'The Old People's Town'

'So it’s the consequence of your urban planning, or your colonialism, or your wealth, or just plain you. We’ll blame anything rather than confront the central truth—that when an old, relatively unicultural society admits in a short space of time a large, young, fecund population from somewhere else, you are setting in motion a process of transformation. Caldwell asks the obvious question—“Can you have the same Europe with different people?” and gives the obvious answer: no. “Europe is not welcoming its newest residents but making way for them.”

In the end, that coy French euphemism for the, um, rioters of no particular socio-religious persuasion—“youths”—gets to the heart of the matter: youths are youthful, and ethnic Europeans aren’t. In the heavily North African Paris suburb of Montfermeil, the Muslim children from the housing projects pass on their way to school each morning a neighbourhood of detached houses still occupied by French natives: they call it “la ville des vieux”—the old people’s town.'

Mark Steyn reviews Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe.

What Happens When Hippies Think They've Turned Right

2 Rifles has suffered more casualties over the 4½ months of its tour than any British unit serving in Helmand. Twenty soldiers have been killed from the mixed unit of riflemen and fusiliers, including six in the past week. The number of wounded, a figure that cannot be disclosed for security reasons, ranks alongside that suffered by British infantry units during fighting in Europe in the Second World War.

When I read this I wondered, not for the first time, how much longer the British Government can keep 'managing' the 'outcomes' of this war. Can mutiny be far away?

Meanwhile, glad to see that other masterstroke of neo-con foreign policy, Iraq, is toddling along nicely towards stable, liberal democracy. They'll have MTV, no-wage burger franchises, a moronic film industry and valet parking in no time.

The Great Dumb Down and A Bright Future

The dumb-Down proceeds apace!

But grade inflation brings devaluation, so... and blimey, even the Guardian's noticing.

Of course, the dumb-down and course-work plodding style of A-levels was brought in to make it easier for girls and penalise boys, to facilitate the gender revolution.

Don't be surprised if the 'intellectual elite' of tomorrow, in politics, the civil service and the media are a bunch of cocky, narcissistic ignoramuses who talk in up-speak. You'll be working in giant Tescos till you're ninety to pay their fat pensions. While we're on the subject, I noted Gus O'Donnell's letter tucked away in the back of the Mail last week, which I can't find online, boasting about how the civil service will be a gynarchy by 2020. What manner of civil servant O'Donnell is can be seen here.

Like the advert says, the future's bright.

I Was Waiting For This

Two months ago, possibly on this blog but definitely in conversation, I predicted that MPs would be on upwards of 100,000 pounds per annum within five years, in return for showing great forbearance in the matter of having their large scale expenditure frauds removed. So, this came as no surprise.

Harriet

See my post below. Who could do the same thing for the Tories?

