Another really good reason to say f*ck

Dumb Jon notices the Tory Party bounding like a graceful gazelle from kamikaze attacks on the British nation to hara-kiri as it prepares to eat its own nostril contents on the World Wide Watch.

Can we perhaps step away from the cultural Marxism - ‘cultural Marzxism?’ - of the gay-marriage, Really Believe in Global Warming, Hug-a-Hoodie because the stocks are so uncool maaan Tory Party for a moment? You can’t laugh all day long because someone might notice and cancel your takeaway delivery order of twenty-six 14” thick crust pizzas with everything….

You’ve got to ask yourself just exactly what sort of political i.e. partisan, strategic, public relations reasoning goes on at the party’s highest levels behind this internet-age equivalent of undressing upstairs at night with the lights on and the curtains open.

In what way do the Powder Blues Who Lose imagine that every aspect (real, imagined, speculative, alternative reality and visionary) of this needless persecution will not somehow be plastered across the BBC, the Twitter sphere, the Guardian, the BBC web pages for UK (and for politics), Facebook, the BBC London pages, Channel Four and the BBC gardening and weather sites from now to Election Day?

There will likely be special flowcharts and commentary showing how both Sarah Palin and the IDF are helping the Toriez inflict their very own Night Of The Long Knives on the shrinking democratic UK Right’s equivalent of a gentle giant on his way home from the cigar store: all full of pizza and chocolate and light-heartedly bantering with a Klan cop and surrendering by light-heartedly running towards him in a friendly and non-threatening manner?

Someone might devise a specialist search engine: 

www.google.dividedtories.org.uk

But a party that conducts its business in secret and far, far away from its membership and the electors probably reasons that as MacMillan won’t even publish a hardback about l’Affaire Bow Group, who’ll ever know? 

Jokes about spices, gold and precious gems

…that I bring to Jerusalem to test the wisdom of Solomon with hard questions.

David Cameron insisted “we are all Thatcherites now.”

Which means I must be…

Picture from here.

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."

Rejoice. Rejoice.

It’s not despair you understand; nor even the twisted hope that somewhere, someone is assembling a high-velocity leadership challenge for the Tory Party, because I truly do believe in the rule of law.

No. It’s just that sometimes, even when things are bleakest, you just have to speak or write the truth.

This is from Conservative Home which, from the comments you get on the site on those posts where commenting is actually enabled, seems to be the Belgium of the British ‘Right’ – in all senses of the word ‘Belgium.’

Cameron promises to invite other main party leaders into war cabinet if he becomes Prime Minister

COMMENT: "David Cameron's first speech of the election year did not contain much new but was interesting for its emphasis on bipartisanship and the commitment to invite other party leaders into the war cabinet of any Cameron administration:

"I can announce today that if we win this year's election, I will invite leaders of the main opposition parties to attend the war cabinet on a regular basis so they can offer their advice and insights. When a nation is at war, it needs to pull together. I am determined that with a Conservative government, it will."

This will appeal to the great many swing voters who like the idea of parties working together in the national interest."

I can actually see great advantages in this.

It would be a good thing to have all the main parliamentary parties on board; sharing their knowledge and opinions and helping to make policy in the national interest, and thus to command greater crossbench support in both Commons and Lords when hard and controversial measures need to be made for common defence against the totalitarian threats that face us.

The Liberal and Labour Parties served well alongside the Conservative Majority in the Second World War and I would have little fear that if the leaders of those parties were intimately involved in the struggle against our jihadist attackers our county would be well led indeed.

But given that the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats of the Third Millennium are stuffed to the gills with pacifists, veterans of the British movement to promote Soviet hegemony called CND and with people who actively hate western civilisation and who wish to destroy it from within, I feel that David Cameron had better bring those parties into his War Cabinet who have no history of approving or excusing communist, Fenian, or jihadist terrorism or active involvement with nationwide organised subversion intended to break up the Union and hand the parts over to various foreign powers. This would be the UK Independence Party, the Ulster Unionists and most of the BNP’s national membership, and I can foresee some problems with that.

Oh, and if you seek popularity through targetting ‘swing voters,’ how about reintroducing hanging for murderers: particularly of child murderers and cop killers?

Highglights not verbatim of Mr Cameron's speech:

11.42am: (Big announcement): Cameron says that he will establish a National Security Council on day one of a Tory government and will invite the leaders of the other two main parties to sit in the war cabinet on a regular basis when the country is in conflict.

11.39am: You can trust Conservatives to deliver on promises because…

Where would we be without the gift of laughter?

…you can see we have changed ourselves.

And there you have it. Bulls eye. “Vote for us because we aren’t us.” We’re not Maggie Thatcher. Like, ew! We’re a little bit John Major but not at all Winston Churchill who wasn’t kind to all the foreigners. We’re certainly not Benjamin Disraeli who feared the Two Nations of Prosperous and Poor: forever opposed and unconnected, because if we had one iota of Dizzy’s nous, we’d realize that Britain is now Three Nations: the welfare predators; their Big State apparatchiks that herd them and feed on them, and the producers on whom they all graze.

We have opened up candidate selection and have many more women and candidates from ethnic minorities.

We are just the same as politically correct social engineering New Labour but without the proletarian charm of Tony Blair and Jack Straw.

Not only that, candidates are undertaking social action projects in their constituencies.

Civic pride, charities, voluntary work leadership – all good, old, conservative things. I can’t help feeling that social action projects involve rather a lot more national taxpayers’ money and public employees than the real thing. I could be wrong, but I don’t think so.

