The Establishment Is Strange

If you believe the chinless, upper-class nobheads who dominate the media industry in the UK, Boris Johnson is entirely responsible for the pissed up antics of his minions in Number 10. The same media shills then affect to be shocked when Johnson attacks Keir Starmer for failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile when he was head of the Crown Prosecution Service. I am no fan of Boris Johnson, look back at this blog if you don’t believe me, but holding these two viewpoints is an almost perfect example of Orwellian doublethink.

Emperor Elagabalus And Lia Thomas

I’ve referred to this quote many times in the past but I feel it is worth repeating…

“The words of the Teacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem ‘Meaningless! Meaningless!’ says the Teacher. ‘Utterly meaningless. Everything is meaningless.’ What do people gain from all their labours at which they toil under the sun? Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises. The wind blows to the south and turns to the north; round and round it goes, ever returning on its course. All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they return again. All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, ‘Look! This is something new’? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them.”

Ecclesiastes 1:1-11

The Unbearable Conceit Of The Ruling Class

I haven’t been writing much recently as my new job is taking up most of my mental bandwidth. Fortunately, the school year ended in Queensland on Friday so I’ll be able to vent my spleen here more regularly. And I have lots of spleen to vent! For some unknown reason, a lot of people at my new school think I’m some sort of raving Communist.

From the Gospel of Luke 20: 45-47 and 21: 1-4 (see here)…

“In the hearing of all the people he said to the disciples, ‘Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and love to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honour at banquets. They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.’ He looked up and saw rich people putting their gifts into the treasury; he also saw a poor widow put in two small copper coins. He said, ‘Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them; for all of them have contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in all she had to live on.’” [My emphases]

The Antithesis Of Sport Update

The original post from April 2021 was about the failed ‘super’ league project – The Antithesis of Sport.

The picture I’ve used for the header must be one of the most bizarre images I’ve seen in 45+ years of following English football.

Still, everything is right in the world as I type these words. England have beaten the might of Andorra and Ipswich are up to fourteenth in the third division after crushing Shrewsbury 2-1!

Wibble.

Reblog: Nick Cohen

I thought I would share an article by Nick Cohen in today’s (03/10/21) Observer. Cohen, along with Kenan Malik and John Harris, is one of the few sane voices left at the nest of upper class buffoons and comedy racists that is the Guardian website. I don’t always agree with Cohen but here he is spot on.

Video Of The Day #33

This is what passes for political debate in 2021. Not rising energy prices, crumbling infrastructure, a bankrupt NHS, unaffordable housing or increasing inequality. No, what the British ruling class want to discuss is whether a bloke in a dress is really a woman.

As foul-mouthed Scottish comedian Jerry Sadowitz once said, “Fuck my pubic hair.”

Quote Of The Day #95

“The Tories in England long imagined that they were enthusiastic about monarchy, the church, and the beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about ground rent.”

Picture Of The Day #61

Some things are beyond satire.

If you think wearing a dress at the Met Gala – whatever the fuck that is – is ‘left-wing,’ then you deserve to be transported to Cambodia circa 1977. Apparently, tickets to this Establishment shindig cost 24,000 quid. I’d gladly pay £24,000 not to be surrounded by the sort of people who go to this type of wankfest.

Picture Of The Day #60

The level of ignorance here is something to behold.

The comments on the original tweet show what people outside Jimmy Savile House and Guardian Towers tend to think of the upper class performative ‘radicals’ from Stinky Conformism.

Is it too tinfoil hat to suggest that these ecofascists are funded by the oil companies to make concerns about climate change look ridiculous?

Islam Is Barbarism

Sometimes you hear something so outlandish that you struggle to process it…

“An eight-year-old Hindu boy is being held in protective police custody in east Pakistan after becoming the youngest person ever to be charged with blasphemy in the country.

“The boy’s family is in hiding and many of the Hindu community in the conservative district of Rahim Yar Khan, in Punjab, have fled their homes after a Muslim crowd attacked a Hindu temple after the boy’s release on bail last week. Troops were deployed to the area to quell any further unrest.”

I got this quote from that well-known nest of racists, white supremacists and Islamophobes at Guardian Towers (see here).

*If your answer to this question is anything other than a straight ‘no’ without caveat then either traditional religion or its modern variant ‘Wokeism’ has rotted your brain.

The Refeudalisation Of Society

Is ‘refeudalisation’ even a word? And if it isn’t, where do I claim my £5?

It is often observed that people become more conservative as they get older. The Greek philosopher Socrates is supposed to have said…

“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannise their teachers.”

In recent years, I have seen the opposite happening to myself. The sheet arrogance of the ruling class and their paid jackals in the media is driving me ever further to the left. I am close to becoming a full-on Maoist at the moment.

Quote Of The Day #88

“Herod himself always insisted that he was congenitally a rogue. To which I would reply, “No, you are a fundamentally virtuous man wearing the mask of roguery.” This would make him angry. A month or two before Caligula’s death we had a conversation of this sort. At the end of it he said, ‘Shall I tell you about yourself?’ ‘There’s no need,’ I answered, ‘I’m the Official Fool of the Palace.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘there are fools who pretend to be wise men and wise men who pretend to be fools, but you are the first case I have yet encountered of a fool pretending to be a fool. And one day you’ll see, my friend, what sort of a virtuous Jew you are dealing with.'”

Claudius the God, Chapter 1

[My emphasis]

Strange Bedfellows Update

Original post from June 2020: Strange Bedfellows

As I write these words, Ipswich have just lost their third home game in a row. I have also realised that all my posts about football are basically the same – Ipswich were a good team when I was young and now they are terrible, woe is me! Self-knowledge is the path to wisdom as it sort of says in the Bhagavad Gita.

It is now forty years since Ipswich won the old UEFA Cup (the smallest town ever to win that competition). The club are currently over £100,000,000 in debt and a town of 110,000 simply cannot generate enough revenue to clear such a debt (over £900 per person). Short of being bought out by a Ukrainian gangster or Arab prince, I can’t see much hope.

Anyway, here are the goals from the 1981 UEFA Cup Final (played over two legs in those days)…

Quote Of The Day #87

As our lords and masters love a (spurious) comparison with Nazi Germany, I thought I’d provide a two-for-one special in the wake of the defeat of Donald ‘Adolf’ Trump.