Why I'm Voting for Harriet/Afghanistan Elections

And lo, it suddenly hit me. Last Friday. I was going to vote Labour at the next general election and that was that. Now, this may come as a shock to readers of this blog. As you know, I am merely a poor wretch, lately jettisoned from the world of journalism, and now adrift in post-boom Britain, where jobs are scarce (see picture) and are usually aimed at foreigners who savour the small wages here because they are ten times what they get back in Poland/Czech
Republic/Albania/Wherever (Mandelson doesn’t mention wages when he tells the British unemployed to go abroad to work). I liked that advert because it showed that wages for that sort of job have risen about 75 pence in 14 years. I know, because I used to do jobs like that and by the looks of things will soon be doing them again. Thanks, Tony, Gordon and Peter. I love the country you've created. Wages for the poor haven't gone up much but by golly their rents have! Well done, Islington, mass immigration was such a brilliant idea. Excuse the sarcasm and note the truth.
I don’t need to reiterate my criticism of Labour, do I? So why am I going to be voting for them? Because Harriet Harman will, hopefully, be in charge by then.
I was browsing in WH Smith’s last week. I saw The Spectator (a magazine I rarely buy these days, on the grounds that most of the writers are wankers and the whole thing is inching its way further towards being little more than a sort of American Express members’ magazine: adverts for watches and ‘Luxury supplements’ every five minutes. Plus they keep making people I hate ‘associate editors’) and noted that Rod Liddle had had the same thought I’d had a while ago: Labour will be very badly damaged very quickly if Harman becomes leader. Yes, believe it or not Labour can fall a lot further than they have already.
But that’s not the only reason for voting Labour. Another four years of hardline Harmanism would slowly drag the rich into this spitbowl and, quite frankly, seeing as they’ve remained untouched and grown wealthier through whole Thatcher/Major/Blair narrative it’s high time they, like the rest of us, have their lives touched by the compassion and fairness of new Labour, don’t you think? Add to that a growing sense that Westminster is steadily regrouping after the expenses scandal and needs to be taught a real lesson: as Alan Duncan’s remarks last week demonstrated, they have learned nothing from being exposed as swindlers.
A Harman government would compound the errors of the Brown/Blair years while bringing fresh stupidity to the table: She could fully bankrupt the country very quickly and bring Labour’s many hatreds and neuroses to the boil in a trice. There would be a vast new drives to go much further in implementing the policies that have made everyone hate Labour; the public sector would become a sort of Marxoid gynarchy; ‘misogyny’would be ‘stamped out’; billions of borrowed money ploughed into ‘equality’; the current underhand Labour policy of underfunding the armed services and diluting them into a ‘European Army’ would be stepped up, despite the country being at war; Labour’s policy of EU and non-EU mass immigration would be fiercely encouraged; the lobotomy of schools and education would gather greater pace; the monarchy would be closer to abolition than at any time for centuries; the police emasculation will continue apace; violent disorder and organised drug addiction will grow. As now, there will be no money but borrowed money. Taxes will soar. The journey to third world status and third world services, begun under Blair and Brown will be properly under way and steaming ahead all engines firing. The sins of the empire will be atoned for – the wet dream of every Labour ideologue – and England will be smothered. Except for the wealthy, civilised life will be a dim memory. Like now but more so, sirens, hip-hop and the Muslim call to prayer will be the soundtrack to urban living. Recycling will be encouraged at all spare moments, rather like the way that under Mao’s cultural revolution every person with a few minutes spare time had to work at digging a hole in their back yard.
For the sane man the only response will be alcohol abuse or revolt. One can almost believe that civil war would occur, and that, plus revolution, is just what this old country needs. Then we’ll all know where we really are, instead of the micro-managed media mirage of today. At the very least it will make a nice change, as my old granny used to say.
Of course, we won’t get a Harman government we’ll get a Cameron one; and the minute that expenses-fiddling individual sets foot on the Downing Street doormat all the forces of the liberal left, so long quiet about this country’s problems and economic woes, will start shouting and carrying on as if there hadn’t been a Labour government for 13 years. The Specials will probably re-release Ghost Town, even though high streets were boarded up and fascism grew fast under Labour rule. By three months in it will all be the Etonians’ fault and, though I dislike the Tory party, I don’t see why they should get the blame for what Blair and Brown have caused. Also, a Conservative victory will allow the Political Class ideal cover to repair and entrench itself after the disaster of the expenses scandal. This would be very bad for all of us.
So, I’m voting Labour at the next election and I urge you to do so as well. It is, as a politician would say, the only way to make real change happen.

It was sad to see the BBC reporter holding up the fake election papers he’d been sold in Kabul. It makes me angry to think that British soldiers’ lives are being thrown away to ensure a crooked election in a terminally corrupt and medieval country, and all on account of the vanity and stupidity of neo-cons and Anthony Charles Lynton “Tony” Blair.
The war in Afghanistan is lost; we are already defeated in the long run. It only remains for years of government spin to attempt to paper over the cracks, and for inquiries to come to some anodyne conclusions. It and Iraq are the biggest foreign policy mistakes for fifty years and there’s no way round it.
David Miliband, Her Majesty’s Foreign Secretary, writing about the elections in the Daily Telegraph this morning, asserts that Ninety per cent of the Afghan population is ‘reasonably confident that they will be fair’.
The BBC reporter I saw this morning was offered two hundred voting ID cards for a few pounds. The ‘allies’ can stay up there for fifty years and they won’t eradicate corruption or religious extremism.
They certainly won’t stop terrorism, which is the stated aim. It is a peculiarity of this government’s intellectual incoherence that they don’t mind starting wars in distant countries and throwing soldiers’ lives away but the idea of proper border controls, by which I mean burkas off at the airport door and an awful lot of searching and rigorous enquiry, appalls them. Yes, that is because it would disproportionately affect one of the Left’s most favoured minorities. Better to have an endless war in Afghanistan than annoy the Muslim Council of Britain and slow down airlines’ profits.
That’s a little specious, I know, but not so much that it doesn’t provoke the smile of recognition, in this author at least. After all, this government and its predecessors have allowed an extraordinary amount of jihadists to move freely in this country. Over the past eight years, while the Army has been ‘fighting terrorism’ abroad, the Cultural Marxism of this government has ensured that Islamist clerics have operated with near impunity in Britain.
The West must get out of Afghanistan. Those who wish to leave that country ahead of the Taleban rule can be re-located in the country that started the war: America. If the Taleban then wish to allow Afghanistan to become a fort for international Islamic terrorism against the West, the West must respond to any acts of war and aggression by carpet-bombing the country flat. The Taleban cannot win a conflict on those terms.
Otherwise, we should leave the mullahs to their goats and start to sort out the mess in our own countries.

