the little people: ourselves alone

House of Lords and The Queen Rubber Stamp Law Stopping No Deal Brexit.

For those of you at home still keeping score this means that the last constitutional protection that a free British national theoretically had against an out of control ruling class (the Remainer Commons and a House of Lords which consists of Tony’s cronies and a generation of Life Peers recruited straight from our incompetent technocratic ruling class and the permanent state) has failed. In theory the Monarch, sovereign in Parliament, could have refused the Assent to this bill which makes it illegal for Britain to leave the EU as we voted by a substantial majority in 2016 to do.

The parliament that offered us the chance to vote in the referendum, which then stood and was re-elected mostly on manifestos promising to honour our decision to leave has now passed a law sponsored by an MP who said she would never block Brexit that says that it’s now illegal for the UK in fact to leave. We’d need a whole new Act of Parliament to replace that law: an act no imaginable Houses of Commons and Lords would ever pass. When the ultimate constitutional backstop (refusing Assent) that was intended to protect the little people against an over-mighty ruling class could have been used and perhaps followed by a prorogation of Parliament until after Easter that would have allowed the clock to run out and helped us leave without further legislation, Elizabeth Windsor folded like a cheap suit. 

Leviathan shrugged.

15 minutes is just 1/20^th of the time it took to arrest Tommy Robinson, charge and try him without his own choice of legal representation, and to convict and imprison him at the other end of the country far from his home and family for a non-crime that involved no violence, no property damage and no public disclosure of any part of an ongoing trial.

And baby Alfie Evans is still dead for his own good at the insistence of the medical branch of the same ruling class.

I’ll say this for them: for all of their out of touchness with the common people, for all their tin ears about what we care about and unconcern for our welfare and wishes, if our incompetent new politically correct ruling class wants you crushed, you’ll be crushed pretty damn quick.
So how can we ever hope to be governed as we wish to be? Our rulers have used everything they have, inside and outside the Constitution to prevent that.

We’re on our own.    

Illustration from here.

Have a banana

As it is only in banana republics and outright tyrannies where the ruling class ignores the results of elections, perhaps in this dying week of British democracy readers would like to greet their Remainiac correspondents with that most iconic of European images: the banana, with suitable wording.

Perhaps we can meme the dishonourable bastards* into shame, unlikely as it may seem.

Here.

I 'll start it off if you like.

“I pledge allegiance to the Banana of Britain and to the Republic for which it stands, four nations under Germany, invisible, with serfdom and injustice for all.”

Pass it on.

* I'm not referring to the honest defeated who must be horrified at their campaign leadership's openly fascist campaign to flush away what's left of our democracy. You have to pity those good people. Banana bomb combatants only, please.

Picture from here.

And what have we done?...

Learned the truth, sad to say.

Time for the red pill?

Let’s be immigrants. No.  Seriously.

And while the Independent and the Daily Mail battle it out in that latter case of enrichment as to whether the particular hominid that raped a ten-year-old in a swimming pool had his sentence dropped to a measly four years or raised to a horrific seven years in prison (instead of auditing his breathing apparatus with extreme prejudice) , we might ponder as to why our ruling class even allows this thing to happen at all.

I mean, looking at that third link what kind of ruling class mind-set lets a supposedly Christian charity be involved in this? :

‘In January, one month after the attack was reported, the government introduced a controversial cap on refugees to be allowed into the country...It set the bar at 37,500, fewer than half the number who arrived in 2015. It avoids a potential confrontation with the wider EU. Brussels had warned that a limit on numbers of asylum seekers would break the bloc’s rules, as well as pandering to the rise of the far-right. "Breaking EU law openly would have been a huge embarrassment for Austria," said a spokesman for Austria's Catholic Caritas charity, which works with refugees and asylum seekers.'   

We’ve learned that we Just.  Don’t.  Matter.

Not that we should be surprised. The same ruling class that already takes or plans to take an artisanal or tailor-made attitude to criminal sentencing is scarcely going to care overmuch about what the initials of EU stand for. 
Everyone's Union? Everywhere Union? 