First, the Fuehrer himself…

“[T]hey proceeded on the sound principle that the magnitude of the lie always contains a certain factor of credulity, since the great masses of the people in the very bottom of their hearts tend to be corrupted rather than consciously and purposefully evil, and that, therefore, in view of the primitive simplicity of their minds they more easily fall a victim to a big lie than a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big. Such a falsehood will never enter their heads and they will not be able to believe in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous misrepresentation in others: yes, even when enlightened on a subject, they will long doubt and waver, and continue to accept at least one of these causes as true.” From Mein Kampf Chapter 10, page 231

Now his chief propagandist…

“The cleverest trick used in propaganda against Germany during the [First World] War was to accuse Germany of what our enemies themselves were doing.” Speech at Nuremberg, 1934

The New Calvinists

In October 2017, I wrote a post called The New Puritans about the destruction of a statue of Athena by the unwashed barbarians of ISIS. This was based on my belief that modern Islamists are exactly the same as the ignorant zealots who did so much to undermine the later Roman Empire. It is also my firm belief that the modern West is not based on so-called ‘Judeo-Christian’ values but on the rational inheritance of Classical Greece and Rome.

Developing this theme, I would argue that today’s Brahmin ‘left’ are the Calvinists of our times.

FYI – the subtitle for this post comes from John Lennon’s song Working Class Hero. And remember, the ruling class, the Establishment, really do hate and despise you.

The Decay Of The Labour Party Update

Original post from January 2020: The Decay of the Labour Party

From the original post…

“The main reason for the decay of the Labour Party is its abandonment of left-wing economics…  The party has effectively abandoned the working-class it was founded to represent in favour of a much more middle-class support… The trouble is that these newer Labour supporters feel guilty about how well they have done out of our current hypercapitalist system. To make themselves feel better, these newer Labour supporters have replaced concerns about concrete economic matters with nebulous phobias and isms which they have elevated to holy writ. It is far easier to rant about transgender toilets and Palestine that to tackle the deep-seated economic inequalities that continue to afflict the UK.”

None Of The Above

In the film Brewster’s Millions Richard Pryor is set the task of spending $30million in 30 days so that he can inherit a fortune of $300million. In order to waste as much money as possible, he decides to run for mayor of New York. Pryor doesn’t want the job so stands on a slogan of ‘none of the above.’

I bet the good people of the United States wish ‘none of the above’ was an option in this November’s presidential election.

Video Of the Day #26

This is The Jam singing the song ‘Scrape Away’ from their 1980 album Sound Affects.

Full lyrics…

Hands In The Till?

One thing that I vividly remember from my eighteenth birthday is the pay rise I received. I was working on a potato harvester at the time and my hourly rate went up from £1.90/hour to £2.10/hour. A 20p/hour pay rise doesn’t sound like much but it was 1987. I earned an extra £1.60 a day and £8.00 a week. This was just before I went to university and beer was 50p a pint in the union bar.

The recent Covid19 shenanigans have highlighted just how little some people are being paid. Minimum wage for people over the age of 25 is £8.72/hour. Other people appear to be earning vast salaries for doing next to nothing – the daily attendance allowance at the House of Lords is £323 a day, which would take a minimum wage worker more than 37 hours to make. Other people seem to have a great deal of money without having a job at all.

Step forward Mr Tony Blair.

Quote Of The Day #82

“Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.”

‘Woke’: Religion Or Fascism?

Rik Mayall was a comic genius. But his portrayal of Rick in The Young Ones, who thought everything was ‘fascist,’ was meant to be a joke at the expense of the fake radical (usually privately educated) familiar to anyone who has attended a British university in the past 50+ years, not a guide for how to behave.

Disturbing (and disturbed), barely readable German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that…

“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby becomes a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.”

The upper-class ‘Woke’ imbeciles who have colonised left-wing parties all over the West have become the fascists and racists they affect to despise.

Quote Of The Day #80

“[T]he Labour Party is a thoroughly bourgeois party, because, although made up of workers, it is led by reactionaries, and the worst kind of reactionaries at that, who act quite in the spirit of the bourgeoisie. It is an organisation of the bourgeoisie, which exists to systematically dupe the workers…”

Full text of speech here.

Book Review #9 (Long Read)

This is a long one. I have highlighted what I think are the key points.

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

One does not have to be a Marxist to have sympathy with the view that conflict between rich and poor has been a vital element in the history of humanity. I would suggest that in history and in politics, economics is of far more importance than race, sex, sexuality or the name of your imaginary friend. Our rulers are obsessed with money and it is wealth that gives them their privilege in society. I am not advocating Communism in any political sense as Communist remedies tend to be worse than the ills they purport to cure. Still less am I supporting the cod-Marxism of know-nothing like Ash Sarkar and Owen Jones or the retro 1970s socialism of Jeremy Corbyn.

It is with these thoughts in mind that I recommend Michael Lind’s new book The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Metropolitan Elite.

Picture Of The Day #38

This never gets old…

From William Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2:

Jack the Butcher, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

Luxury Beliefs And Class Hatred Part Two

This is a long one so I have split it into two parts – the first part can be viewed here.

Luxury Beliefs And Class Hatred Part One

This is a long one, so I will post it in two parts.

Alexander II, Tsar of Russia between 1855 and 1881, was a great man. He extricated Russia from the ludicrous Crimean War, freed the Russian peasantry from serfdom and introduced elected local government and trial by jury. Despite all this, the Great Emancipator was murdered by radicals from the People’s Will (Narodnaya Volya) who only achieved the replacement of a reforming emperor with his brutal and autocratic son.

Alexander II is a textbook example of the failure of the monarchical principle since despite all his achievements, his father, his son and his grandson (Nicholas I, Alexander III and Nicholas II were all unequal to the task of ruling Russia in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. But that is not the reason I have shared this biographical sketch. Alexander’s murderers remind me of a certain type of pseudo-radical and narcissistic purist who is so prevalent in our own times.

Picture Of The Day #36

The House of Lords – a care home for superannuated members of the Establishment.

This picture would be funny if I didn’t know that these people are being paid £305 a day of taxpayers’ money to kip on the red benches.

Oliver Letwin – Man Of The People

I thought I’d join the trend for using words to mean the exact opposite of their dictionary definition. After all, we live in times when drug-addled simpletons like Lily Allen lecture us about politics and mega-privileged, carbon-spewing princes rebuke the plebs about flying.

Step forward, man of the people and leader of the ‘rebel alliance’, ‘Sir’ Oliver Letwin.

NB – nothing in this post should be read as an endorsement of Brexit.

Oikophobia – A Strange Afflcition

The great writer and journalist George Orwell, once commented that England…

“…is perhaps the only great country where intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution…”

Oikophobia comes from the Greek word ‘oikos’ meaning ‘home’ or ‘family.’ I am not using it here in the medical sense but in a way that has become all too familiar in the past twenty years – accusing one’s political opponents of being ‘phobic’ against a favoured identity group. Oikophobia in this sense means dislike or distrust of one’s own people or country, as opposed to ‘xenophobia’ which is hatred or dislike of foreigners.

The Depravity Of The Ruling Class Update

“Depravity (noun):

1/ a corrupt act or practice;

2/ the quality or state of being corrupt, evil or perverted: the quality or sate of being depraved.”