Throughout the last four years we've worked with other parties - with Labour on education reform…

Which is like working with Sinn Fein on local government reform, except that it’s already been done.

…and the Liberal Democrats on fairness for the Gurkhas.

And in WW2 and the Falklands you’ve found a couple British wars that all but the bicycle-eating, allotment-tending, alpaca-wearing wooden bead Buddhists of the Lib Dems' Far Left can admit were a bit okay.

Well done, Mister Cameron: you’ve discovered the Liberal Democrats’ Sensible Neurone.

We have called for election debates whatever our opinion poll position because they are the right thing for democracy.

We will undertake the most dramatic decentralisation of power in Britain for a generation.

Yes – national power will head straight outwards to Brussels and Strasbourg on the one hand and inwards to the fake charities and quangos that concoct and administer funds for social action projects on the other. I’m thrilled. Really.

11.37am: We will also rebuild society.

Does anything in the experience of the last 65 years of hands-on, top-down, centralized social engineering tell them that it is possible and wise to ‘build’ society? Have these bozos ever heard of Michael Oakshott, Edmund Burke, Friedrich Hayek or Roger Scruton? Hasn’t George ‘Two Brains Osborne’, the intellectual powerhouse behind the New Tory Party discovered that even some top government scientists now believe social engineering is a whole lot more dangerous in the hands of national government than just plain letting people get on with it ever was?

I mean, it’s not like the Right is short of several generations’ worth of brilliant, detailed, and thoroughly peer-reviewed studies (of the sort readable even by top pols) explaining with handy footnotes and pictures just exactly how the whole notion of ‘building society’ sucks like a top-of-the-range-Dyson in a pillow fight?

Comprehensive education. Prison reform. Council housing tower blocks. Town planning. The Probation Service. Income Support. Child-related benefits. Prison reform. The permissive society. Child-centered education. Criminal court sentencing reform. Local government reorganization. ‘European’ ‘Legislation.’

Are there any bells ringing in the (you should excuse the expression) minds at Tory HQ? Or are all the active brains outside the back locked in the, um, powerhouse?

We are progressive conservatives who will protect NHS funding.

This actually isn’t controversial at all.

Given that the only religion common to the British is their belief in the NHS despite anything and everything that shows it to be a disease-raddled, incompetent, murderous hell-hole of corruption and excessive costs, Mister Cameron’s merely admitting here that his cabinet will be subject to the law of gravity, if not the ancient laws of the land.

Of course, when the money runs out for everything else and he’s still trying to ‘fully fund’ the Stalinist Beveridge project, the stretcher bearers won’t be carrying him to an NHS hospital.

Through a pupil premium we'll get extra resources to poor children.

Local Education Authorities, in all their treasonous Gramscian power, will still exist and will therefore control teacher recruitment, ‘training,’ indoctrination and employment from top to bottom.

So it won’t work if the only choices for schoolchildren and their parents are A) Left-wing indoctrinated school A; or B) Left-wing indoctrinated school B; or C) Left-wing indoctrinated school C; or D) go ‘private’ by attending direct fee-paying schools (if any) or via the housing market which represents the true mechanism of parental schools choice, or E) help build a theocratic element into education via attendance at ‘faith schools.’.

Or does pupil premium refer to some new source of kebab meat or ocular treatment?

Through welfare reform we'll give people independence and dignity.

Well, they could sack me I suppose, so that would be one welfare ‘crat down and a few hundred thousand to go, but if the Tories don’t stop the fountainhead at it source: the pudendas of tax-supported third, fourth, fifth and more-time mothers, they won’t save substantial sums of money.

We'll strengthen families.

How? By imprisoning ‘wife’ beaters for less than the twentieth offence and by not allowing the accusers to with draw their allegations because they ‘forgive’ the tattooed scum who smack the dozy cows and their kids around? By insisting on ‘Asian’ girls going to mainstream British non-Muslim schools all the way to the age of 16 and by pursuing them with the force of law when they disappear? By tying any (limited) child-related benefits to the mother and by making child support work instead of abolishing the Child Support Agency?

We'll increase Britain's commitment to the poorest people of the world.

If that means the ‘Gazans’ I’d rather the Tory leadership fellated their own loaded shotguns right now, thank you so very much. But you never know; it might be female black Africans, the Indian Untouchables, and some Australian Aborigines that they mean, though I suspect there are other agencies than the UK taxpayer who ought to be helping such folk out.

11.34am: Conservatives have been honest about the need to cut spending but much more than that we need a complete overhaul of the economy. There'll be a cut in the main corporation tax, a new high speed rail network

To be paid for, now doubt, out of the profits made from discovering cheap, clean, renewable and sustainable power sources such as: unicorn droppings; the cornucopia; and Mister Crazy McCrazy’s perpetual motion battery – you know, the one he’s invented and that he tells us about at work to disguise his utter unwillingness to get a paid job rather than live on benefits?

...and 100,000 more apprenticeships as we build a new dynamic and enterprising economy.

Does the phrase ‘unfunded pensions crisis’ mean anything to these jokers? The true level of national debt?

11.33am: Britain can't go on with a divided government. The campaign to win the General Election starts today. On Monday we'll publish first chapter of our manifesto.

Entitled ‘What I did on my holidays,’ no doubt.

They are so trivial, peripheral, and ignorant. All this will do is to confirm the New Labour agenda and ‘achievements’ as permanent and desirable.

Even treating these clowns an anti-Labour protest vote will be worse than wasted. God help us all.

Picture from here.

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.

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.