Still, it’s good to know that Black Lives Matter’s history of peaceful protest and thoughtful rhetoric did not in any way contribute to the Trump-hating humourous asides made by the lightly sentenced torturing unfortunates that were found kind of guilty, yeah? I mean, you can call Trump a white supremacist and a Klansman all day and every day and be in no way responsible for the Trump-related torture of a white person. You just can't.

But complain rudely about Muslim immigration and you can lose it all and fair enough.

What can you expect from rulers determined to elevate democracy above populism? Above populism? Above populism? Above populism?

So what’s the Christmas Eve takeaway from all this?

Your rulers hate you and don’t mind much when you die and they will never apologise when they get you killed.

Your daughters and sons can be raped and be unavenged. You can be murdered and your killers are the real victims and you and your ancestors are to blame and your rulers will import more of the same forever and ever, world without end. You will be colonised from abroad and there is nothing your rulers will do to stop it and they will punish you if you complain or resist. And don’t even think about voting your way out. It’s. Not. Democracy. When. You. Do. It. 

Can you seriously want to conserve all this? Pickle it in aspic? Preserve it in amber?

Time to take the red pill.

Merry Christmas and a happy 2018. (Laughter, off)

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."

The snake’s belly and the ‘hood.

How low have we got?

Try the slopes of moral hell.

Mrs. NW and I once gave up a whole evening ( quite unasked by her) standing Adele free beers and shoulders to cry on; listening to her family woes and conspiracy theories about the bosses closing down most of the pubs to spite the workers after I’d found her muddy and bewildered… but also quite successfully talking Miroslaw at the corner shop out of a quarter bottle of handbag gin on credit.

I had lived on the same street as Adele and her then partner Ryan and knew them back before I met Mrs. Northwester. Mrs. Northwester knew her via friends of friends. Castle City is a small town. CS Lewis would recognize what Mrs. Northwester and I did.  We were just being neighbourly. Not post code neighbourly you understand; but New Testament neighbourly. Or Great Rift Valley neighbourly. Take your pick.

People are often willing to be sociable - if not brainwashed out of it from birth or at adolescence - and many of us like to help nearby folk and even some not-too-strange strangers, freely, at personal cost in time and treasure and without governmental assistance or mandate. We do so with instincts descended from the ancient teamwork with which our ancestors survived the march out of Olduvai Gorge and through numerous Ice Ages with nothing but cutlery, sticks and cooperation to help them. 

And still Adele wants it all for free.

Societies – particularly those with large measures of freedom and government by consent - require a wide scale predisposition from the highest to the lowest to follow the rules and treat each other right, and we are long past the point where we can rely on anything like that.

CS Lewis wrote (and I can’t find the quotations concerned right now so I’ll paraphrase) about how his Left-wing intellectual contemporaries -I think he was referring to Socialist Oxford dons and others of the 1940s and 1950’s Wise and Good - that whatever collectivist and anti-property views they taught and proselytized as being for the good of society, they would travel hundreds of miles to return a borrowed shilling.

I think I remember he also wrote something to the effect that no matter how much deep suffering they were prepared to inflict in theory in the name of Equality, etc, and no matter how much mass state violence they were prepared to tolerate in foreign policy support for the Soviet world, they themselves would act with the nicest concern for their fellow men if they knew them individually. Forced collectivization and megadeath famines under Stalin? A necessary fuelling station on the railway to The New Millennium. Let an undergraduate drink alone over the Easter vacations? Unthinkable! Sit over here old chap and tell me how your essay on The Aenead is coming along. Das Kapital and Hegel are all very well in the real world of men and machines and continents, but it was Sunday School morality and nursery-taught good manners and it’s just not done, old boy that they practised in their own neighbourhoods. That was Generation Number One. The Greatest Generation. They beat Hitler. No complaints.

But.

I’m sure there’s still a lot of this about: think of your Leftie friends, relatives and colleagues who are still good for a tenner loan on a bad ATM day or a lift to the railway station or all the way home when you’ve missed the last bus. 

But hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance are not enough to keep a society healthy and free.