New fiction: Double Raspberries

I've grown so weary of writing and thinking about the war in Afghanistan and the British government's attitudes to it that I decided to subject it to the artistic process and see what came out. The idea for this story first occurred to me a year or so ago, and then it was to be a radio play called The Self-Serving Bias, about middle-management civil servants and a funding scandal. I abandoned the play on the grounds that Radio 4 (the only producers and broadcasters of radio plays in Britain) would never accept any work that was critical/satirical of or about the kind of decaff-socialist, self-regarding, politically correct, self-serving, deceitful, bureacracy-and-jargon-heavy micro-managerialism that runs Britain today, on the grounds that the modern BBC is run exactly like that and by the type of people who appear in this story. Still, the idea percolated, and, as the late trombonist George Chisholm used to say, it comes out here.

Double Raspberries
By William Gazy



Jamie Sping, junior policy development officer (feeder grade 2, civilian; lower quartile), media unit, Ministry of Defence, was playing a computer game in the office of his immediate superior, Dylan Banner (upper quartile, civilian; pension grade 3), a senior policy advisor liaising between Number 10 and the Ministry of Defence. Banner stood behind him eating a small triangle-shaped egg and cress sandwich – a leftover from the lunchtime meeting on fresh media approaches to the war in Afghanistan.
“Has this got the motionplus feature?”
“Nah,” said Sping. “I did order it but this came instead. It’s crap.”
“Grab the sea-trike: you get points.”
“No, extra life.”
“Well, pick it up.”
“Shit, missed.”
“You’re crap.”
Banner wandered over to the window, chewing. Through the net curtains he could see the back of a statue. Traffic passed along Whitehall.
“I felt like shite in there today,” said Banner. “The Prime Minister was on one.”
“Heavy weekend?”
“Went to Platitude.”
“Who was on?”
“Kung-Fu Jesus headlined – you know, Jody Crunj’s band, he was the drummer in Cyst.”
“Wicked.”
“Like, I grew up on Cyst. Soundtrack to my teens. Wild night. Got very messy. Done some pills that were like pink callies in the 90s. ’Course, I was mashed all the way back from Oxfordshire – couldn’t even dismantle the tent, left it there – and then everyone ended up round ours and we drank everything I had in the flat. Absolutely battered. Regretted it this morning. Tube was all fucked. Held vom till Waterloo. A mountain of shit waiting for me here.”
Sping laughed. “Bollocks: missed the sea-trike again. Have you got through the zombie swimming pool bit? If you blow their arms off before their heads you get double raspberries.”
The door to Banner’s office opened and Stubb, Ministry-to-Army media policy liaison officer (feeder grade four, civilian; median), walked in. He looked harassed.
“Sebastian’s going apeshit downstairs. His boyfriend’s lost his dog.”
Sebastian was their nickname for a prominent member of the government.
“What’s he still doing here anyway?’ asked Sping. “The meeting finished three hours ago.”
“Because he’s an interfering cunt. Been in an office downstairs with the PM. Kicked up a stink about combing the room for bugs. The dog must have come this way, because there’s a turd out there, so watch out.”
“Who’d be interested in listening to those two?” asked Banner. “I suppose the Taleban might like to get advanced warning on which bands will be playing Kabul?”
“Eh?”
“That was one of the things that came out of the lunchtime meeting,” said Banner. “Sebastian reckoned a rock concert in Kabul would be a ‘publicity coup for the West’. ‘Bring people together’, ‘show the West’s good side.’”
“You jest?” asked Sping, turning round.
“Nope. Sebastian’s full of radical ideas at the moment. Maybe he’s in love. He said: ‘it’ll be like the old days.’”
“What does he mean by that?”
“Fuck knows. When this government was popular, perhaps?”
“Have you seen either his boyfriend or the dog?” asked Stubb irritably, “because I’ve been roped in to looking for them.”
“You might get a knighthood if you find them,” said Banner.
A thick-necked sergeant-major, in his 40s, passed down the corridor behind Stubbs, whistling for Sebastian’s dog. “Kisses,’ he called softly, in a heavy Glaswegian accent. “Kisses, where are you?”



