent crime of the stealing-bread-for-my-children variety. Not that that appears to have happened very much in the Great Depression: charity and family seem to have fielded that ball without a crime wave amongst the poor unemployed. They didn’t have much, but they weren’t, by all accounts, thieves.

Now the welfare state does the theft for their 21^st Century successors via taxation and benefits and I suppose it’s less violent than mugging for bread and burglary for fresh fruit and vegetables would be. It’s not seen as theft and so, according to the morality of the majority, taxation for fairly extensive welfare provision is seen as quite moral.

So logically, while it is probably true there’d be some more family-feeding thieves if basic subsistence wasn’t provided (along with free school meals, free healthcare, free schooling, -TANSTAAFL, but you know what I mean - Child Benefit and Child Tax Credit, higher levels of help with rent and Council Tax for families), those things are provided. While I don’t think that charity and self-help and family and neighbours would fail to help out to prevent actual starvation amongst the jobless instead of extensive welfare benefits, I also don’t think there’s a cat in hell’s chance that any British electorate would vote against the continuing availability of basic welfare provision any time soon – including many amongst the ‘right.’

But that’s not the problem here. The first problem is inter-generational lawlessness, illegitimacy and welfare dependence with children growing up either (and mostly) fatherless or, as in this quite rare case, with a repeat felon as their only role model.

Such children use up and yet often don’t benefit much from disproportionately high levels spending in education: child psychologists; special classroom assistants; case workers from half a dozen “agencies”, and are the bane of their classmates’ and teachers’ lives as they disrupt most or every lesson if they attend school and everyone else’s if they play truant.  Nice of this crook to stick around with those who seem to be his genetic offspring

Then they grow up [(or rather they grow large) and become half-criminal disturbers of the peace and serial welfare parents themselves. They will use up police and court resources and waste acres of paper and months of administrative time as they career clumsily and negligently through the benefits system; racking up debts to landlords and to the benefit-paying agencies as they are overpaid benefits to which they were not entitled because they actively defrauded the system of negligently failed to report changes in their circumstances that would have reduced their overall entitlement. The they create more children themselves as the marginal gain from receiving of benefits is higher as more children arrive,  and so we have to support and “raise” – read suppress – those children with all of the above, and disturbed peace and squalor and increasing levels of malnutrition and disease.

And then they go on to suck up more and more resources as hopeless and amoral physical adults who never, ever contribute anything to the society that has supported them throughout their lives.

I don’t think that the right or the libertarians have much chance of persuading MPs to reduce the high and general levels of entitlements, but I can see how they might influence them to break the cycle of crime and welfare dependency by a couple of easy measures: a three strikes and you’re out policy for crimes against property and persons (and sack the magistrate or judge who refuses to sentence accordingly)  and the limiting of child-related benefits to help with two children per mother per lifetime – see how Kylie likes the idea of sleeping around and “falling pregnant” knowing she’s going to have to foot the bill for little Chardonnay-Steffie  #3 or Tyson-Staffy #3 out of her Income Support or Jobseeker’s Allowance.

Of course, we’d have to dismantle the human rights legislation and amend the welfare and tax credits laws in the teeth of a howling Civil Service and ‘independent judiciary’ and an almost-united welfarist establishment, but if a certain political party actually thought it might gain votes, seats, and stay in government that way, then backbenchers might just go for it.

Of course, next those backbenchers would have to get that into the party manifesto and then persuade the Prime Minister to allow its enactment.

Which isn’t likely, given what this Prime Minister lets the criminals get away with because he’s on the other side in the culture wars.

See how the culture wars get everywhere?

Picture from here.

We are not worthy:official

Just in case any of you out there are of the opinion that democracy has something to do with you, The Independent puts you right.

It’s the most concise argument for an aristocracy that I’ve ever seen.

Read it and wonder, peasants.

The discerning minority

Monday, 9 May 2011

As became apparent soon after the first results came in, the referendum on the Alternative Vote would be lost by a majority of more than two to one – a thumping defeat if ever there was one. And that is a source of deep regret for this newspaper, which has consistently supported the cause of electoral reform. But the rejection was not quite universal. Of the 440 electoral districts, a select 10 – that is 2.2 per cent – voted Yes. So let's hear it for Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh Central and Glasgow Kelvin, as well as the London boroughs of Camden, Hackney, Haringey, Islington, Lambeth and Southwark. Here, the Alternative Vote convincingly carried the day.