My hometown, “Castle City,” has a village institute. Actually, it’s an urban institute donated about the turn of the century by one of the local capitalist exploiters/millionaire philanthropist/smart boy who got lucky and rich in business and inadvertently gave Castle County’s poor folk something to do for a living other than following the south end of a northbound plough horse.

It’s been extensively done up with ‘public funds’ from wherever, ie you, and there’s a bar with good beer and food and wifi, and a small cinema where we the Skyless people can watch major football matches over a pint without the elsewhere inevitable Walkabout exchange beginning “What the f*ck are YOU looking at?” They also put on small jazz combos and Zumba lessons and stuff for the children of both the potless manual workers and the Guardianistas. Interesting stuff happens that otherwise might not happen under the commercial constraints of budget and profit margins and high local property prices. You can have a pretty peaceful time listening to the turning pages of the TES and the sweet silver voices of little Hobbesian Ayeshas, Gaias and Toms ignored by their Rousseauian parents running about and torturing each other with fire-hardened Lego and dog-eared copies of The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

Once in a while, we put on a disco.

I mean it: no embarrassment. An actual, glitter-ball bejewelled, Euro-trash and Radio Two Glam Rock standards disco, like the only enjoyable twenty minutes of a wedding night dance - except that they play the good stuff all night long; utterly free of the hot-hatchback amplified street beat of DUH-DUH-DUH!, and not a mothafucka to be heard

It’s voluntary. It’s self financing with surpluses going to local charities, with ‘security’ enforced by a rota of the musos themselves, plus yours truly and other volunteers minding the door. Teenage kicks for Generation X. This is the sound track to the Big Society, if there is such a thing; Samuel Smiles chanelling the Doors and the Stones and consisting of mostly middle class and aspirational working classes with no further state involvement. 30, 40 and 50- aged well-washed folk hopping and bopping to the Sixties, Seventies, Eighties (yey!) and Nineties.  They work. They play. They pay their way.

Culturally, they should be the gatekeepers and upholders of our civilization, even if many of them obviously vote the straight Insane Platform at elections in that very hall, Dear Reader, but it’s safe as houses and never any trouble.

Except. 

Except that we are all the Children of the Revolution and some of the younger ones don’t want to pay.

Most of these children of the wartime generation and the early Boomers cheerfully fork out the nominal fee to cover the running costs of the event  and accept that any surplus buys new CDs and the rest is sent off to help Castle City’s actual poor. There are ticket price concessions that make admittance penny chew stuff.

But still some of them don’t want to pay.

Take Adele and Ryan. Both are lifelong hardcore Lefties and have been deeply involved over the decades in making sure that the world and Castle City don’t get too much better via their work at election times and their bureaucracies lobbying government for more government. You know the type; left their inherited wealth town house uninhabited for a few months to rent a place in the pupil catchment area of a more distant and excellent rural non-selective school so that little Che and Fidel could be get a decent education rather than sitting elitistly for examinations for Castle City’s selective school or being incarcerated in the progressive comprehensives their parents have spend a lifetime protecting from parental choice, academic excellence, formal discipline or anything else of much value. Respect, yeah?

Ryan pops in to the disco from time to time: a quite charming smiling man of the people and sometimes neglects to pay if he doesn’t see me at the ticket table. I have to pursue him and cheerfully demand that nominal fee which he does with a ‘Silly me, I must have forgotten’ grin. Adele, however, knows shame or something and once turned up late in the evening and actually asked to come in free as she’d missed the beginning. Nice try but that’ll be Generation X pounds please Adele and enjoy your dance. These are Generation Two.

Get to the point, North Northwester; I think that gangrene is setting in to my brain. There are lots of pictures of pretty ladies on the Internet and Julia’s probably posted up another storm by now.

Adele and Ryan aren’t really the villains of my tale. We’re way past them in 2011. They are only practising what they preach after all, and it will come as no surprise to readers of this blog that some Lefties are actual as well as philosophic looters. The real slope of hell, however, is unto the next generation – the undergraduate-aged ones and twentysomethings who drift into the dance hall and don’t even consider buying a ticket. They have the cheek to look hurt when I pursue them and agree that, yes, all are indeed welcome to come in from the very instant after they’ve paid peanuts and got their hands stamped they can boogie with the Flintstones of Glam. Some of them actually argue about it. We’re not talking pallid, wasted features and hollow cheeks or track-marked arms here; we’re talking shiny happy people who can’t see why they should contribute anything at all to the event except for the pleasure of their company. It’s not really ‘cheek’ at all - it’s aggrieved entitlement.