Two days later Banner had a breakfast meeting with his boss, Communications Liasion Director (Senior Civil Servant, 99th Percentile Grade) David Hirudine, and Stubb. Hirudine, neat, forties, grey temples and gym slim, was sniffing at an avocado.
Hirudine said, without looking up from the fruit: “Keep getting abusive emails and phone calls from the British Legion asking us why the PM or the Foreign Secretary or someone isn’t meeting the bodies when they arrive back from Afghanistan. What can we do about this?”
“Persuade the PM to do it?” said Banner. “Just the once? Make the gesture, keep ‘em quiet?”
“No, I don’t mean that,” said Hirudine irritably, “what can be done about stopping the bloody British Legion getting through to my voicemail and email? Why have a web team, an internal comms team and whatnot and then end up doing the front of house yourself?”
He turned to Stubb. “The sausages are good, aren’t they? This avocado is good. I had a little moan about catering and it seems to have hit home. Same with the booze: I’m preparing a preliminary beverage report, no pun intended, which you might like to contribute something to. I floated the idea of a wine committee, like they have in the Commons.”
Hirudine turned to Banner.
“Look, it’s not a bad idea to suggest the PM goes down to meet the dead, but you know perfectly well he won’t do it. He’ll say his predecessor didn’t and if he didn’t, then why should, etcetera. I don’t know why Shining One didn’t; he could have got away with it, made himself look good: cried and so on.”
Shining One was the their nickname for the Prime Minister’s predecessor.
“But it might do the PM some good, in a way,” said Stubb. “In the polls, I mean.”
Hirudine changed the subject.
“This rock concert Sebastian was going on about on Monday,” he said. “It’s starting to take off as an idea. Had the BBC on the phone at 5.45am wanting to do a phone interview about it with anyone from here.”
“How did they get hold of it?” asked Stubb.
“Sebastian, obviously,” said Banner.
“Of course,” said Hirudine. “He’s briefed them behind our backs. Complete lunacy, of course. But it’s taking off now and we’ll have to roll with it. Sebastian’s office is already doing a feasibility study vis a vis insurance and agents and talent fees and all that. I had a email from him a minute ago and he wants an office, essentially a media hub, set up in Kabul as soon as possible.”
Banner looked at the front of that morning’s Times. Heavy fighting in Afghanistan, and heavy casualties. Three deaths.
“So this concert, you don’t think it will blow over?”
“No, I don’t,” said Hirudine. “Sebastian says that he has extensive contacts in what he called ‘the rock world’. Says he met Jody Crunj at a backstage party a couple of years ago and, unlike most pop musicians, he wasn’t ranting that Iraq and Afghanistan are evil imperialist adventures.”
“He’s very much in the minority on that one, I’d say,” said Banner.
“Quite possibly,” said Hirudine. “But it’s in motion now and we’ll have to run with it. Sebastian will open the coffers up for it and the funding. In regard to us, it boils down to this: someone’s going to have to go and set the hub up in Kabul and that’s that.
Silence followed this.
“It’ll have to be one of us,” said Hirudine. “Or, rather, one of you two.”
“How can I go?’ said Stubb. “I was downhanded the re-incentivising of our media affiliates, plus the hits-and-clicks web delivery focus group to sort out.”
Hirudine turned to Banner. “Dylan?”
“My workload isn’t exactly light,” he said in a voice more hollow than usual. “I have people in my management line that might be appropriate.”
“That doesn’t strike me as being the best solution. You’d have to make a sound recommendation, which would have to be approved. I’d far prefer it if you went, Dylan.”
“OK, I’ll go,” said Banner.
“Now,” said Hirudine, changing the subject again. “I was briefed by the PM that we, as the Min of Def media, should be briefing everyone that the equipment in Afghanistan is good and getting better all the time. There is an adequate amount of helicopters in Afghanistan and, where there isn’t, there soon will be, which for you means there already is and, furthermore will be more very shortly. Armoured cars and so on are being developed that are invulnerable, etcetera. Everything’s on an upward curve of efficiency and strength; I know this is basic stuff but; never give an inch on this, ever. Never get put on the back foot by reporters over this. Ever. It’s the PM’s new golden rule.”
“Oh yeah?”
“According to Sebastian, some lawyer got arsehole drunk at Chequers the other weekend and said he wouldn’t be surprised if, quote, ‘the fucking lot of you didn’t all end up in court over the two wars’. Rattled the PM, who made the mistake of getting lippy and asking the man ‘what he meant by that’. ’Course, the bloke rattled off a prima facie case that should have been obvious from the start and that ‘they’d all be lying through their teeth till the day they died, just to stay out of a courtroom’.”
“What happened?”
“PM went into a sulk. Then someone said they’d heard that Shining One was now running around in Washington suggesting that ‘the allies’ should invade Zimbabwe.”
“What did PM say?”
“A very rude word. Then he stormed out.”
Banner’s blackberry buzzed. He read the message.
“Two killed last night in North Afghanistan. Corporal and sergeant. No names as yet.”
“Family bereavement media briefing pack four,” said Stubb, apparently as an aide memoir. He wrote something down. “Four B if they’re Scottish,” reminded Banner. “And three C if they’re Welsh.”