A strong word but one I felt apt for the ruling class in the UK, and indeed much of the West, in my previous post The Depravity of the Ruling Class. The reaction to the vote to leave the European Union is a symptom of the fact that our lords and masters dislike, even hate, ordinary working people and treat their concerns with disdain, even contempt.

Despite being criticised both here and elsewhere, I still maintain my view that Brexit is nothing but a ruling class civil war about money. Since at least 1976, the UK has been in the grip of neoliberal economics and a form of globalisation designed to enrich the few and pauperise the many.

Class hatred is alive and well in 2019. I’d like to demonstrate what I mean by addressing recent news about so-called reparations, public schools and climate chance.

The Depravity Of The Ruling Class

St Paul, founder of Christianity…

“The love of money is the root of all evil.”

Muhammad of Mecca, founder of Islam…

“Greed proves to be a curse because once a person has it, it stays with him forever. it becomes difficult to resist so it keeps growing with time.”

Karl Marx, father of modern Communism…

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

Arnold Rimmer, Second Technician aboard the mining ship Red Dwarf…

“They overthrew me… so I could never threaten their insane lust for power.”

If you look back my posts since I started this blog in January 2017 you will see I have repeatedly made two points…

1/ I neither support nor oppose Brexit. However, whilst I support the idea of a European Union I am not persuaded that the European Union is anything but a tool of the super rich, the banks and big business.

2/ The ruling class in the United Kingdom, or the Establishment if you prefer, only care about money. It is this, not democracy, parliamentary sovereignty or any of the other excuses that have trotted out over the past three-and-a-half years, that is at the root of the current crisis in British politics.

Picture Of The Day #35

Interesting what you can find on the internet.

The Naked Self-Interest Of The Ruling Class

Brexit is irrelevant. The Second Referendum is irrelevant. The European Union is irrelevant. Jeremy Corbyn, the Establishment stooge who allegedly leads the Labour Party, is irrelevant. The only positive to come out of this whole ridiculous charade (the ruling class was and is never going to allow the UK to leave the EU) is to expose the sheer contempt the plutocracy has for the rest of us.

I am not pro-Brexit. Nor am I particularly pro-EU. It is possible to support the idea of a European Union whilst being opposed to the European Union. I have advocated a kind of associate membership of the EU that would be to the benefit of the UK and to those countries who wish to press ahead with ever closer union. The fact that the British voted 2:1 in favour of membership of the European Economic Community in 1975 but rejected membership of the European Union in 2016 suggests this could be a popular compromise.

Jeremy Corbyn: Establishment Stooge

Jeremy Corbyn is a stooge for the interests of the ruling class. His claim to want  to remain in the neoliberal European Union despite decades of Bennite opposition to its policies of featherbedding the rich and eternal austerity for everyone else proves it. His call for a Second Referendum is for the advantage of the already wealthy and their banker chums not the poor he claims to care so much about.

Nothing I have written on this blog or am about to write is pro-Brexit nor is it anti-Brexit. Brexit is an irrelevance. The real problems are caused by decades of neoliberal, ‘gush up’ economics designed to enrich the few and pauperise the many.

The ruling class only care about money and most of them think leaving the EU will cost them money. A minority of the ruling class think they can make more money outside the EU, that’s the only reason Johnson, Rees-Mogg et al support it. Jeremy Corbyn is now one of the bought-and-paid-for mouthpieces of the faction of the Establishment that wants to stay in the EU.

If truth be told, Corbyn is probably the senior politician most opposed to the EU in the whole of Britain.

The Second Referendum

Second (or Third if you count 1975) referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union
Vote only once by putting an X in the box next to your choice
Should the United Kingdom continue to be ruled by a bunch of arrogant, chinless, public school wankers who only care about money and do what they want regardless of the voters’ opinions?
Yes (gosh, aren’t you clever? Have a gold star, you good little drone)
No (by marking this box, I acknowledge that I am a thicko who doesn’t understand the question and that my vote doesn’t count)

 

How I despise the British Establishment and their running dogs in the media.

Picture Of The Day #33

One of the most common tropes of our times is ‘fake news.’ The current President of the United States is a great one for accusing the media of printing and/or broadcasting ‘fake news.’ In his, and many other cases, ‘fake news’ can simply be something people just don’t want to hear.

The BBC claims to be “impartial” in its news coverage (if anyone is interested their self-serving editorial guidelines are available online). However, they are anything but impartial. Just like any other news or current affairs organisation. Just like the blog you are reading. In fact, despite claiming that their “independence from government guarantees [their] editorial and artistic freedom,” the BBC is the main voice of the British ruling class.

The Bigotry Of The ‘Anti-Racists’

I would urge readers to watch the Panorama documentary Is Labour Anti-Semitic?

I’ve come to a similar conclusion about Jeremy Corbyn as I did about Sepp Blatter and FIFA. I originally thought Blatter was merely useless at his job but changed my mind and came to believe that he was personally corrupt. Similarly with Corbyn. I thought he was an overpromoted nonentity surrounded by anti-Semites. However, I have change my mind and I now, reluctantly, think that he is personally anti-Semitic.

Before I continue, I would like to point out that as far as the Israel/Palestine quagmire goes I simply don’t care. I hold no brief for the Israeli government, certainly not under its current leader. Still less do I support the genocidal religious fascists of Hamas nor the geriatric kleptocrats of the Palestinian Authority. I am as interested in this issue as the average Toytown ‘anti-Zionist’ is interested in Transnistria, Abkhazia or the Sahrawi Republic.

What this row demonstrates is that the fanaticism, bigotry and good/evil binary of monotheistic religion has transferred itself into politics, particularly amongst those who I like to call the pseudo-left.

The Arrogance Of The Ruling Class Update

Seems I’m not the only person who dislikes the arrogant and aloof Markle person.

In yesterday’s (07/07/2019) Sunday Times, Camilla Long wrote a splendidly sarcastic piece – For keeping mum about Archie’s godparents, I rechristen the people’s prince HRH Killjoy.

She makes the same basic point I made in my original post – The Arrogance of the Ruling Class – that the dysfunctional Mountbatten-Windsor clan are allowed to live in obscene luxury at taxpayers’ expense because they fulfil the role of nonpolitical head of state. The Markle person has broken this compact.

The Arrogance Of The Ruling Class

Many years ago, when I still bought printed newspapers, I had a letter published in the international version of the Telegraph that criticised their coverage of the wedding of Kate Middleton and William Mountbatten-Windsor. The following week, several letters were published to criticise me for my “mean-spirited” attitude.

This post will make that letter look like a eulogy to the British monarchy.

Why Does This Keep Happening?

