Tacking

Wonderful stuff, Blu-Tack.

It’s cheap and easy to use and to recognize.

It can be used to hold up all manner of light burdens such as Che Guevara posters, or the one with the tennis-player scratching her bottom, or Snoopy, or Nuclear Power: No Thanks.

It can’t hold up a wall, though

It’s easy to tear into small bits and to roll into little balls for each of its thousand household uses.

Best of all, it’s malleable. Anyone can shape it, and anyone – anyone at all - can mould it and use it for their own purposes. It has no fixed inner structure: neither coherence nor any skeleton nor any motivating force that makes it anything other than a passive object to be warped and torn and used by any passer-by that fancies a go.

And the more it is used in this way, bit by bit more of it becomes dirty with the grime and fluff that it comes into contact with, and so it becomes unattractive to look at and smell and bits and pieces of it go missing.
Blu-Tack is just a thing.

Away from the metaphors, you get this, using Blu-Tack.

New poll suggests hung Parliament

Britain could be on course for a hung parliament after the next general election, a survey has suggested.

The Tories' advantage over Labour has narrowed to 10 points over the past month, research by ComRes for The Independent found. The party was down 3% on 37%, with Labour unchanged on 27% and the Lib Dems up two on 20%.

If the result was reflected at the ballot box, it would leave David Cameron six seats short of an overall majority. The Conservatives would have 320 seats, Labour 240, the Liberal Democrats 58 and other parties 14, the polling company calculated.

The research also suggested that people were becoming more positive about the prospects for UK plc.

Some 56% said they were optimistic about the economy generally, compared to 41% who were pessimistic.

Nearly two-thirds said they would spend about the same on this Christmas as last year, while 30% were planning on spending less and 8% more than 12 months ago.

Cameroonianism is reaping the whirlwind at last, I hope…Or better yet, as metaphors go, it's in the doldrums.

He has no wind in his sails because he has no fixed cargo or destination other than some vague idea of office, plus a surly and press-ganged crew with few enough convinced loyalists, and he’s been tacking across whatever wind comes his way – greenery, broken Britain, let freedom reign, a gold-plated guarantee of a referendum on Lisbon, since his elevation to leadership.

Despite the fact that New Labour are the most corrupt and downright treasonous government since the Stuarts, and indeed the Catholic Tudors; despite the fact that they have bankrupted the public finances and taken on armies of like-minded professional busybodies and put the country in hock for generations; despite the fact that there is now a pensions deficit in this country of gigantic proportions and it is not even being mentioned, let alone being dealt with; despite the fact that Britain is now clearly a province of a European empire which has no interest in the way we are governed for our own sakes; despite all that, David Cameron still only has a ten percent lead?

‘Lead’ is the first syllable of ‘leadership’, and yet…

Yes, I can see that those people mentioned above who are going to spend a packet this year are chronically dim. Their ancestors in the Garden of Eden must have avoided the Serpent at The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil but waited instead until the Bluebottle tempted their umpty-great grandmother into trying the Fruit of the Tree of Ignorance of Cause and Effect or Anything At All.

But it is a Tory leader’s job to educate the stupid and the greedy into realizing that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Mrs Thatcher did it all the time, and she won three staggeringly good election victories. But Mister Cameron hasn’t done that at all. He went along with the happy daze building boom and merely promised to decorate it better than New Labour would, once Barrett’s had moved the proud new mortgage-holders in.

Some of the people who are seriously worried about the Himalayan mountain range of debt that will chain our children forever to the banks and the inflationeer’s looting ways and to lower job prospects won’t trust the Tories with Cameron in charge.

And, yes, I know all too well that with outfits like the BBC singing Brown’s praises and bigging up the inflation-led stock market boom that just fell off the back of a camel, it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, and folk will want to be taken in by it….

But if Cameron had been preaching austerity for a couple of years and had already been on board the recession train, then he wouldn’t have had to jump on the doom and gloom bandwagon last autumn when it went south and therefore wouldn’t have looked exactly like the spineless, unprincipled opportunist that he really is. And now he’d have the rep of an economic genius for spotting what the rest of the political class were spending their efforts disguising (Britain’s stony-brokedom) and be able to say: ‘Double dip, my arse. We’re bust and it’s going to take a lot more than a few tax tweaks and an austerity budget or two sacking one Gramscian bureaucrat in a thousand to save us from the bailiffs.’

And some more ordinary folk would have believed him, and that 37% might have been a bit fatter.

And then there’s Greenery.

Cameron decided to become the Inedible Bulk and save the planet and pick up a million watery-eyed bicycling Liberal Democrat votes too. And though I can imagine a fair few working-class folk wanting a Tory Home Secretary to put the boot in on neighbourhood ‘youths’ and cruising gangs of diverse door-to-door teenager groomers, I doubt very much that your average Guardian reader is going to look up from his/her/Jordan’s and think to itself; ‘You know, the thing we need more of round here is the leader of the party of industry and the City of London promising to save the polar bears. I’ll just forget my allegiance to all things Leftie and follow the eggshell-blue silver-spoon boy to the Age of Aquarius.’ Be they real greens or watermelons, making nice to the lemmings will strand you at the bottom of a cliff, and not in a nice early 1960’s Melvyn Hayes or Una Stubbs sort of way.

And as for the industrialists and simple people who don’t want their businesses raping to hell and gone by e-coloon legislation, bureaucracy, and a wide variety if breathing out taxes? Greenery’s just a way to hurt the medium-sized donors and a fair share of the door knockers and envelope stuffers.

And by not arguing against the trade-killing anti-civilisation maniacs who own Greenery, he’s allowed hundred of thousands more people to think it might be right after all, so why not vote for people who really mean it? Culture wars show casualties in numbers - even if the metropolitan elite miss them because they’re already halfway there. Acting on the conviction that people matter more than mice and marshlands might have fattened up that 37% a bit.

Oh, and the Tory Party that’s not the party of the nation state is nothing, and I’d say right now that that 37% is a big fat nothing to write home about, and so it exactly matches the hollow shell that once held Disraeli and Wellington, Churchill and Thatcher.

It’s not just that he’s losing us in scores and hundreds of thousands to UKIP over Lisbon, though that’s bad enough and the topmost layer of internationalist bureaucratic government so far; but watch for the organisation that the UN will put over us for cap-and-trade…

It’s because of his clueless unawareness that the things that matter to actual Tories…actually matter to Tories.

We like nationhood and small, effective government. We care about tradition and not having our heads stove in or our daughters assaulted by law-immune gangs. We like to buy stuff that some people disapprove of that we‘ve always been allowed to and we’d love to live in a country that practiced its traditions and spoke of its history with pride in its own language. We’d like to feel that our soldiers are fighting in the war that our future government understands. Tories fear a disjointed nuclear world and we despise the rolling-over non-defence acceptance of three rather than four nuclear submarines for the Royal Navy. Military cuts as a whole make no sense at all in these dangerous times and we think that Cameron sees the war and the Cenotaph as a photo-opportunity. We will not exchange our deepest beliefs for focus-group talking points and our deepest feelings for fashionable issues.

‘To conserve’ is a verb – it’s something you have to do. It’s not something you merely say.

It’s certainly not a thing – but you can surely count it, and especially when it goes away.

Picture from here.