The particular reasons why these places voted as they did will doubtless be studied long and hard by psephologists and demographers, and they will provide material for many a doctoral thesis in years to come. But it is hard to escape the impression that these 10 districts between them represent a pretty formidable concentration of brain power and diversity of all kinds. Could it be, perhaps, that we are looking here at a bold intellectual and political vanguard that may one day be vindicated? If so, Oxford, Cambridge and the rest are not unrepresentative so much as ahead of their time.

I wonder what the life expectancy of children and other innocents in those elite conurbations of is?

But don’t you merely wonder, dear reader: instead simply follow the links and revel in the joy and safety brought to ordinary peoples’ lives by the no-doubt disproportionately pro-AV pretty formidable concentration of brain power and diversity of all kinds.

Hat tip to staybryt commenting over at House of Dumb.

Picture from here.

I get around

Lefties are broadminded, well travelled, and tolerant. That’s why they hate Americans.

Now this is from a conversation with the sweetest, cutest person in the Universe who isn’t related by blood or marriage to me. For some folk, Leftism isn’t an active sin; but rather something they step in or that rains down upon them from a cloudy sky, and that they then trail after themselves across the world with their be-sandaled footsteps.

One regular salvo of the culture wars is that Americans are so parochial. Most of them don’t even have passports because they don’t travel outside the USA and so they know little, if anything, about the rest of the planet and the sophisticated un-American thinking that people of other nations therefore achieve thanks to their broad travels and their broader intellectual horizons. This is the Great Poets theory of American Imperialism Studies. You know how it goes: Byron travelled extensively throughout the Mediterranean and therefore did good things like supporting Greek nationalism and had relaxed attitudes to, for example, his sister. William Wordsworth, on the other hand, only travelled to 18th Century Germany – as uncultured a place almost as the USA – and he eventually rejected the French Revolution, so what did he know? Shakespeare travelled all the way from Stratford to London, and so produced a body of work which, even though the jury’s out on all the history and the comedies and most of the tragedies and problem plays because of their inherent sexism, racism, unsanctioned anti-Semitism and nationalism, still has something of lasting worth to say about the human condition as long as it’s produced and directed by the right people.

If you don’t travel extensively, it seems, and to the prescribed party line destinations at that, then how can you be a free spirit and free thinker at all?

Please be aware of the science of all this. The jets that fly Lefties off to Cambodia or the Serengeti, and the ships that cruise around the coastline of Classical Civilisation, and the elderly Volkswagen campers that take them to ashrams in the Yorkshire Dales or Buddhist retreats in the Highlands and Islands don’t run on aviation fuel, marine diesel and petrol at all. Instead they are fuelled by the perfectly sustainable extra virgin olive oil, tahini and patchouli; whose only waste product is a colourless, odourless and utterly senseless gas known to outsiders as smug.

On the rare occasions that Americans do travel outside their birth states (apart from flying from Hawaii to the mainland to sign up with the most corrupt city and state administration anywhere in the continental USA, which is fine), they just don’t fit in with the subtle rest of the world. Whereas Home Counties or North London (or better yet educated Edinburgh or Assembly Welsh) accents sound just lovely in mysterious little ristorantes by the Rialto Bridge just add to the cosmopolitan feel of Venice, the nasal tones of New York and the Bible-quoting drawl of the South in Saint Mark’s Square ring out as just so crass. Or they kill people.

My friend and I are both taking professional qualifications at the moment to improve our career prospects and earnings potential within Britain’s bloated public sector. Our studies differ from each other in degree and subject matter, but they have the same egregious faults in their respective syllabuses. Firstly, each course is taught and will be examined solely in English. Secondly, the each lacks what you might call compulsory cultural background studies, specifically: Ethnic Classification (with special reference to non-Aryan breeds); Scientific Socialism and Dialectical Materialism; and Koranic Studies. Most Americans, it seems, do not even know where Wales is. However, writing as someone who’s grateful to be able to do government work without raising my arm higher than the water cooler each morning, and who does not require the Cyrillic alphabet to advance in my profession, and who does not need to bang my head on the floor five times a day ™, here is a short list of the places where unwelcome Americans have been initially ignorant of the local oil-rich geography but who have, sometimes permanently, mixed themselves in with that geography for whatever weird reasons they did travel to places other than Paris (but which did, one or twice, also include Paris.)

