Mark Wadsworth points out in my previous post that I might be a trifle long-winded, and implies that brevity can be the soul of wit: wisdom painfully contradicted byirritable former girlfriends.
James Higham is a little kinder, but still all that got me to thinking that perhaps - just perhaps - a shorter post might do the trick for a change.
Here’s Polly Toynbee, perhaps taking a break from editing Practical Villa Maintenance, to confess (stealthily in self-exculpatory prose that the unreformed Left must use) that Labour's game is up. The public finances are bust. And, without in any way expressing any responsibility for the mindset that she has spent an adult lifetime inserting into the echoing skulls of the British political class, she's really saying, ‘Labour were wrong to do what I’ve been telling them to do forever, it’s been noticed, but I’m jolly well not going to admit that, and instead will blame only the banking arm of the UK’s bricks-and-mortar Darien Venture.’
Enjoy it as she squirms.
Meantime, here’s my view of Polly’s squirming finger in the manner of the people who gave The Bridge on the River Kwai to the world and then and sold us the DVD players with which to watch it.
Iran 'frees five' UK embassy staff
Royal Mail sale 'facing delays'
Arms witness hails loyalist move
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She is former pupil of Morecambe High School on Dallam Avenue and Lancaster and Morecambe College on Morecambe Road in Lancaster, where she gained a Diploma in Business Studies. Her first campaign was supported by the Communication Workers Union, for whom she was formerly an officer. Prior to becoming an MP she was a Lancaster City Councillor and worked for the Royal Mail from 1980-97. She has been Labour Member of Parliament for Morecambe and Lunesdale since 1997.
For those of you not blessed with detailed ecological knowledge of Northwest England's colourful and Byzantine political life, the phrases Morecambe High School and Lancaster and Morecambe College and Lancaster City Councillor can best be defined by analogy. That analogy is that if Simon Cowell ran a political competition called Britain's Got Morons then Geraldine Smith might - just might - get through to the final as the Scottish virgin with werewolf eyebrows and the voice of an angel. I'm saying, is all.
By coincidence, I was visiting the lovely hypodermic-paved Lancaster and Morecambe's Salt Ayre hinterland Asda superstore on Saturday.
There was La Smith in a cute little sympathy-inducing Labour-red plaster cast loooking very, very browbeaten at her 'Meet your MP' table.
Mrs. Northwester asked me if I felt sorry for her and her kind because every time these poor sods went shopping from now on someone was bound to ask 'Are you paying for that out of expenses?'
Alistair Darling confirmed today the cost of rescuing the high street banks combined with the impact of the recession will almost double the nation's overdraft to £1.2 trillion within three years — that's £1.2 million million....The arithmetic of £1 trillion of debt is eye-watering. It is £16,700 for every man, woman and child in the country and would take 28.5 million years for someone on average London earnings to pay off.
Geraldine Smith spent £235 on picture and £185 on mirror for London flat in August 2005. Bought Bali table lamp, floor lamp and three cushions for total of £620 one month later.
I wondered whether Ms Smith had been thinking of my daughter's future prospects when she voted for all those Labour budgets and spending plans and' initiatives' and 'boosts' and 'helping the most vulnerable in society', and how she squared that with the likely consequences for Tiny Northwester and her generation: the jobs which heavily-taxed 'Big Business' will no longer create for my daughter to apply for, and the more expensive everything she will have to buy with her highly-taxed and lower wages.
I asked myself whether Ms Smith had been concerned about how much Labour's building boom bubble might hurt the economy for evermore as she voted for all those 'generous' tax credits and health service funding and all the spiffy new ministries and departmental reorganisations and community initiatives when she was browsing for mirrors and lamps and cushions.
Had selling my daughter into a life of debt slavery been worth it to keep vulnerablemeat-people-carrier mums in plasma TVs and Benson and Hedges?
Just in case you were afraid our taxes weren’t being spent on generating wealth and getting the economy back on track, this ad is from the Times. I just love that last slogan.
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Welcome to the Coprolite Hit Parade, sponsored by Gramsci & Rousseau: Evil Stupid Ideas For All Occasions and Nations, brought to you at knock-down prices just like the stock-market, and they’re practically cutting their own throats to do it for us.*
Evil.