Here in Australia there was a federal election last weekend. All the polls predicted a win for the Australian Labor Party (not a typo; they use the American spelling) over the incumbent Liberal-National government. In the event, the government won an unexpected victory and actually increased its tally of seats in the House of Representatives.

This was something of a shock as more than fifty separate polls over the past three years had predicted a Labor victory. Two Liberal-National prime ministers (Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull) lost their jobs because of poor polls. However, it has emerged that the pollsters were badly wrong. I would like to offer three exclamation which I call…

1/ the Nikita Khrushchev reason,

2/ the Homer Simpson reason and

3/ the Bad Santa reason.

I Demand A People’s Season

Dark days in the great nation of East Anglia (unless you are a Norwich supporter). Ipswich Town have been relegated to the third tier of English football for the first time since 1957. I am today launching a campaign for the 2018-19 season to be replayed to get an outcome I like. This campaign will no doubt receive a boost if and when Scouse Cheats FC win the league for the first time since 1990.

Wibble.

Isn’t demanding a rerun if you don’t get your way what people do these days? And isn’t football (channeling Bill Shankly, manager of the aforementioned Scouse Cheats between 1959 and 1974) more important than Brexit?

Wibble, wibble.

(FYI, 58% of people in Ipswich voted Leave in 2016.I bet more of them care about this relegation than the EU. And that includes the 42% who voted Remain).

Unrepresentative Democracy

As I write these words, Britain has already passed Theresa may’s ‘legally binding’ Brexit date of 29th March. The current deadline of 12th April may or may not be shifted to 22nd May. Perhaps our lords and masters will go for another extension? Perhaps the EU will lose patience and refuse another extension? Whatever the outcome, you can rest assured that it will be in the interests of the ruling class rather than ordinary working people.

Brexit is not the key problem facing the UK today; it is merely a symptom of the real problem. The growth of plutocracy – rule by the rich – and plutonomy – economic policy based solely on the interest of the rich – are the real problems. Despite the lip service paid to ‘democracy,’ it is abundantly clear that many of the members of both Houses of Parliament  hold much of the electorate in contempt.

What’s The Point?

I told you so – The Fix Is In.

So did Emma Goldman…

“If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”

And Tony Benn…

“If democracy ever dies, it won’t be the Red Army; it’ll be the media that destroy democracy by denying people the voice so they can tell the government what they want.”

And Johnny Rotten…

“There’s no future, In England’s dreaming”

Even Padme Amidala…

“So this is how liberty dies.”

This is no longer about Brexit. It is about an arrogant and deeply out-of-touch ruling class that knows it can get away with anything and treats the rest of society with complete contempt.

Plutocracy And Plutonomy

“Plutonomy (from Greek ploutos, meaning ‘wealth,’ and nomes meaning ‘law,’ a portmanteau of ‘plutocracy’ and ‘economy’) is a term that Citigroup analysts have used for economies “where economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few.” See here.

“A plutocracy (Greek ploutos, ‘wealth’ + kratos, ‘power’) is a society that is controlled by people of great wealth or income.” See here.

The modern West, and indeed much of the developed world, is both a plutonomy and a plutocracy.

Beyond Leave And Remain

It has been an education watching the collective meltdown being suffered by the British ruling class since the plebs voted to take their favourite toy away from them. I said in a previous post that I would no longer refer to the political and media class as the ‘Establishment’ because it is too mild and the only way they are an ‘elite’ is in their arrogance and incompetence. They have been having this argument over the European Union for nearly 3 years now and there is little sign of any agreement 56 days (at the time of writing) from Brexit day.

I’ve said many times that the ongoing squabble over EU membership is little more than a civil war within the ruling class. As with most economic policies these days, 99% of the benefits of EU membership go to 1% of the population. Aside from a few fanatics, most ordinary voters have a similar attitude to Pooh and Piglet in the cartoon I have used as a header for this post – there was a vote, one side won and now it is time to implement the decision. Most ordinary people are not obsessed with the EU, just as they are not obsessed with race, gender, religion or transgenderism. These are the obsessions of an out-of-touch ruling in class. It is time, with apologies to Herr Nietzsche, to go beyond Leave and Remain.

Quote Of The Day #51

“If you want to understand any problem in America, you need to focus on who profits from that problem, not who suffers from the problem.”

Book Review #5

When I wrote (yet another) post against identity politics – Wealth Not Identity – I made reference to the superb sitcom ‘The Young Ones’ and in particular, the episode Bambi. In that episode, Alexei Sayle delivered the following rant…

 

“…I never really wanted to be a train driver, you know. I mean, they told me when I left school, if I got two CSEs, I’d be head of British Steel. That’s a load of nonsense, isn’t it? You look at the statistics, right? 83% of top British management have been to a public school and Oxbridge; 93% of the BBC have been to a public school and Oxbridge; 98% of the KGB have been to a public school and Oxbridge. All you get from a public school is one, a top job and two, an interest in perverse sexual practices…”

 

I highly recommend you read Robert Verkaik’s book Posh Boys: How The English Public Schools Ruin Britain.

Quote Of The Day #50

“It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonoured by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government; ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money.

 

Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess? Ye have no more religion than my horse; gold is your God; which of you have not barter’d your conscience for bribes? Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth?

 

Ye sordid prostitutes have you not defil’d this sacred place, and turn’d the Lord’s temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress’d, are yourselves gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors. In the name of God, go! ”

Brexit: Left Or Right?

The Referendum that resulted in the decision for Britain to withdraw from the European Union happened only 25 months ago. It seems longer. Such has been the rage of one section of the Establishment about being torn from the embrace of their neoliberal chums in Brussels that they have thought of little else since June 2016. Don’t get me wrong, I still think the decision to leave the EU was misguided and have little respect for the fantasies of the equally neoliberal section of the Establishment that is obsessed with somehow recreating the times when Britain was economic top dog. Brexit was, is and always shall be about an Elite Civil War.

 

One of the many lies that have grown up around Brexit is that leaving the EU is some right-wing conspiracy and everyone who voted Leave is a either racist thicko or wants to fire up the ovens for immigrants or wants to round up poor people for use as spare organ banks for the plutocratic rich. Or perhaps all three. Dismissing opposition to the EU as mere xenophobia or ‘far right’ populism demonstrates a profound ignorance of both history and economics.

 

Anyone who sees opposition to the EU as only right-wing has never heard of the 1983 Labour Party general election manifesto.

An Elite Civil War

Readers of this blog will know that I have absolutely no time for celebrity culture. I have no interest in the pointless antics of the vacuous narcissists who populate so-called ‘reality’ television. The only reason these absurd shows have spread like Japanese knotweed is because they are cheap; producers don’t have to spend money on writers or actors, they just get a bunch of exhibitionists in a room, on an island or in the ‘jungle’ and hope they will fight, argue or have sex. I suppose the Holy Grail of this type of programme would be all three.