The working day was winding down. Jamie Sping was playing the computer game in Banner’s office.
“Get the fucking sea-trike!” yelled Banner, leaning over the screen.
“Got it,” said Sping. “Extra life.”
Banner consulted the time. “Fancy a quick pint?”
They went to the Red Lion, down Whitehall. Banner outlined the situation.
“So, basically,” said Ping, who always used the word basically in any work-related business whether it was needed or not, “someone’s got to go to Afghanistan to set the hub up?”
“Yeah,’ said Banner. “To be honest, like all the crazier policy drives from Sebastian it’ll fizzle out when the initial allocation budget dries up and nobody will sign off more money for it. Then the project will be renamed and only the hardiest FOI-sender will be able to find out where the money went. For you, on the other hand, it represents a chance to do yourself a bit of good. You can shine here. Go to ‘theatre’ and you’ll get points. Double raspberries. You’ll probably go up a grade far quicker than you would have and women will think you’re hot.”
“I am hot,’ said Sping.
“And all you’ll be doing is sitting in an office on fucking facebook all day. Like here in other words, except you’ll be in Kabul.”



The Times, always warm towards Sebastian, went big on the rock concert the next day.
“Fuck me,” said Stubb slowly, as he read the story in Banner’s office. “I like this bit: ‘A source at the Ministry of Defence confirmed that Bob Dylan has been approached for the concert in Kabul’. Genius. Your idea?”
“Yeah,” said Banner. “We-ell, you might as well go to town with it. We did approach him as well – he was playing golf at his Scottish castle – and he got his office to tell us to fuck off.”



To avoid a confrontation with Hirudine and the paperwork involved in sending Sping to Afghanistan, Banner presented at his doctor’s surgery complaining of anxiety and depression and got himself signed off work for a month. He did some housework, web-browsing and bought tickets to Glastonbury for himself and his wife. One afternoon his mobile rang and it was Hirudine.
“I realise you didn’t want to go, but is Sping up to it?”
Banner was prepared.
“Technically, yes. Emotionally, yes. True, he’s lower quartile, but a riser. He’s clearly got potential, otherwise why did we take him from feeder grade? You said yourself at that corpcom meeting that if bigger projects are not downhanded then our technological terrain and crossbriefing interstices will remain at Management Model II.”
“Yes, I did, didn’t I?”
“In your power point presentation you said ManMod III requires nano-dynamism and vision-compliance from the lower quartile. ManMod III will remain non-impactful unless the lower quartile expedite synergistically. Other words, the guy’s a newbie, but I thought Sping was an ideal candidate for this project. If you don’t get the guy a challenge, he’s heading for long grass and bandwidth supervision, which, to be fair, seems a waste.”
“Thanks, Dylan,’ said Hirudine brightly, “I Hope you get better soon.”
Banner clicked off his phone. He switched on the television. The rolling news on cable showed more flag-draped coffins being unloaded at an RAF base.