Ranting Stan starts the ball rolling at Number Ten with a heart-warming tale of how Britain’s justice system is still a world leader in keeping innocent gangs of hooligans safe from marauding Daily-Mail reading curtain-twitching haters of homosexuals, women and Jews (but not those who do so in a nice way such as the Islamists; with poetry and tradition and God on their side). Fortunately for those who care deeply about civil liberties and the rights of young people, this evil householder and taxpayer is now dead and therefore unable to use the special Tory magnet that draws violent criminals into the houses of the citizenry so they can be persecuted by the judgemental and privileged Thatcherite ruling elite.
An equally welcome visitor to the Top Ten is Laban Tall whose ever-vigilant eyes and nimble fingers continue to discover things about our country’s everyday life which much of the multi-billion mainstream media fails to bring to our national leaders’ attention as something worth changing, or at least doing something right about with existing laws.
Here’s a tale of everyday multiculturalism and torture and the Paddington Hard Stare that our wonderful judiciary gives even to impish scallywags such as these. And here's a story he foundto thrill the thrifty souls of any Council Tax payer who fears that local government is squandering its very own money on idle foolishness rather than delivering the essential services that we all depend upon to survive. Now I don’t know if the innocent morons X and Y are either mongs, flids, spasbos or crips, but I’m guessing the torture and threats of death might have penetrated even the most fuddled of consciousnesses as something worth avoiding, but the vigilant Master of the Rolls has saved a packet of cash for the deeply caring and delightfully diverse councillors of that paragon of gentle justice, the London Borough of Hounslow. I’m sure they did their best. Oh, and know for sure that should someone remonstrate with you for nipping ahead at the Sainsbury’s tills because you only have a bottle of milk and the cash ready, then the full force of the law in all its majesty will fall upon your murderers like…a feather? Gentle spring rain? A child’s innocent laughter?
Straight in at Number Eight is newcomer to TJ.AT? Edwin Greenwood, whose Dogwash post here will inspire all fair-minded people who wish the best for the multicultural society and worry about the eyesightof people in that part of London. A point I’d like to add is that for some reason I don’t expect Sikhs to be getting onto London Transport vehicles any time soon with explosives to protest about the illegal occupation of ‘Palestine’ and the West’s rapacious desire for Middle Eastern oil.
Funny, that.
EU Referendum points out that (amid the flim-flam men of G20 and their possible Dutch auction of all our liberties to a nascent World Government and the Leftie hordes whose high-spending, state-controlling, welfare-benefit-expanding bidding they have in fact been doing for donkeys’ years but without satisfying them) the British National Party came second in a top-secret bye-election in Temple Newsam in Leeds -unbeknownst to everyone including our multi-billion pound mainstream media and our vigilant Political Class, and that they are consistently polling at 20% nationwide, though I’m guessing they don’t do so well in the Celtic Fringe. The thought that the National Front’s successor can regularly garner double figure percentages of the electorate would have been unthinkable, say; oh, I don’t know…eleven years and eleven months ago: especially to very the people who made it possible.
Tip; they still aren’t thinking about it, so it’s not really real. So that’s alright, then.
Harry’s Place (not currently involved in a mutual love-in with the BNP) gives us a clue about why this 20% might have come about, and why a certain national government [or is that a certain nuclear-armed County Council belonging to the EU? I can never remember which it is] STILL has no clue what it’s facing in political Islam.
Hit Number Five is Stan again, laying it down, voicing what many of us social conservatives would want to happen had we a time machine and a hit-squad of crack Burkean ninjas ready to go back to 1945 or so and make some alterations to the top echelons of certain national institutions…
Just outside the Top Three is Sue, the Hercules Poirot of our continent’s pathology. The little grey cells have found a vital clue – O happy day ! – a professional journalist who says it to a readership of millions about the new caste-system of the statist aristocracy and their courtiers, shamen and priests of the three main parties at the top, and the fast-breeding underclass army which supports them with ever-present threats of violence below, and the productive and law-abiding middling orders in between.
But all is not lost dear reader; far from it.
The next three bloggers brought refreshing and pleasing joy to my heart when I read them this week: joy as when unexpected springtime showers fall on a day when the womenfolk had dressed for sunshine.
Hope.
I suspect that the Top Three might be uncomfortable around one another: each having a different set of prescriptions for what might be done to deal with all this.