 

However, each to their own. I don’t watch these shows but I have no right to stop other people from doing so. Unfortunately, celebrity culture, which I don’t care about, has spread into politics and real culture, which I do care about. As ever, our American friends have taken reality TV to its logical conclusion and elected an unqualified ‘celebrity’ buffoon to the most powerful position on the planet. But the so-called BBC, which absolutely loves to criticise the USA, can’t take the moral high ground as it gave a huge platform to drug-addled simpleton and alleged ‘singer’ Lily Allen to spout her ill-informed views about the problems with refugees/immigrants/asylum seekers/economic migrants (delete as you see fit) in Calais. Whilst I am a strong supporter of democracy and free speech, I can’t help but think that anyone who gets their political views from the likes of Allen should be disenfranchised.

 

Of all the political issues that have attracted comment from ‘celebrities’ the June 2016 vote to leave the European Union must be the biggest.

London’s Knife Crime ‘Epidemic’

The British media do make me laugh. They have the attention span of a forgetful goldfish in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. A couple of weeks ago, they were obsessed with Poundshop Bond villain and definite heterosexual Vladimir Putin allegedly poisoning a double agent in Salisbury (see here and here). Then last week, it was all about the disgusting anti-Semitism amongst parts of the Corbynite far left that currently dominates the Labour party. This week’s panic is all about the alleged spike in knife and gun crime in Greater London. Coming next week, Meghan Markle’s affair with Gerry Adams.

 

There does appear to have been an increase in knife and gun deaths in some of the, shall we say, less salubrious parts of  Greater London in recent months. Whether this makes London a more dangerous city than New York, as some parts of the gutter press have suggested, is pure speculation. What does appear obvious is that most of the victims of the killings come from minority ethnic communities across the capital. Some people – particularly David ‘I had a friend who died at Grenfell Tower’ Lammy – are making this a racial issue. An interesting piece in the Independent – a newspaper I usually have very little time for as it makes the Guardian and the so-called BBC look balanced and well-researched – suggested Violent crime in London would have been tackled better – and sooner – if the victims were white. I have some sympathy for the writer’s suggestion that the Establishment don’t really care about what is happening but I don’t believe this is a racial issue.

It’s A Rich Man’s World

I’d like to start my first post of 2018 by quoting those well-known Swedish philosophers, Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson…

“I work all night, I work all day
To pay the bills I have to pay
Ain’t it sad
And still there never seems to be
A single penny left for me”

Full lyrics here and video here for those of you who want to relive the 1970s (that’s for you Jeremy if you are reading this).

It has long been my belief that the Establishment in the UK only care about money. Since at least 1976, neoliberalism has dominated the economic ‘debate’ in Britain. Governments of all types – Labour, Conservative and Coalition – have bowed down before the demands of the stock markets, selling public assets at a fraction of their value, allowing social housing to be transferred from council ownership to rapacious private landlords and bailing out banks with billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money when, in their arrogance and hubris, they (deliberately?) crashed the world economy. The fact that the entire Establishment – left, right and centre – is doing everything it can to stop the UK leaving the European Union suggests to me that a lot of very rich people stand to lose a lot of money when (and if) the UK leaves the EU.

In Defence Of Disagreement Part Two

Continued from previous post.

In Defence Of Disagreement Part One

I started this blog in January 2017 and have written over a hundred posts since then. In my first ever post I gave three reasons for adding yet another voice to the cacophony that is the internet…

1/ the general coarsening of debate in the second decade of the twenty-first century;

2/ the seeming triumph of emotion over fact;

3/ the return and apparently unstoppable advance of aggressive, authoritarian religion and the scarily right-wing religionists who demand RESPECT for their beliefs.

This post is my way of summarisng what I believe after nearly a year of writing this blog before I take a break over the Christmas and New Year period. I am sure my impending visit to the UK will give me lots of things to write about in 2018. The unfortunate truth is that the things I objected to in January are still the prevailing problems in politics in the Western world.

We Cannot Afford The Super Rich

A couple of recent events have inspired this post. On another blog that I read and occasionally contribute to, a poster was writing about Rylan Clark-Neal, a person of whom I have scant knowledge. I recall seeing a cutout of Clark-Ryan when I was in a bookshop in the UK last year. When I asked the lady behind the counter who he was, she started talking about X-Factor and I stopped listening. Apparently, Clark-Ryan finished fifth in X-Factor and he has since appeared in such delights as Celebrity Big Brother, Big Brother’s Bit on the Side, This Morning, The Xtra Factor and Up Late with Rylan and Babushka. He played the part of an air steward in Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie and has also been on BBC Celebrity Masterchef. For all this he has amassed a fortune in the region of £4.5 million!

The second event happened when shopping in my local supermarket. On the past two or three occasions I have been shopping for groceries I have been accosted by a member of staff asking if I wanted to make a donation to cancer research. Whilst nonentities like Clark-Ryan can gain huge fortunes for doing zero work, vital medical research has to be funded by turning minimum wage supermarket employees into chuggers.

There is something fundamentally wrong with the economic system in 2017.

The New York Attack Update #2

The Halloween attack by jihadist Sayfullo Saipov has been quietly forgotten by the world’s media (see here for my first post and here for my first update). Meanwhile, the Hollywood and Westminster sex scandals continue apace, dragging ever more people into its ferocious maw of guilt by accusation. As I write this sentence, not one single person has been charged as a result of the accusations that have been all over the media for the past several weeks. The latest person to be accused of sexual harassment is comedian Louis CK, a man of whom I know very little. On the other hand, Sayfullo Saipov is facing federal terrorism charges. I thought that the warped priorities of the media and the Western Establishment could not surprise me anymore – but I reckoned without the Guardian.

Niall Ferguson And Unpopular Opinions

I am a big fan of the historian Niall Ferguson and I am impressed by his readiness to attack the sacred cows of both ‘progressives’ and ‘conservatives.’ In The Pity of War (1998) he put forward the unpopular view that Britain, and in particular its dithering foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey, was to blame for the hideous slaughter of the First World War. Had Britain made it clear that it would fight alongside France and Russia, Ferguson argues that Germany would not have launched its attack on Belgium. In Empire (2002), which was provocatively subtitled “How Britain made the modern world,” he argued that the British Empire was not wholly evil, an opinion guaranteed to have the average Guardianista fainting into their organic muesli. And in 2014, on the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, he argued on television and in print that Britain would have been better off staying out of the war and allowing a German victory. This would have resulted in a situation not dissimilar to today – German economic domination of Europe – and it would certainly have been better for the Jews of eastern Europe to have been conquered by Imperial rather than Nazi Germany.