Banner had been back at work for a month and several more soldiers had been killed in Afghanistan when Stubb came into his office at speed.
“Heard the news?”
“Go on.”
“Sebastian’s downstairs going apeshit.”
“Why?”
“Someone trod on his boyfriend’s dog – and Jody Crunj’s has walked out of the rock concert project.”
“That’s fucked that then. He was their only chance. No one will touch it now”
“Sebastian’s in with Hirudine now. Ranting and raving. Hirudine wants a meeting this afternoon on briefing angles.”
“I won’t be there, thank God – ManMod III aggregation delivery strategy.”



A few months passed. The war carried on with no discernible progress. Retired Generals wrote imploring letters to the The Times and the Daily Telegraph about the government’s duty to provide adequate equipment to the armed services. The media team were kept busy issuing briefings that showed that the Army’s equipment was more than adequate. More soldiers were killed. Fresh Family Media Bereavement Packs Four, Four B and Three C were printed. Meanwhile, the concert project disappeared from the media.
“Sebastian won’t have it mentioned,” said Stubb, who had been in Sebastian’s offices at the Commons that afternoon and was regaling Banner with gossip over lager in the Red Lion.
“I’m not surprised,” said Banner. “Don’t suppose he’s got much to worry about, though. The news coming out of Afghanistan is so bad the papers don’t need to start digging around that particular fiasco. I’ve never looked at the money spent on it but I wouldn’t mind betting it could have bought something useful for the war. If we’re lucky, if the story ever does come out it’ll just be a few pars in the back of Private Eye.”
Both men’s blackberries buzzed simultaneously. They consulted them and said together, “Sping’s been kidnapped.”
Stubb looked at Banner. Banner said, “for fuck’s sake.”
Both men drained their pints and headed back to the Ministry.



It all came out in the media. The rock concert, the money: the bill and expenses for event planning was called ‘eye-watering’. There were front page pictures of Sping; Sping in happier days on holiday and a video capture of him, blurry and crying in a cage – “bit like a Francis Bacon painting,” observed Hirudine, who was doing an evening course in Modern Art at the Tate. There were pictures of Jody Crunj and Kung Fu Jesus playing on stage; pictures of the office in Kabul from which Sping and two bodyguards were kidnapped; pictures of Sping’s parents and girlfriend. A meteor shower of Freedom of Information Requests hit the ministry. More financial details emerged to general outrage. The atmosphere became siege-like. The Secretary of State for Defence, a lowly figure in the cabinet and subordinate to Sebastian, took most of the flak.
“I see Sebastian remains untouched,” said Hirudine at a morning meeting with Stubb and Banner. “The old tricks are the best. He’s relentlessly briefed against and smeared the Minister, who now wants to resign – ”
“Does he?” asked Stubb.
“Of course, he’s had enough shit lately to last a lifetime. This is the final straw. Of course, neither the PM nor Sebastian will let him. Not until they think the moment is right.”
“Have you agreed strategic continuity on the kidnapping?” asked Banner.
“Sebastian, cleverly, has instructed me to request a press blackout in the interests of Sping and the bodyguards’ safety, while the Foreign Office attempts to negotiate.”
“That works in Sebastian’s favour, too,” noted Banner.
“Of course,” said Hirudine. He turned to Stubb. “If you can get that suggested wines idea of yours knocked into a pdf before lunch I can take it into Food and Beverage with me this afternoon. I don’t hold out a lot of hope, but as I said to the Minister, it’s no good serving pub wine in the Historic Rooms. It just makes us look crap.”



The war continued. Video footage of British soldiers fighting in the pink badlands of Afghanistan played daily on the television. The media blackout ensured Sping’s story disappeared. A year later Banner switched on the computer in his office, checked Reuters and learned that the decapitated bodies of Sping and his two bodyguards had been discovered in a cave, one hundred miles north of Kabul. He stared at the screen for a bit and slowly plugged his iPod ear plugs in.
Later, when Stubb arrived, Banner said, “I’m just glad I got that job at Health. Get out of this fucking nightmare.”
“Oh, you got it?”
“Yeah. Upper quartile, same pension grade. Health can be bumpy, but not like this. Fuck this.”
“For a game of soldiers,” said Stubb.



It was down Whitehall at Health, one afternoon some months later, that Banner, while walking down a corridor, noticed some dog shit on the floor. Soon after this Banner was accosted by his immediate superior (SCS, 99th Percentile Grade), who said, conspiratorially, “Sebastian’s in.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, spending a worrying amount of time poking his nose in down here these days.”
On their way downstairs they walked past another dog turd outside Briefing Room six.
“Careful not to tread in the shit,” said Banner.
“That’s what everyone’s saying these days, isn’t it?”