The Kasserine Pass, Salerno, Normandy, The Ardennes, Iwo Jima (don’t you just love those cute little computer games and cheap hi-fi – so much more fun than katanas and all that Japanese bowing and scraping and raping Koreans and Chinese!), Incheon, Kapyong (obviously anticipating the days of mass-produced carbon fibre badminton racquets,) the Saigon Brent Blend fields and the gushers of the Mekong Delta, and of course, Kuwait, Baghdad, Kabul and the heavy crude deposits of Kandahar and Bora Bora.

Of course, the Americans; ignorant of the diverse peoples whom they visit and their unique and un-American ways of life, left all kinds of pollution in their wake. Parliaments and multi-party democracies and working economies fit to feed and clothe and house un-American populations from Tokyo to Paris, Bonn and Copenhagen, Rome and Brussels and - eventually - Berlin and Warsaw and Prague. Like the arrogant British they also left all kinds of holes in the ground – many with crosses littering the landscape, and all kinds of brown stains.
They also took stuff other than photographs and oil supplies home to the States with them: wives and ideas; orphans and refugees and a higher per capita mouth–to-limb ratio than prior to their travels.

Are Americans dumb, or what?

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.

And so it begins?...

The Albion Alliance.

For the few of you who might have missed it, via James, there's a new campaign in town ; one that looks as if it might have the legs, and the bottom, to overcome the political class's code of silence on the European Union (as discussed here at UE Referendum.)

It strikes me that the political class and their censor/megaphones in the media most deeply fear what they frequently misrepresent themselves to be responsive to: grass roots, man in the street, average housewife(!) concerns about the world we live in.

This is what they claim their environmental agenda is - responding to and helping to lead 'ordinary people' in struggling against The Awful Truth.
We, dear reader, are aware that Awful just isn't in it.

But if people from all walks of life and all backgrounds across our divided nation - and most especially across party lines - started hassling their MP's and PPC's, and wrote to their friends and got people to sign all over the country just for the right to be consulted on Britain's future in Europe, it might just leak into the consciousness of The Men Who Would Be King.

Tea parties. Anti-immigration protesters. Committees of Correspondence. Wild-eyed fishermen in Roman Palestine. It all starts small.

But then, so do whales.

Expect The Reaper

Didn't get much chance to blog or surf yesterday or to read anything but the headlines on the dead tree press at service station shops. One tabloid headline was something like 'a disgrace to humanity', and the Telegraph's front page article stated that Nick Griffin used his place on Question Time to 'attack Islam.'

I'd like to know how many airliners full of commuters, cars full of explosives and NHS doctors or rockets he used to attak Islam.

The BNP is largely the creation of the political class in general and the New Labour core in particular.

As Labour abandoned its working class roots for a rainbow coalition led by middle-class cultural Marxists and encouraged formerly civilised banks to prey upon the natural acquisitiveness of human beings by abandoning Mr. Major's financial controls, our rulers - with their typical sense of humour - allowed the EU to compel an open doors immigration policy on Her Majesty's County Council regarding the Continent and practised a de facto one regarding the rest of the world, to conduct endless experiments with intrusive and job-destroying legislation, to raise a worthless, workless mob over those men and women who still seek to support themeslves and feed their own families, degraded every national symbol of unity, cohesion, and pride, defamed any criticism of the project as tantamount to genocidal xenophobia, and at the same time contrived to install every centrifugal force into 'national' assemblies in all but the English heartland, and expected...what?

And as for the rest of the jokers; our PC political class, what of them?

The Tories are so enthralled to bending over in the shower for their Etonian dictator that they sat meekly by as he sacked an ex-army officer for the temerity of suggesting that some black recruits use their race as an excuse for underperformance in basic training. He elevated Baroness Warsi as his spokesperson on why British soldiers are terrorists... And as for the 'Liberal' 'Democrats....' Well, they just go along for the ride as far as I can tell.