The New York Attack Update

I shall not gloat that I was right in just about every one of my predictions about Sayfullo Saipov’s attack on pedestrians in New York. I will admit to being surprised at just how quickly this latest attack by a jihadist maniac has dropped off the radar – quicker even than the failed bomb attack at Parsons Green underground station. The past week has revealed is the strange priorities of the media and those who rule us.

The New York Attack

This blog is only nine months old and already I have written posts about Islamist attacks in…

Westminster in March 2017,

Manchester Arena in May 2017,

London Bridge in June 2017,

And Barcelona in August 2017.

Had I chosen to do so, I could have written posts about attacks in cities as varied as St. Petersburg, Kabul and Mogadishu. I shall not repeat myself but merely make a few predictions about what will happen in the days and weeks following the latest atrocity in Manhattan. Such is the frequency of these attacks and such is the predictability of the response by the Establishment that I am fairly confident that most of my predictions will come true.

A Proposal For Change

It is fair to say that the West is going through a period when faith in politicians and the  political system is at a very low point. Whatever one thinks about the UK’s decision to leave the European Union or Donald Trump’s election to the presidency of the United States, these are, by any standards, unusual events. As were the Front National’s Marine Le Pen winning 34% of the vote in the French presidential election in May (double what her father achieved in 2002) and the AfD winning 1 in 8 votes in the Bundestag last month.

And as faith in politicians has declined so has faith in religion; outside the USA, Christianity is dying in the West and the indigenous population of Europe and North America is not warming to the latest aggressive and intolerant version of the Abrahamic delusion that has poisoned Western society since the fourth century.

People are at once cynical and ill-informed about politics – witness the enthusiasm for Jeremy Corbyn among people in their 20s and 30s. Some of Corbyn’s most ardent fans support his plan for large-scale nationalisation but also want to want to stay in the neoliberal EU. Both of these positions are intellectually valid but they do tend to be mutually exclusive – you simply can’t have both. Look at the way Greece was treated by the EU when it was forced to sell off state utilities to pay debts to international banks. There was no ‘bailout’ for Greece, only for the banks – privatised profits but socialised losses.

It is time acknowledge that the democratic institutions of the West are in need of a thorough overhaul. I have written before about the debt the West owes to the Classical Greece and Rome rather than to so-called ‘Judeo-Christian’ values. One of the key ideas I think can revitalise democracy and end the domination of the neoliberal Establishment (by which I mean all the main political parties in the West) is sortition – the selection of public officials by lot.

The Parsons Green Attack

“Let’s go round again
Maybe we’ll turn back the hands of time
Let’s go round again
One more time
Let’s go round again
Maybe we’ll turn back the hands of time
Let’s go round again
One more time, one more time, one more time
One more time”

Average White Band.

I’ve only had this blog since 31st January 2017 but I’ve already written five separate posts about terrorist atrocities. If I may, I’d like to quote myself: on 24th May 2017, in response to the attack in Manchester I wrote…

“The fact is that nothing will be done in response to the Manchester attack, just as nothing was done about the Westminster attack.”

The four months that separate the Parsons Green Attack from those words have not led me to change my mind.

Is “Asian” A Euphemism? Update

Interesting video here about a Sikh television channel in Birmingham that has aired a film that some have claimed encourages vigilante action against those accusing of sexually grooming Sikh girls. Doesn’t fit into the narrative of the old racists – the BNP/skinhead types – or the new racists – identity-obsessed so-called “liberals.” The old racists wouldn’t know a Muslim from a Sikh because they hate all “Pakis” (apologies for this offensive term) and the new racists would struggle to find how Sikhs complaining about folks from the same ethnic background is “racist”; bet they could though!

Original post here.

Is “Asian” A Euphemism?

Asia is a vast continent. At more than 17,000,000 square miles, containing 48 countries (and six not recognised by the UN) and inhabited by over 4,000,000,000 people, it is the largest continent on Earth. Asia stretches from the Arctic Ocean in the north to Sri Lanka in the south and from Istanbul and Tel Aviv in the west to Shanghai and Tokyo in the east. It is the cradle of civilisations from Mesopotamia to the Indus Valley and the Yellow River. It contains numerous cultures and religions and people from different parts of the continent have very different “racial” appearances. But if you believe the BBC and the Guardian, the UK is suffering from an epidemic of “Asians” exploiting young girls in cities across the country – Rochdale, Rotherham and, most recently, Newcastle. Not only is this not true and insulting to the large numbers of Britons with “Asian” heritage, it contradicts the evidence in these cases. One might almost be tempted to say that this word – “Asian” – has been deliberately chosen as a euphemism.

Is Anyone Else Bored of This? Update

In my original post about the media frenzy that continues to surround the proto-Kardashian Diana Spencer, I made a comment that she was always in the Daily Express and the Daily Mail, two bottom-feeding UK newspapers. I did not expect the Guardian to jump on the bandwagon, publishing this pile of tosh from Jonathan Freedland, one of the most Establishment writers in that nest of Establishment shills. But the reason I’ve posted the link is because I would encourage people to read the comments at the bottom of the article to find out what the public really thinks about the ridiculous Spencer woman. But in one way I agree with Freedland – Spencer did help shape modern Britain, a place where talent and ability are secondary to narcissism and ubiquity. Oh, and by the way Freedland, some of us were embarrassed by the emotional incontinence that followed Spencer’s death at the time.

Is Anyone Else Bored Of This?

Apparently we are living in a “second golden age of television.” It’s true that there is a great deal of choice these days – pay TV, Apple TV, numerous streaming services – and the choices available make the poll tax levied to fund the BBC even more anachronistic than it was when I was a child. It’s also true that there are a lot of great television shows; I’ve always loved The Simpsons and Game of Thrones is excellent – the sixth and seventh series (when did television series become “seasons”?) have been of a particularly high standard. But, let’s face it, most television channels are filled with absolute dross and reality TV seems to be taking over. Baking a cake on the telly, watching people doing DIY, putting a bunch of narcissists on an island and hoping they have sex – this is not my idea of entertainment. Reality TV has spawned whole legions of people who are simply famous for being famous. When scrolling through a news website the other day I saw an advertisement for the new series of Celebrity Big Brother – I recognised one of the contestants because he used to have a minor role in EastEnders. Apparently, it is enough to appear on one reality TV show to qualify as a “celebrity” for another show. This is a longwinded introduction to my real topic – the refusal of some elements of the UK media to allow the proto-Kardashian, the original talentless celebrity, famous for wearing clothes, to fade into well-deserved obscurity. I refer of course to Diana Spencer, erstwhile Princess of Wales.