ENDS 2,957

Burke, berks & the BBC

When you switch the BBC on in the morning, be it the TV breakfast show or James Naughtie's socialist briefing on Radio 4, you get the news which corresponds most to the BBC's obsessions, which are the hobby-horses of the grown-rich-on-taxpayers'-money liberal chattering classes: "equality", "diversity", climate change, prison-doesn't-"work", more-immigration-please, I-Love-the-EU, English-culture-embarrassing (except football and anything from the North - except the huge rise of the BNP there)/foreign culture good (and don't mention the honour killings, homophobia and Jew-hating). To this list of the usual suspects can be added a new, bubbling-under category: 'Now smoking has been banished from pubs how can we get drinking out of them?'
Watch this item from BBC Breakfast this morning.
The first thing to be said about the piece is that it fails to ask even one member of the public for their opinion (wot, no "social democracy"?). This is either lazy journalism or the manifestation of editorial approval. The Beeb being the way it is these days it's probably both. The second thing is that when strong-arm anti-liberty measures are proposed which involve police interference, say stop-and-search in areas of high ethnic density, the BBC rigs its coverage to demonstrate why they think the new measures are a bad idea. All manner of people, usually Shami Chakrabarti, are wheeled on to decry the new measures. Not the case with alcohol in Oldham. The ending of street violence becomes a non-negotiable necessity. Very laudable, I must say. But if this story was about a clampdown on violence and drug-dealing/taking in East London or Birmingham, 'community leaders' would be placed upfront in the item, laying out their objections and saying such measures would 'alienate the community'. The white working class in Oldham are not afforded that privilege.
Further thoughts: I'm not defending the loutish behaviour - I wouldn't go in one of those bars if you paid me - but I smiled at the irony when I watched the piece, because the problem of extreme drunken violence and bad public behaviour has been mainly caused by things the modern liberal-left strongly approve of: deeply equivocal and pluralist attitudes to family, education, morality and public behaviour. In other words, letting it all hang out, baby, is all fun until someone loses an eye. Don't expect The Guardian or the BBC to spot this obvious fact. The final thing to say is that if I'd been the reporter instead of that pliant dolt Richard Bilton, I would have finished my piece with these words from Edmund Burke: "Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be from without."

Social Democracy All at Sea

A fishing hut, Hastings, 7th August, 2009.

Another success for Sofgov*

*Newspeak for Sofa Government of Islington.

Oligarchal Collectivism - the Final Year Begins

This new move to introduce state brainwashing of children is only the beginning. Only a few months ago traditional subjects were deemed a waste of time by Sir Jim Rose in his education proposals. So, out goes history and in comes the Guardian Women's page (except it doesn't have a Women's Page anymore, because every page is. Can a 'Man's Corner' be far away in the Guardian, I ask myself). Notice how it is only crime against females and one-way gender bullying that is being tackled. The fact that men top the lists in, for instance, suicide, alcholism and depression and get a worse deal from the NHS (not that you'd notice from the MSM) will go unremarked and entirely left out of this new slab of socialist interference in education. Note this:

Work on the strategy was first launched by Jacqui Smith when she was home secretary but is also understood to be being driven forward by Harriet Harman, the deputy leader of the Labour Party and Equalities Minister.

As I said in previous posts, it's no-going-back, scorched earth policy railroading for the final year. This isn't good news for them either. Not that negative outcomes from their policies ever stop them for a second, but it's interesting that they can't even fiddle the figures properly anymore. Expect 'drives' and 'crackdowns' that are forgotten about in a week.

Letter to a friend concerning Madness, the 80s, the Thompson Twins, sex and Olivia Newton-John