It’s the bootleg DVD mentality. It’s the illegal download generation. It’s also cultural Marxism triumphant and they don’t even know they’re doing it: from those according to their ability to those about to rock.

Logically, they aren’t wearing out the dance floor much more and they do buy drinks (when they buy drinks) and that supports the Institute’s finances, and they aren’t violating anyone’s property rights and they don’t kick off or fight; these youngsters who want a bit of retro paid for with their smiles, but they are expecting it as a right.

To recap: to work, societies - particularly those with large measures of freedom and government by consent - require a wide scale predisposition from the highest to the lowest to follow the rules and treat one another other right.

This generation has no concept of the rightness of things – that everyday manners and consideration and morality matter - and who were brought up by parents who neither understood that it was important to do so: let alone why.

Their parents have been propagandized (by Ryan and Adele’s assorted bards and filmmakers) to avoid any such ideas. CS Lewis’s Socialist colleagues and Adele and Ryan’s (and my) generation have passed to them, where in every film the West’s military are evil, where the corporations threaten life on Earth and peace and put toxic waste into puppies, and where the very notions of self-restraint on the one hand and doing the proper thing on the other are alien and hostile perversions.

These poor kids have no idea of the separation of powers; or the multiplier effect of new products put onto the market or how they get there in the first place; or the dignity of the individual (other than as a benefits entitled individual); or what privacy is for; or how important property rights are or the importance and utility of loyalties to collective arrangements such as patriotism or civic pride; let alone why traditions become so and how they. Freedom is licence. Responsibility is conditional. Duty is contractual and subject to ‘conscientious’ change at zero notice. This is Generation Three. Generation free. ‘Free’ as in free of personal cost.

These are the people who will be voting and organizing ‘protests’ and nominating prospective parliamentary candidates and writing scripts and editing the news and commissioning documentaries and teaching our children for the next forty years, if some guy named Mo doesn’t float a couple of yachts laden with Pakistani technology up the Thames and the Clyde ins’allah. They are the people that readers of this site and commentators and supporters of its mission have little or no way of getting hold of and teaching them what’s wrong with their attitude. They’ll click away if they find us, because we are toxic waste. These are the people who will squash this dream flat – and order vodka shots and text each other whilst the police and the mainstream media cut it up into bloody, ignored, reviled little pieces.

It will take decades, generations even (if we are allowed to live through them by the Greens and the green flag boys) to turn a tidal wave on which we are merely minority flotsam. We can attack at all levels, but if we don’t aim for the foundations by countering Lewis’s colleagues in the moral and cultural spheres, we’re still going to be written off (if we’re lucky) as so much human strontium ninety or its 21^st century offspring, carbon dioxide.

Picture from here.

Size matters

Hey, we're on the peoples' telly.


Cool.

You'd almost think democracy was meant to count for something.

Paint it black

A little touch of Harry in the night.


I’m in debt once more to Cherry Pie who sent me to this site where I could quiz myself about politics and see if I scored any better on the conservatism front than I’d done here.
At the danger of seeming like an ungrateful Right-wing bastard rather than an appreciative Right-wing bastard, I’m going to comment about this new questionnaire which tells us much of what we need to know about how we are actually governed.
There’s a funny bit at the end, sort of.

This quiz too had lots of questions: the first few of which were ambivalent or misleading or worse; limiting.
That’s what worried me: the narrowness of vision and scope that the questions imply, and how similar they are to what our rulers present us with. I’ve not done the test yet, and plan to do so only after finishing this post.