The Delusions Of Tony Blair Part 4,652

I have no strong feelings about the European Union; I am not particularly in favour of the EU but nor do a suffer from the visceral hatred that some of the Conservative party appear to have. This hatred has seen the last three Conservative Prime Ministers brought down by divisions over Europe and it will almost certainly see off a fourth, probably by the end of this year. If I was still living in the UK, I would probably have voted to remain in the EU, seeing the status quo as the least worst option. In that I am rather like Jeremy Corbyn who appeared to abandon his lifelong opposition to the EU; Corbyn claimed he was “seven out of ten” in favour of the EU – this despite being a follower of Tony Benn, who “loathed” the EU and as a Cabinet Minister campaigned for a “No” vote in the 1975 Referendum. However, despite not sharing the intense dislike for all things EU on the Labour left and Conservative right, I am mystified by the insane Europhilia evidenced in all mainstream parties – the Scottish Nazis, the Illiberal Undemocrats, the Conservatives and Labour. And no more insane Europhile exists than the war criminal himself, Tony Blair.

The $22,000 Fidget Spinner

There are few things guaranteed to upset me more than the arrogance, vulgarity and sheer sense of entitlement displayed by the global super rich. Ipswich’s repeated failure to return to the Premier League and the existence of Victoria Beckham are the only things I can think of that give me similar attacks of rage. So, you can imagine the spike in my blood pressure when I heard about a fidget spinner for sale at $22,000 (£13,000). It reminded me of the time back in the 1980s when Mike Tyson paid £650,000 for a watch. It demonstrates clearly that the obscene wealth enjoyed by some of the global rich is also obscenely wasteful  – as well as being economically illiterate and environmentally unsustainable.

Shakespeare Is Garbage

Whilst on a short family break earlier this week, I made the mistake of turning on one of the network channels to see the news headlines.  I was greeted with the sight of a person with a waxed moustache (look at me, aren’t I eccentric!) dribbling on about a modernised version of Shakespeare based on the second Globe Theatre that some university professor had spent the last five years (!) researching. My first reaction was that any university that pleads poverty whilst paying someone to waste five years on this tosh should be cut off from public funds. My second thought was to wonder why Shakespeare continues to have such a hold on our culture four centuries after his death. Personally, I feel the same way about Shakespeare as Rowan Atkinson in “Blackadder: Back and Forth.” And I don’t think I’m alone.

What Is “White Supremacism”?

As I have written in several posts, one of the British Establishment’s favourite tools is identity politics. This is a variation of the classic tactic of dividing ordinary working people into mutually antagonistic tribes in order to stop them uniting against the economic oppression by the rich that has been the default setting of all societies since the emergence of the first civilisations in c.3500BC. The Establishment love to label anyone and anything they dislike as “far right” and I’ve noticed the re-emergence of “white supremacy” as a bogeyman on the Establishment’s own mouthpiece, the BBC. But I would argue that the real racists and the real white supremacists are the British Establishment themselves.

Hatred In The UK

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Throughout history we see the oppressor and oppressed in constant opposition to each other. This fight is sometimes hidden and sometimes open. However, each time the fight ends in either a revolutionary reconstruction of society or in the classes’ common ruin.” Karl Marx wrote these words in 1848 but they apply equally to 2017. The British Establishment only care about money and they hate people who don’t have money.  They don’t hate you because of your race. They don’t hate you because of your religion. They don’t hate you because of your sex. They don’t hate you because of your sexuality. They hate you because you don’t have any money.

A Shocking Outbreak of Racism

An absolutely shocking week of racism in the UK. Ever since the inconclusive election on 8th June, Theresa May has been looking to Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party to prop up her wounded government. This has led to attacks on the Paisleyite DUP’s religious fundamentalism, anti-abortion stance and all-round bigotry and homophobia by the protectors of public morality at the Guardian, the Independent and (of course) the BBC. Don’t these people realise that attacking someone’s religion is the worst form of racism? And if that wasn’t enough, that political giant Tiny Tim Farron has been forced out of his job as leader as the Illiberal Undemocrats – despite increasing their representation in parliament from a puny 8 in 2015 to a muscular 12 in 2017 – because his Evangelical Christian beliefs led him to be less than enthusiastic about gay sex when interviewed on television. Horrible, horrible racism.

Quote of the Day #11

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink… [Language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language make it easier for us to have foolish thoughts… But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better.”

Sara Khan Not Anjem Choudhary

In my first ever post I outlined my reasons for starting this blog. I said that I disliked the coarsening of political debate and the intolerance of differing opinions that has disfigured political discourse in the West over the past couple of decades. I also decried the triumph of emotion over reason and some people’s apparent inability to separate their opinions from their identity, as if disagreeing with the former was an attack on the latter. But most of all I wrote about how I was concerned about the ongoing march of aggressive, authoritarian, intolerant, far-right religion.

The Manchester Attack Update #2

In the days since the attack on Manchester Arena, the Establishment has continued to display its ignorance, its racism and its cowardice, both moral and physical. It is all very well to order the plebs to “Keep Calm and Carry On” when you are protected by legions of taxpayer-funded armed guards. Notice too how the soldiers that have been deployed on our streets have been used to guard the very centre of the Establishment – Parliament and Buckingham Palace. Gibbering in fear over a few medievalist religious fanatics is not a good look for our glorious leaders. And, by the way, the “Keep Calm” campaign was scrapped during the Second World War because it was considered patronising when the UK was facing a real threat from a heavily armed industrial nation rather than a bunch of friendless losers who have watched too many beheading videos on YouTube.

The Manchester Attack Update

I was right. Yesterday I wrote about how the British Establishment – by which I mean the entire media and political class – is racist against people of South Asian, Middle Eastern or North African ancestry. Their racism is most obvious in their insistence on calling people “Muslims” because of their ethnicity; claiming to know what people think because of their genetic makeup is the very definition of racism. The reason that the long-predicted anti-Muslim backlash never happens is because the ordinary people of Britain are far less racist than their rulers. Proof of the ignorance and racism of the UK media was provided by, of all possibilities, Cosmopolitan magazine.

The Manchester Attack

Here we go again. It is only two months since an Islamist drove a car onto the pavement on Westminster Bridge and killed a bunch of “infidels” in order to get his reward from his imaginary friend. Now we in the aftermath of an other attack inspired by a twisted belief system that thinks the murder of children and teenagers attending a concert is pleasing to a psychopathic deity. Depressingly, the words used by Prime Minister Theresa May in responding to the events in Manchester are almost identical to those she used when commenting about those in Westminster. Are we, like Sisyphus and Bill Murray, condemned to repeat the same set of experiences over and over again?

Jeremy Corbyn Is Right!

I am not a fan of Jeremy Corbyn. He reminds me too much of the sneering pseudo-leftists I met at university. You know the type, came straight to university from thirteen years of private education, picked up a couple of second-hand books by Lenin and think they understand the plight of the workers because they once helped the nanny with the washing up. I am well aware that this is reverse snobbery but at the same time it is a perfect description of Emily “people vote for Theresa May because they like her hair” Thornberry who is at once the stupidest and most arrogant person in British politics. Quite a feat when Diane Abbott and Tony Blair are still around.