National bankruptcy matters. Immigration matters. Nationhood matters. British customs, laws and morals matter. To people.
But for the jokers - only their collectivist, post-moral 'morality' matters.

As you sow, so shall you reap.

Previously on Zombie Chainsaw Slugfest ...

So.

Just before we get into the nitty-gritty of precisely how the main democratic parties might choose to secure and improve our lives via primary legislation, fiscal planning and public spending, and by employing diplomacy and treaty building and through both institutional reform and the enforcement of the laws, I thought it might be helpful to list, without further commentary, some of the issues which they may choose to face on our behalf by using powers and freedoms that we have lent – or that we shortly will lend – to them.

Foreign affairs.

The government of Iran will likely soon possess nuclear weapons.

Pakistan already possesses nuclear weapons and may soon be ruled by the Taliban and its alies.

The government of North Korea possesses and is testing nuclear weapons and is sending nuclear-capable rockets over other nations’ territories.

The United States of America is nearing bankruptcy.

The US Government seems to be happy with all of the above.

Most of the oil-producing countries are governed by people who hate our way of life down to the last detail and wish to change it.

The two most populous countries in the world are undergoing massive industrial revolutions and are competing for scarce resources with us.

Almost anyone, no matter how unconnected with Britain, no matter how violent their beliefs and actions, and no matter how antagonistic they are to our country’s institutions and contemptuous of the rule of law are allowed to settle here in effect permanently.

British foreign policy is largely made by the European Commission.

The European Commission believes in, and constantly and overtly pushes for greater control of member nations’ internal affairs and diplomatic relations.

The economy.

The national debt is equal to a year’s GDP.

Government borrowing is high and getting higher.

There is a massive public pension debt on top of the national debt and only half the people are making any provision for their future incomes.

The private sector and therefore the tax base are contracting.

A workless underclass is massively dependent of welfare benefits.

Most of the banks are state owned, and aren’t lending to business.

The pound is weak.

Imported goods needed for our economic growth such as fuel and raw materials are expensive.

Of the home countries, only England is paying its way – the rest are dependent on tax revenues half or more of their incomes via disproportionately large public sector employment.

Society.

The native population - and especially the middle class - is largely childless or in one-child families. This is below recoverable replacement levels for the white population.

The elderly are increasing in number and proportion to the working population and surviving largely on tax-funded income and services.

The underclass is growing in size and is growing above the law.

Immigrant families with hostile or otherwise incompatible world-views are reproducing at much higher rates than the natives.

The academy views western civilization as inimical to moral life and is openly subverting it throughout primary, secondary, and tertiary education.

Traditional morality and the family are widely seen amongst the professional classes as opposed to happiness.

A shrinking number of people is educated to a level that they know the first thing about how we are governed, how wealth is created, and how societies grow, flourish and survive.

Government.

75% and perhaps more laws which are made each year derive from the Commission of the European Union.

Many laws are never discussed or scrutinized by Parliament.

The police have abdicated most of their authority to enforce the rule of law.

The courts have abdicated much of their authority to punish criminals.

Government concerns itself with ever-greater quality of life issues.

Government seeks to concern itself with ever-greater and more intimate areas of personal life.

Government proclaims a monopoly of the use of force: a monopoly that it shares with the lawless.

That should keep them busy for a while.

That’ll be £399.99, please.

Die, Nazi cows!

It's a toss-up between the self-absorption, the triviality, and the willful ignorance of the modern Left towards matters of nationality and race as to which is the most harmful and offensive to our way of life. Here's what some of the self-serving blowhards have been doing to make our national life safer and more peaceful.

Complaints that a milk advert was racist because it showed a white bull getting "purer" by losing its black patches have been dismissed by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA).

Yes ladies and gentlemen: in a country where immigrant gangs preside over a crime wave in ourinner cities, some of whom are now being recruited by those diverse 'British citizens' who march the streets under banners saying 'Death to the Jews' and who support our soldiers' enemies, a cartoon cow is the harbinger of Holocaust Regained.