Look at question number one.
“If economic globalisation is inevitable, it should primarily serve humanity rather than the interests of trans-national corporations.”
Now, a definition of economic globalisation might have helped here – is it freer trade thanks to low or no-tariff treaties and the economic liberalisation of a number of Asian countries, for example, or is it merely a name for ever-growing international economies of scale and productivity and capital movements, transportation and communications? The difference to the definition might make a difference to the answer.
Also the idea of inevitability begs questions; what are the supposed forces that make it inevitable? Surely not the inevitable consequences of human society being obliged to change according to the relationships between individuals and the means of production and exchange in a capitalist society? That’s just pure Marxism. There’s a world of difference between believing that attractive business or employment opportunities will receive private and some measure of public support in most countries – and believing that it is somehow inescapable and that no amount of political control can prevent investment, production, and sales across international borders. North Korea and Syria and Hamas’ Gaza seem to be pretty good at preventing the free flow of labour, capital and goods and there’s no reason by other similarly worthless governments couldn’t do the same or worse.
Or does international trade not somehow ‘serve humanity?’ Who else trades than human beings? There’s a wealth of supposition about globalisation being bad for humanity in there – too much for me to go into now, and why bother? You’ve probably done it already, dear reader…
And as for trans-national corporations...

So there’s all that up-front ideological baggage. But look at what the answer ‘choices’ are that might lead you to an ideological assessment of yourself.
So to the have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife-yet question: ‘I'd always support my country, whether it was right or wrong’ what answering options do we have?
Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Agree, Strongly Agree.
Oh dear.
Let’s try Option One, shall we?
‘I would strongly disagree that I'd always support my country, whether it was right or wrong.’
Now, does this mean that I’d never support my country, or that I disagree with the notion of my country ever being right (or wrong), or that I’d only agree with it if it was right, or that I disagree with the whole stupid question because it contains false opposites or because I might distinguish between supporting the constitution, institutions, morals and the welfare of the people of Britain from any actions its government might follow? Are we talking about foreign policy here or domestic matters such as taxation, spending and law and order? And would my support consist of unspoken acceptance, or of publishing angry posts and sending furious emails to the editor of The Telegraph if they criticised flash Gordon (King of the Impossible )? or running out into the street waving my six-foot Union Flag in joy at the signature of some other fatuous EU ‘agreement’? And what is my country? England? The UK? Yurrup? Is it my country’s troops abroad or only its sports teams or trade treaty negotiators? And if I don’t approve of a particular party in power and it does something I don’t like, do I let the paid officials who carry out that policy die for want of, say, my taxes and my support for their lawful if mis-led actions?

I think that, taken with the suppositions within the questions, ultimately most answers to this question if you think about it a will leave you pretty much the choice of coming across as a uber-chauvinist or as an internationalist hippy. Some choice.

Okay, okay; so the multiple choice format is inherently simplistic and can be misleading compared with interviews or writing essays – it goes with this particular research technique’s territory. But that’s how we vote and answer opinion polls and ultimately come down to deciding whom to marry, for example; by winnowing down many complex knowns and unknowns and balancing pros and cons and finally making a decision. But we are also allowed to think of celibacy, and just shaking up, or polymory or casual relationships.

And this is precisely how we are governed and how we are likely to be governed in the near future: through an expertly-chosen and narrow range of ‘alternatives’ that don’t differ from each other very much, and whose presentation to us voters leave whole realms and dimensions of consideration and policies ignored and never offered.

So comparing along the totally bogus ‘Left to Right’ order that’s the only one the political class ever allows to be used on for example BBC election night programmes, let’s look if we must at the three ‘nationwide’ parties’ policies, shall we?
Just for laughs.

Defence.

Labour.
We don’t have any particular enemy in mind, but Labour really, really believes that soldiers are super and we’ve made great strides in providing them with really, really thick body armour that stops most munitions - and soon, we plan them to buy another set - so that when they are blown into mincemeat or blinded or something then our very generous compensation scheme will kick in and make them all better for a consequently rather smaller number of survivors..

