Red in tooth and claw

I’ve always preferred human civilisation to the raw, bloody, amoral processes of Nature.

Some of this preference was for the little things: only human beings wear trousers and put spinach into cans and it is only in humanity where (throughout the Anglosphere and some parts of Metropolitan France at least)  the males use indoor toilets and with some degree of accuracy.

Only human beings come unasked to the aid of their fellow creatures in distress when those creatures are unrelated to them by blood or immigration into a new pack, pod or troop.

My preference is, I suppose, a prejudice: and all the better for that having been built upon the opinions of respected contemporaries and the inherited wisdom of ages, plus my own experience, as Dr. Dalrymple recommends in his awesome monograph In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas.

But prejudice can also mislead.

My preference for what man hath wrought over the works of Darwin’s mad, fanged and clawed lottery fails, for want of intelligence worth the name outside our species, to come up with idiocies as profound and insulting to he human mind than does Mankind itself.

No bottom-feeding scavenger filtering through the vile organic sludge in the abyssal depths stoops quite so low in search of sustenance: no insect-paralyzing wasp that lays her eggs in the agonized abdomen of a poisoned butterfly is so indifferent to the hurt she causes to her offspring’s living nest and first meal, with anywhere near the intelligence-insulting, mind-denying and almost malicious indifference to the suffering of others as the spokesmen of Britain’s public sector trade union leaders on the latest ‘cost-cutting’ budget.

Here are some of the reactions to the government’s public sector pay ‘freeze’ (which gives the lowest-paid quarter of the public sector a £250 per year wage increase (and that means me, dear reader):

Trade unions accused the Coalition Government of “declaring war” on the public services, raising the prospect of 1970s-style industrial unrest.

Note the counterfactual belief that, outside fruit farms, money grows on trees. Oh, and the evaporation of any sense of public duty and concern for service recipients like temporary ponds after sudden rainfall in the desert.

Brendan Barber, General Secretary of the TUC, said: “Public servants did nothing to cause the slump but are being asked to bear an unfair share of the burden.

True. Most of us did indeed do nothing to cause the slump. Most of us ignored the slump, took the pay and the flexi time and the expenses and the pension and kept re-electing the same budget-busting political party that promised us good times forever, free of the elsewhere universal trade cycle, and watched our house ‘values’ grow faster than our ever-expanding mortgages, whose periodic and generous extensions lent by benevolent banks and credit card companies went as likely as not on foreign holidays and vehicles and school fees for children not bred to share classrooms with welfare cash-crop children, who are elsewhere so beloved of the public sector (in theory; just not near our kids, thank you so very much.)

Chris Keates, General Secretary of the NASUWT, the largest teachers’ union, added: “The Chancellor’s assertion that the public sector has been ‘insulated’ is an insult to all nurses and health service staff, teachers and support staff, police officers, firefighters and other public service workers.

Absolutely; we can’t use generous final salary pension schemes with guaranteed benefits irrespective of the state of the economy when we retire to retain the heat from burning fossil hydrocarbons in our homes. We can use special foam for that in the attic, which we can afford to replace with the lump sum from a pension we paid peanuts to ‘buy’ while everyone else who bothered had to trust their own money to the stock market, national government borrowing and, er, bankers.

“During this recession, they have worked tirelessly to deliver an even greater scale of service to the public in order to mitigate against the worst effects of a situation caused by the reckless bankers and financiers who have emerged from this budget unscathed.

Looking at the illiteracy rates and violent crime rates of recent years and the death rates in some of its best-resourced hospitals (adjusted for out-and out governmental lying), I’d say that education and policing and the health service aren’t giving very good value for money – where they are trying to do the core job at all…

And as for the local councils…

“In short, this is a dishonest budget on every level which will have a devastating impact on millions.”

So there you have it.

The leaders of Really Smart People who tell us what to eat and what to think and how to raise our young and where to put our rubbish and who ultimately decide who shall live and who shall die are utterly unaware of, or care nothing at all for, the causes of Britain’s massive debt.

I honestly don’t know which scares me most: that the public sector union leaders are unaware of the housing bubble and the massive and unfunded expansion of the public sector that accompanied it; or that they just don’t care about cause and effect; or whether they know and care and still expect their members to do nothing to help put it right.

So, dear Reader, ignorance and lack of moral responsibility beyond the family or nest typify organisms in the natural world, but which creature in nature is dishonest to and about its own kind on this scale?

Picture from here.

Sunday blasphemy hour

A hymn to and from our owners; our masters; our gods.

Immortal, invisible, State only wise,

In light inaccessible hid from our eyes,

Most blessed, most glorious, the Ancient of Days,

Almighty, victorious, thy great name we praise.

Unresting, unhasting, and silent as light,

Nor wanting, nor wasting, thou rulest in might;

Thy justice like mountains high soaring above

Thy clouds which are fountains of goodness and love.

To all life thou givest to both great and small;

In all life thou livest, the true life of all;

We blossom and flourish as leaves on the tree,

And wither and perish but nought changeth thee.

Great Father of glory, pure Father of light,

Thine angels adore thee, all veiling their sight;

All laud we would render: O help us to see

'Tis only the splendour of light hideth thee.

And who said the Left are anti-religious?

The Liberal Lobster Pot

Spot the odd one out…

The Beveridge Report’s terms of reference were:

“To undertake, with special reference to the inter-relation of the schemes, a survey of the existing national schemes of social insurance and allied services, including workmen's compensation, and to make recommendations.”