The cartoon campaign for Cravendale milk prompted 11 complaints, 10 against a television advert and another about a magazine advert.

The ASA did not uphold the complaints, saying viewers were unlikely to see the adverts as racist so widespread serious offence was unlikely.

The ruling said: "The cows were intended as a visual metaphor for milk which underwent extra filtration processes.

"We considered viewers were likely to understand that the black and white bulls in the ads were intended as a metaphor for milk and were unlikely to interpret the visual representations of the purification process as being racist.

During the television advert an animated bull was shown visiting a milk bar. It appeared angry and demanded milk, drinking every bottle. It was then sent down a chute to the Cravendale purity room were its black patches were gradually removed and it passed signs saying "pure" and "purer".

The magazine advert showed a picture of a black and white cow next to the phrase "fresh milk". A sieve was shown below and underneath that was a white cow, alongside the text "only purer".

Additional text below said: "Cravendale is purified to remove the bacteria that turns milk sour. So you get a clean, fresh tasting milk."

Oh my God! Scramble RAF Bomber Command, call out the Platoon of Guards and signal both vessels of the mighty Royal Navy to get steam up against the imminent threat of Operation Sea Lion.

Now this is no longer tactical.
This isn't just the Far Left creating a febrile atmosphere in which any expression of doubt about the matchless loveliness of immigration is beyond the pale, and so only the Left gets to discuss nationality in the hopes of latter-day Weimar-style rioting between them and the National Front. This isn't just the Labour Party in the 1960s using memories of Hitler and Mosley to intimidate the Conservatives from discussing Pakistan and New Commonwealth settlement here. This is the culture, stupid.
This is the third generation since Enoch Powell's expulsion from the Shadow Cabinet and it's now standard operating practise for some of the Left - anyone in the Left - to keep the pot boiling. It's pretty much all they can do now that their economics have been shot to hell by decades of comparisons between the centrally-controlled and free economies.

But this instinct is dangerous because those Islamists who preach jihad; their gangs of converts; and the immigrant criminal gangs aren't going to go away. They are going to go on becoming more numerous and more powerful and they will continue to be protected by the kind of reflex action to witch-hunt 'racism' wherever it might be concocted - no matter how absurdly. People are already dying but it's all but illegal to speak of it.

Anti-racism has tried to infect even the 'voluntary sector' such as the Advertising Standards Agency - whose 'voluntary' financing from advertising sales prevents the ever-more invasive State from taking much closer and ever more prescriptive control of the industry. So much so that someone thought it worthwhile to use the ASA to trump up the semblance of white supremacism at Arla Foods of Leeds.

Think of the huge pretension that this represents. The massive self-centredness of people who think it's acceptable to counterfeit rage at (or who are deluded enough to actually believe in the existence of) Nazi dairymen bespeaks the triviality and obsession of large parts of this country. It's just fine and dandy to use up all those resources and to divert time from an organization that is intended to punish manufacturers who say that cigarettes contain vitamins or that their aftershave attracts women to everyone who wears it in order to fight off non-existent Nazi hordes.

What point is there any more in standing by a political class (including the 'Conservatives') which goes along with this enthusiastically; that lets the race-hustlers and the victim-herds rule over us: who stop our mouths with curses and slanders, and who prevent the issues that might save the lives of people of all races from ever being discussed?

And many people have got the point.
We are mostly sober, decent(-ish in my case), law-abiding people who mean no harm to anyone. Our hearts aren't full of hatred for 'The Other', nor dreams of conquest, nor spiffy uniforms, nor shattered glass and beer-house brawling. We fear for our children's futures and for our own safety and yet as we watch our legislators troughing on the very best in life that we taxpayers can provide whilst we walk our own streets fearfully in some places (if at all) we know that any discussion, any mention of nationality and immigration will be met from all quarters with slanders and libels and abuse.

Tell me all you of the political-class of MPs and Westminster, Whitehall and Brussels insiders, if you're going to accuse any of racism at the first breath of criticism of your rainbow land, then why shouldn't we be hung for a Nazi cow as for a racist lamb?

And why shouldn't we hang you out to dry come June on the rope that we paid for but which you stole?


Illustration from The Sun.