Liberal Democrats.
Actually we’re very, very different in tone and emphasis from all the others as we’re pretty sure that all the lousy weather we’ve been having lately and Britain’s possession of nuclear submarines are making all kinds of foreigners grumpy, so instead of squandering money on armour and such we want to make sure our money goes to the peace-loving Gazan government and that all the returning soldiers have somewhere nice to sit and listen to the radio reports of our peace negotiations (or the negotiations of whichever international body we decide to put in charge of our country’s defence and international relations decision-making) whilst they draw their dole. There’s no real enemy worth mentioning; except possibly Russia last year. And Tony Blair apparently.

Conservatives.
We don’t have any particular enemy in mind either, but unlike Labour we really, really believe that soldiers are super and we’ve made truly great strides in providing them with really, really long lists of key factors to introduce as adjectives in any weapons procurement procedures that we might very differently institute, but it’s a safe bet that thickness is probably going to be involved somewhere along the line, and also somewhere nicer to live whilst they’re waiting for us to buy, send, re-equip, test, repair, refurbish with the right size holes and electricity for British use more of the Eurofighters, Royal Navy destroyers and actually brown-coloured rucksacks which are so essential for use in, er, some dusty places. Actually, we consider ourselves to be rather a lot like Tony Blair and so we’re going to leave him out of things thank you so very much, okay?

The Economy.


Labour.
Labour intends to go on presiding over a huge public sector delivering services, and supporting businesses through a website with advice, some targetted taxes that are lower than North Korea’s and, obviously staying inside the European Union which has proved so good for our economy all along.

Liberal Democrats.
We plan to support a huge public sector delivering services, and supporting businesses through being greener fairer and cleaner (those being what business needs to much), and some targetted taxes lower than those of at least one of our Scandinavian partner’s tax rates, and obviously staying inside the European Union without which universal cannibalism would ensue within weeks if not days.


Conservatives.
We plan to go on presiding over a huge public sector delivering services, supporting businesses through tiny targeted tax cuts and supporting families with likewise tiny targeted tax cuts; some of which might compensate for a tiny part of the massive loss of purchasing power that all the inflation we’re expecting (but not talking about) tsunamis down on Britain. Plus obviously staying inside the European Union which has kept the Goths, Vandals and Gepids away since we signed the Treaty of Rome to the great benefit of our agriculture and manufacturing, to name but two, or something.

Immigration.

Labour.
Some immigration is good, and some immigration is bad and we’re going to make sure that only the good sort gets done: especially for the possibly bad ones from outside, you know, Europe.

Liberal Democrats.
Immigration? What kind of cake is ‘immigration?’
My auntie made me a fruitcake one. It was nice.

Conservatives.
Some immigration is good, and some immigration is bad and we’re going to make jolly well sure that only the good sort gets done: especially for the possibly bad ones from outside, you know, Europe.

Say, is there a pattern developing here?

Europe.

Labour.
Is the European Union good or what? I mean is it merely utterly, utterly essential to the continued existence of multicellular life on this planet and also so lovely to feed us and clothe us and house us and cure the old folks’ illnesses and protect the poor little match girls, or is it the sure and certain proof of the existence of a Divine and Benevolent Being in the universe?


Liberal Democrats.
Now it just so happened that I was skateboarding backwards in the showers and adopting a bent-backed stance when quite by chance I passed through a cloud of randomly-flung globules of Kilo Yankee that someone was tossing about and who should I bump into but the equally-naked but erect President of the European Commission himself - José Manuel Durão Barroso!

Conservatives.
Senor Barroso, I just want you to know that I breathe through a blow-hole and possess a non-functioning gag reflex.


So there you have it, dear reader: any high-spending, high-taxing maximal state you like which approaches immigration as being right up there as important as animal welfare and subsidizing sports, and whose defence policy seems not to recognize an organized, well-funded, and determined series of wars against this country and it allies on many fronts. And all pretty much circumscribed by the famously efficient, flexible, democratic European Union. All you have to do is choose whether it's in raspberry, butterscotch or blueberry flavour.

Henry Ford would be delighted.

And we’re having a go at the Jews.
Go, Henry.

The 3000

The BBC reported yesterday that around 3,000 Iranian pro-democracy protesters were harassed and attacked by police yesterday.
From Cassanda Troy,
this top video doesn't look like a mere 3,000 to me.