Its chairman added the following:

“Policies of social security "must be achieved by co-operation between the State and the individual, with the state securing the service and contributions. The state " should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility; in establishing a national minimum, it should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than that minimum for himself and his family, and we shall build into it study mechanisms to reverse any policies, procedures or institutions that are established which evidence shows tend towards idleness or the stifling of individual responsibility".

The Home Office Announced in 1945:

“Post-war Britain will be a land of opportunity with much work to be done. Some of that work will be unpleasant and poorly paid and it does not seem right to the Government that heroes of the British Home armed forces should be obliged to work in such occupations. Consequently, careful and measured immigration of Imperial and Commonwealth forces veterans will begin shortly to fill such posts. The British people should be assured that should such immigration show signs of changing the nature of towns and cities in which migrants settle, or of threatening Britain’s pluralistic, liberal and tolerant society, this policy will be reviewed and if necessary cancelled. The public should have no fear of finding themselves strangers in their own land.”

Labour Party Education spokesman 1964.

“Spare the rod and improve the experience of childhood for the kids, parents, neighbours and teachers alike; both at home and at school. This will be the guiding new rule of government family and educational policy over the next fifty years.

However, if there are significant indications that slacker discipline in the home and less emphasis on good manners and obedience to authority in schools are causing serious problems, well shall immediately halt further liberalisation and conduct a thorough review of progressive education theory and practise, and reverse any policies seen to be at fault.”

Regarding Mick Jagger’s conditional discharge for possession of amphetamines in 1967, the editor of The Times, William Rees-Mogg, wrote:

"If we are going to make any case a symbol of the conflict between the sound traditional values of Britain and the new hedonism, then we must be sure that the sound traditional values include those of tolerance and equity. It should be the particular quality of British justice to ensure that Mr Jagger is treated exactly the same as anyone else."

He added, to the applause of the united intelligentsia of the academy, media and arts alike

But should serious problems arise out of greater toleration for, or even softer punishment for the possession and use of mind-altering drugs occur, then we shall all be equally united in demanding a return to former levels of intolerance and punishment for using them.”

Continental statesmen welcomed Britain into membership of the European Economic Community in Brussels today. United in their pleasure that the United Kingdom has finally been granted membership, the president of the Commission stated: ”We are eager to being work with the British and other joining countries towards our shared goals of joining in a free-trading area.

Doubters in the United Kingdom should be assured that at any time they feel that the EEC is taking more power and control over the everyday life of Britain, they shall have immediate recourse to the provisions of the Clauses Terminales, which allow for easy and immediate cessation of further moves towards unification, and the replacement of intrusive European legislation with the original native British powers.”

Shadow Chancellor Gordon Brown said in an election campaign interview in 1997:

“I am definitely not, under any circumstances, no matter who begs and pleads me to, about to: encourage a massive inflationary housing bubble; sell off part of the country's hard-earned bullion reserves; tax pension funds to death from the word 'go'; or plunge the country into the worst indebtedness ever whilst increasing the State's share of the economy to levels proportionately higher than Communist Eastern Europe's; let alone threaten the very existence of sterling by accident rather than as a conscious plan to adopt the Euro. If anyone notices me even start to do anything like that, I want them to firmly but gently let me know, and I will cease and do something instead.”

Answer: the Gordon Brown one. His was the only one with a brake and a reverse gear.

He did indeed go on about ‘tough but tender’ and ‘prudence’ and ‘fiscal responsibility’ a lot before New Labour swept to power. I think that that is what he meant us all to believe about him.

However, he didn’t add: ‘…and if I don’t live up to my promises, may God strike me dead...’

But nobody’s perfect; even Mister Brown.

Look at all those things they’ve inflicted on our country: the Welfare State which is now a vampire sucking at our nation’s moral and economic throat ; immigration way above previous peacetime levels and from much further afield that most previous influxes; ‘progressive education’ that only progresses downwards and in so doing destroys the work of centuries of educational experimentation, reform and refinement; softening attitudes to and punishment for the use of unfamiliar intoxicants; the dissolution of Britain as a sovereign state; the spending of all the surviving post-war imperial capital and the luxurious bullion reserves bought by the productivity of the Thatcher reforms.

And they did it all without any thought to what might happen if it all went wrong.

Not for liberals and the socialists and their Butskellite Tory clones the ideas of escape clauses or periods of reflection or review or mechanisms by which any new problems or failures of whole new institutions might be reversed if they proved insoluble.

The Left just doesn’t envisage any problems coming from their reforms as long as they do them in big, confusing, unhistorical stages; with lots of money to support them and the braying of the intelligentsia character-assassination squad against anyone who raises a note of caution. For the united Left, it’s always full speed ahead. There’s never the concept of retracing our steps back to familiar territory.

Which is largely why conservatism is best. We know - a bit - of what we’ve already got, and fear its loss and so if we must support change we support it in small, easily-quarantined doses.

I mean, would you buy a car sold like this?:

‘It’s new, Madame; fast and of a revolutionary design. It performs in the laboratories way above the levels of its closest competitors. Its wind-tunnel testing proved it to have remarkable handling and powerful steering…What? Slow it down? Madame, why should you want to slow it down? It’s scientifically designed on rational principles which the very best minds have planned for your comfort and safety. Get inside, Madame, put your children in it, too, and let’s take it for a spin…

Reversing Madame, why ever would you want to go back to somewhere that you’ve already been?...’

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