UK General Election 2017 Update #3

The Conservatives have been in power now for seven years, albeit propped up by the Illiberal Undemocrats and their comedy ex-leader Nick “no increase in university fees unless it helps me become Deputy Prime Minister” Clegg for five years. They have decided to pursue a controversial, so-called “hard” Brexit on the basis of last year’s narrow referendum victory for “Leave.” Any opposition party worth its name should be at least in contention for government. Unfortunately the UK does not have an opposition party worth its name.

UK General Election 2017 Update #2

Some elections are hard to call. Tony Blair was guaranteed a victory in 1997 against the exhausted Major government and Margaret Thatcher had little chance of losing in 1983 against a divided Labour Party. Other elections are much more difficult to call. I was astonished when John Major beat Neil Kinnock back in 1992 and I think both David Cameron and the Scottish Nazi Party were surprised by the results of the 2015 election. However predictable the result, the losers always pretend they are in with a chance; Ian Duncan-Smith, the most inept party leader of recent times, used to boast that he was going to spend “several years” as Prime Minister – even his own party didn’t believe him and threw him out before he could lead them to defeat.

What Does “Far Right” Mean?

Words are important. Indeed, it may be said that language is what makes us human. From the philosophical musings of Socrates in Classical Athens to the information overload on the internet today, words have helped us to understand the world around us. Unfortunately, too many words have been hijacked and made to serve a different purpose. Words become cudgels with which to beat opponents, labels with which to smear enemies. Amongst the favoured insults of our times are “racist,” “Islamophobe” (or any other term ending in “phobe’) and “misogynist.” But the king of insults to the pseudo-liberals and faux-leftists who dominate so much of the media is “far right.”

UK General Election 2017 Update

The most boring general election in living memory is less than a week old and the feeling is that a great many voters are sick of it already. The fact that it is the fourth major vote in four years may be responsible. Or perhaps voters are less than inspired by the choice between Jeremy “Lenin’s granddad” Corbyn and Theresa “I hid behind the sofa during the referendum” May. Just when the campaign couldn’t seem to get any worse, up pops the most hated and most deluded man in British politics, Tony Blair.

UK General Election 2017

I was wrong about both the major elections in 2016. I thought the British people would vote in favour of remaining in the European Union – mostly out of inertia and fear of change rather than any great love for this corrupt and incompetent organisation. I also thought Hillary “Elect me because I’m a woman” Clinton would defeat Donald “I’m a friend of the working man but I live like an emperor in my golden tower” Trump. Shows what I know! But most of the people who get paid to comment on politics called these two elections wrong too. And it hasn’t stopped them commenting so why should I stop?

Quote of the Day #6

The Aztec pipiltin (noble class) “wore cotton clothes, sandals, feather work, and jade ornaments, lived in two-storey  stone houses, ate the flesh of human sacrifices, drank chocolate and fermented beverages (in moderation) in public, kept concubines, entered the royal palace at will, could eat in the palace dining hall, and performed special dances at public rituals. They did not pay taxes.”

Abolish the BBC

Some institutions are so rotten that they cannot be reformed, only ended. The absurd British monarchy that reserves the position of head of state for the deeply unlikeable Windsor-Mountbatten clan is one such institution; the kleptocratic fossils of the House of Lords another. The spectacularly corrupt FIFA, an organisation that resembles a gigantic money-laundering operation more than a sports administrative body, should have been declared illegal the moment it awarded the world’s premier sports competition to the petro-gangster states of Russia and Qatar. To this roll of dishonour I would now add the BBC.

The Ongoing Problem of Housing Affordability

“A single generation transformed London into a capital where no person with normal resources could hope to own a modest home.” So begins an article by Guardian journalist Deborah Orr on the ongoing problem of housing affordability in London and, increasingly, in the UK as a whole . Coincidentally, the Australian Federal Treasurer (equivalent to the Chancellor of the Exchequer) spoke out this week about similar problems in Sydney and Melbourne.

A Corrupt and Arrogant Establishment

I dislike identity politics. And by “dislike” I mean frothing-at-the-mouth, tinfoil-hat-wearing hatred. The faux-left in the UK and elsewhere seems absolutely obsessed with dividing the population into ever smaller categories and with Orwellian newspeak to distinguish those categories. Just today  I came across a new term – “transmisogyny” – in an article in the Independent that seeks to justify curtailing the right to freedom of speech. I have quoted sources as varied as Malcolm X and Tom Watson (a nineteenth century US Congressman) to back up my argument that the only people who gain from this division of society into mutually-antagonistic tribes are the rich. The apostles of identity politics, most of whom are minted (it’s easy to care about the toileting arrangements of transgender battery hens when you don’t have to worry about the rent), are distracting people (deliberately?) from the ongoing class war of the rich against everyone else. Such is the background to the ongoing scandal of the House of Lords.

The Establishment and Brexit

I did not vote in the 2016 Referendum on whether the UK should leave the European Union as I have lived abroad now for more than a decade. Had I voted it is likely I would have been an unenthusiastic Remainer – a bit like Jeremy Corbyn. However, like “libertarian Marxist” Mick Hume, I have been appalled by the undemocratic response to the Leave vote.  And when the entire British Establishment are in favour of something I am always suspicious. Then I saw this interview with the great John Lydon.

George Osborne and the Foul Stench of Corruption Update

I’m wondering what’s wrong in the world this morning. Owen Jones, the Guardian’s very own Islamist-apologist-in-chief, wrote this article on George Osborne’s many jobs and I found myself agreeing with him.

George Osborne and the Foul Stench of Corruption

I have never been a fan of George Osborne. I am aware that a lot of people dislike him for reasons of inverted snobbery and I’m afraid that is part of the reason I find Osborne difficult to stomach. It’s always best to be mindful of one’s own prejudices but Osborne’s antics since being unceremoniously booted out of the Treasury last year have confirmed my feelings about the arrogant, incompetent and, above all else, smug and complacent  “elite” who run Britain today.

Karl Marx was Right (and so was Bill Clinton)

Whilst faux-leftists continue to obsess over the toileting arrangements of transgender battery hens, the war against ordinary working people continues apace.

Australia Post and the Obscene Pay Packet

One of the many concerning aspects of capitalism in the 21st Century is the way reward has become divorced from effort. By this, I do not mean the enormous pay given to entertainers and sportspeople; I do not even mean the vacuous “celebrities” amassing vast fortunes from posting pictures of their backsides on the internet. No, I am concerned that some organisations are paying massively over the odds for what is essentially administrative and/or secretarial work.

Beckham and the Non-Existent Knighthood

I don’t usually pay attention to the mindless goings-on of  “celebrities.”