And if that didn't get to you, Tory Totty has found some poor Iranian woman whose words of love and sorrow for her homeland and its lack of freedom would make stones weep.

δημοκρατια

Ranting Stan forces my hand, and so I must get my own electoral reform fantasy in sharpish.

Democracy is extremely hard to define in a nutshell…

An elected second chamber will make us less democratic - not more.

The final thing is an effective check and balance on the elected government - which is where the second chamber comes in. It is, of course, impossible for there to be an effective check and balance on an elected government if that second chamber is elected too. People keep trying to tell me that they manage it in other countries - such as the USA - but this simply isn't true.

The Lords does sterling work - and did even better before Tony Blair’s partial-birth ‘reform’ - in part because its members weren't dependent on day-to-day popularity as Commons MPs are (and as they have to respond to), and other aspects of partisanship.

The hereditaries never feared for their seats (except during civil wars, of course) being there by right; nor did the Law Lords or the bishops who are there ex officio. There were and are party hacks, of course, and direct Prime Ministerial appointees, but with the cross-benchers and non-appointees, there are still a lot of people not under the partisan thumb.

May I make a suggestion, going right back to the origins of democracy itself: ancient Athens?

Keep the existing appointees, hereditaries and ex-officios as they have their own freedoms and small power bases in different ways, and there should remain a core party structure and Government representation in the Upper House, and this would continue to bring variety and experience and a core of organisation and careful research to the upper chamber... and then draw the rest by lot.

Draw - say - nine individuals from the electoral rolls of each Commons constituency and allow no exceptions or defer service only on health or military service grounds as per jury service. Plug them into the internet at home and oblige them to log onto Parliament's websites, and force them to log onto and vote on Lords debates. Allow a bare minimum of twenty hours' activity per week (which might include posting text or video at each or some of the debate's sites - you could have online debates leading up to the vote where chamber-based peers could debate with their online counterparts in the country.)

Then it's up to them how they’re swayed, what they think and how they vote, and in which debates, if any, they choose to be most highly involved. Their actual votes could be kept secret, and their identities if they so chose.

They would, by dint of randomness, be representative of the public at large and therefore be seen as legitimate, and they also need not be specialist professional parasites:

They wouldn't be under the party whip.

They wouldn't need to chase state or special interest funding to be elected.

They wouldn't need to make empty, untrue or harmful election promises.

They'd already be living outside the Westminster bubble and so less likely to be so narrow-minded as to miss the point every single time.

Lots of girls would get in despite the worst efforts of the party selection committees (a particular problem with the Tories) and they wouldn’t have to abandon home, family, and sanity to do their parliamentary duty.

The political parties would really, really have to work hard to attract their support.

They’d know that they’ll have to go back to the real world of crime, debts, mortgages and having to make a living very soon.

They could respond quickly to emergencies - thanks to their variety and independence (OMG! ‘Diversity’ for real!) - without having to wait for a party line to evolve or to be imposed, and amend or delay legislation accordingly.

You’d probably get social conservatives in despite the libtard hold on the parties because such people would still have to live right close to the communities that the elected politicians variously invent, discover and bribe, and either herd or are herded by.

Carol Vorderman might be chosen without having to be nice to David Cameron who is totally unworthy of her.

I’d keep the territorial nature of Commons elections (look, I’m a conservative, see?), and the party structure and the first-past-the post system, and the Commons’ monopolies on finance and originating bills, because all that works, but force them to really, really work hard to persuade an invigorated Lords to accept their legislation.

Give them terms outside the electoral cycle - say two or three years, so as not to necessarily go along with temporary or trivial electoral fads that might pack the Commons for five years (as 'Tory sleaze' and MPs expenses did and the deaths of Diana or Jade or specific acts of terrorism or treachery might have).

They’d not be a mob – but they would be swayable by media and prejudice, family and friends, but also safe from the oppression of public meetings or enraged constituents.

Pay them one-and-a-half or twice their last year's bottom line per annum to make it worth their while and to overcome the inconvenience of disrupting their lives, (doleys to get £120 per week plus rent and council tax paid, Richard Branson to get £120,000,000 or whatever, businessmen and teachers double their previous years’ scores of thousands.)