Despite that they clearly cherish our civilization and its customs, work within its rules and conventions, even as they wish to change it for the better by their own lights. I’m closest to Number Two but for reasons I’ll explain later I’m inspired by all three.
Number Three is Cherry Pie whose writings about our world, our culture, and our species show that she believes all of them to contain much good; good to which she draws our attention, celebrates and wishes us preserve and improve if we can. Freedom. Democracy. Gotta use and love those treasures whilst we still have some of each.
In the Number Two Spot is my fellow conservative (I think) and my fellow supporter of Christendom (I’m sure) - Rob. He bids us read more of the great Roger Scruton, and why he thinks our civilization is worth protecting, why Islam hates and fears it, and points us to two ways in which we are strong enough to protect it. All of the Top Three are involved in this struggle, and though the methods and viewpoints are as far apart as the can be and consciously stay within the civilization itself.
I’ve been slandered and libelled as a racist and fascisttoo way too frequently off and on for thirty years now, and so I give exactly the respect to the ‘anti-racist’ and ‘anti-fascist’ Left that it deserves when it tries to circumscribe what I read and whom I might believe.
Top of the Posts is Red Squirrel. Red Squirrel is a BNP member and part of that scattered 20% of our country’s electorate which holds the big three parties in utter contempt and has a very strong idea, to say the least, of how to express that contempt.
I think that political bloggers (mostly) tell the truth about themselves and their beliefs when they blog, and I certainly believe that this is so in her case. She clearly regrets that her party can’t enrol the likes of the patriotic Tamil postman Deva Kumarasiri, and for good reasons.
So I hope you will not avoid reading her post for fear that evil fascists are trying to steal your heart and open-mindedness away from conservatism or libertarianism or democratic socialism or whatever it is that you believe in, in order to drag you into some bannered, booted, and bullying future and that you’ll actually take a look because there’s a very important message to be found in the post.
Her G20post here is not so different from the rants of despair and anger from libertarians and conservatives and others about the massive foulness that our Political Class has inflicted upon the people and state of Britain, and more widely onto the whole world. I don’t go in for the BNP’s trade protectionism and the old-fashioned socialism of its health service policies and the dirigisme of its domestic economics, but just look at what she’s railing against.
She expresses rawly and pungently the pain of what our rulers have inflicted, and fear of what they plan to further inflict on the majority of us in one way or another: and the economic and judicial destruction that unconstrained, rootless and above all unhistorical liberalism has inflicted on the former land of law-abiding, tolerant, loyal and patriotic subjects.
I don’t suppose that my many words of little wisdom will ever inveigle her or her friends to become conservatives but I’ve got to say that I recognize the loss and longing for a better past.
20% is a fair chink of our nation and a large number of souls whom Messers Brown and Obama plan to hurt still worse over the coming decades. What makes Christendom worth conserving it that it is supposed to respect and cherish (even when it fails so very badly sometimes) the feelings and freedoms of all its denizens.
*Correction; they’re now contracting out the throat-cutting and reprioritizing the particular throats to be cut. Coming to a community near yours, any time now.
The government's rescue of some of Britain's biggest banks will more than double the national debt at a stroke after government statisticians decided to classify Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland as public corporations. Their liabilities – up to £1.5tn – will be added to the taxpayer's balance sheet.
The Government's stakes in Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds could add an extra £1.5 trillion to Britain's national debt, the equivalent of 100pc of gross domestic product (GDP), the Office for National Statistics said on Thursday.
Britain faces years of tax rises and huge cuts in public spending as the government battles to control public debt that could soar to £15trillion, an official report has revealed
The recession led to a £7bn fall in the amount of tax paid by individuals and businesses in January, data shows.
- the BBC.
Well, golly (oops!) gee, BBC - seven billion down. That's quite a lot of money for the government to find, isn't it?
Fortunately, this line: "It said this could add between £1tn and £1.5tn to public sector debt" is not so serious in BBC-land, and gets into the bottom paragraph of three.
I for one feel glad that the BBC has seen fit to soften the blow and indeed to try to cheer us up in these darkest days of Gordon Brown's prudent, modernising, light-touch regulating, tough choices world-saving economic policy by concentrating on those pesky revenue losses... Home.