No expenses, ever.

Pensions to consist of one year’s Lords remuneration per year’s satisfactory service paid as lump sums into the investment of their choice and none to be drawn for ten years after service ends. This last is to prevent the tendency to approve legislation aimed at making a fast buck on the Stock Market; but rather to prejudice them in favour of long-term overall good economic policies, if they are capable of such a thing.

This would maintain the perspective that having different standards of livings in Parliament might bring – instead of the present everyone starts on £60K and works their way up herd mentality. (Do pigs herd? Flock? Shoal?)

Let the majority of the Lords worry about paying for the gas and the mortgage in the near future – but not too soon to be intimidated by their responsibilities.

You’d get your special-interest pleaders and influence-brokers for sure (but it would be legal and open to view because they’d have to declare their interests) voting per Big Business or the unions or churches or established or fringe parties or ‘community groups’ – but I think you’d likely get something representative of the nation as a whole with some measure of comfort and security, but not too much, by not providing them with a permanent and publicly-funded career with repeat electability and repeat corruptibility.

Think of all those multiple-term US Democratic Senators who’ve helped to usher in The One with all His faults, and our very own Happy Troughers from safe-seat Valleys smeg-holes or Home Counties mini-Reichs.

Repeat as necessary to keep the compost heap of the nation fresh and vigorous.

So what do you think, peeps?

Put the Peepul in charge of overseeing the pols without transforming the Peepul into a permanently rich and comfortable class of brand new bribable pols?

Might something like this keep Britain’s ancient constitution alive and kicking and yet curb our cowardly custodes?

Chalk. Cheese. Semtex.

The BNP cheats.

Its supporters don’t wear sinister uniforms or flaunt evil-looking flags. They don’t disrupt pubic meetings as far as I know or try to intimidate democratically elected representatives of the people. Their local activists would be called ‘community leaders’ if they belonged to any other community than the white majority.
If their famous race war is being planned in secret then it’s a damn well-kept secret, though some comment posters on some of their blogs look pretty bloody iffy even to my frothing-at-the-mouth, gun-me-down-like-a-rabid-dog Right-wing eyes.

No matter. I’m angry about this and so I’m going to labour the point two days running. Let’s forget the candidates themselves, their party and their policies real and imagined. Let’s read those numbers again.

The number of people voting BNP across the UK as a whole went up slightly, from 808,201 to 943,598 in the European elections, but went down slightly in the two regions where it gained MEPs, with the party benefitting from a collapse in the Labour vote.
They won 6.2% of votes, compared with 8.6% for the Green Party, 13.7% for the Lib Dems, 15.7% for Labour, 16.5% for the UK Independence Party and 27.7% for the Conservatives.

943,598 legally resident, fully-enfranchised British subjects cast their votes in a properly-run secret ballot for a legal organization whose candidates were not even in jail and on hunger strike or calling for the deaths of British soldiers or anything in the trusting and perhaps naïve faith that their own humanity mattered enough that their choices would be respected in the same way as the candidates of all the other parties would insist on being respected despite their recent financial and legislative records.

Apparently, someone has decided that this is not the case.They aren’t real people or proper people and their tribunes can be physically attacked and prevented from public speaking with immunity.
And who decided this?

Well, the Labour Party, for starters – two of whose supporters I work with closely, and who yesterday expressed delight that Nick Griffin had been egged. Discussing this, I asked whether it would have been even more democratic if the missiles had been stones, or petrol bombs or grenades.
This point missed their brains by several million realities, it seems, and they went on to discuss what a child had thought when he asked an adult what the man had done wrong. One colleague replied ‘Nothing, yet.’
The other one's making sure, I suppose, that the child in question knows which elected officials it’s going to be OK to attack and presumably with which weapons and weapon systems. That old Colorado Beetle's got a lot to answer for.
If I’d suggested that we should egg people whose parties and fellow ideologues have recently killed and are still killing actual civilians and British soldiers, they’d have been all over me like a cheap suit.


I’m grateful to my colleagues for their words, though.

Previously I’d been finding it difficult to identify the fascists.