July 27 2009, evening

Hi, Nick-o-Pip,





Just a few lines to say fanks for your present. I last bought a Madness record twenty-four years ago and so I was curious, to say the least, to hear what the old nutties were up to these days. The Liberty of Norton Folgate proved to be a richly rewarding listen.
They have retained that very English mix of melancholy and joy (remember the underrated masterpiece of The Sun and the Rain?) and while their ambitions have grown, they haven’t become pretentious. Suggs, it would appear, has been inhaling a mix of Peter Ackroyd and Tom Waits and it’s done the fella a power of good. The amazing, wonderful and horrible bazaar of London past and present is well celebrated and elegied, if you know what I mean. The whole effect rather wonderful, with each band member doing the musical thing one remembers them fondly for. It was a lovely fruit-cake of a record.
Of course, what album is flawless? A couple of numbers serve to keep Guardian readers happy: a lyrically lazy, meaningless song about Africa, called, wooh, Africa (Suggs, you mess with the tacky God Toto: desist, desist! Don’t play da juju man with that particular middla the roadkill. Bes’ forgottun, realleh!) and another appearing to blame rude boys’ pathologies on ‘gherkin men’. Unless Gherkin Men be some extra-esoteric West Indies slang for players of the pink oboe, I do believe we are seeing some of that old red wedge 1985 malarkey from those old enough to know nuance better. Oh, would that it were 1985 again! (Nick R. appears stage-left wearing a bowler hat and brown carpenter’s apron. Whistling, he unfolds a temporary road sign: NO NOSTALGIA, PLEASE, AS SCOFFING TENDS TO OFFEND) Taggy browsers and shirty hurts (I was a natty dresser, at times). All was simple in the forest, even though it wasn’t! I was in love that year and my two years old copy of Long Hot Summer by the S*y*e C*u*cil was played to oblivion. As was various Madness – including The Prince. BRING BACK THE….WE WANT THE…PRRRRRRRRRIIINCE. What a mixture we lived on in those days: Brighton Rock one minute (I had a recording of them doing it on New Year’s Eve 1975 taken off a radio repeat – in scratchy long wave, my dears! May’s rhythm playing at the start made me put down the wooden Dunlop racket with the purple handle ((worn back-to-wood at the point I liked to strum the solo from the Shadows’ version of Ghost Riders in the Sky some six years previous – I had graduated from strumming the Ward Lock Junior Encylopaedia. Maybe I should get a guitar made to look like the Ward Lock Junior Encyclopaedia. Ron Wood had a toilet seat guitar, after all)) and retrieve my battered classical from the loft – later to be smashed to pieces in Townshendian salute. I couldn’t tape that guitar back together as Daltrey advises in Guitar and Pen.) and the Thompson Twins the next! Pip-voice: THE THOMPSON TWINS! THE THOMPSON TWINS! They had only one record I liked, the name of which escapes me. It was about being in a prison camp, if memory serves, which, I suppose, tied into that adolescent male dreamlife of being a hero of some description – even if one’s greatest struggle was the daily styling of the fringe in or out of the equation. I can see myself now: Shaving mirror door on bathroom cupboard; leaf-pattern frosted glass window; soap-caked radio on windowsill; sound of the Victoria train nearby slowing into Penge East; King in a Catholic Style by…ten points, Nick, ten points*…coming on, and this greasy fringe to contend with.
I’ve just looked up Long Hot Summer on youtube. As you would say: oh, dear! Talbot, the keys player, seems an honest-enough fellow, along for the ride, but one look at Weller…he’s like a devious Neapolitan deckchair attendant. Oh well. Children don’t always spot a mountebank as quick as they are sometimes given credit for. I’d got Frenchified and poncy, thanks to the S. Council’s Our Favourite Shop, which I adored. I took up French fags and loafed around listening to Down in the Seine, Weller’s idea of a Jacques Brel number. I thought it very cool.
I was also fond of a Communist band called the Redskins, I remember. Bring It Down (This Insane Thing). And of course the night Simply Red appeared for the first time on the Old Grey Whistle Test. I was ensconced alone in front of the box with a gin and tonic (the dark mysterious tabernacle of the drinks cupboard having been fully appraised and reconnoitred some moons earlier to vouchsafe a King Edward Imperial to smoke on bonfire night) and the then-unsigned Hucknall’s voice tore at my wounded heart (where my knee would be buried). WINE AND SONG, SIR. WINE AND SONG! A poisoned chalice, sir. ‘The pestle with the vessel, the brew that isn’t true.
But that’s nothing to a musical memory from the 70s: bloke next door in my front room doing an extended Elvis dance in his moccasins to Mud on the telly. TWIGLETS AND BABYCHAM, CHIPBOARD AND PAMPAS GRASS (possibly a new ITV detective series) VESTA CHINESE MEALS and wallpaper RD Laing could get his teeth into. As Roy Batty says in Blade Runner: the things I’ve seen with these eyes.

And, back in the 80s, Madness kept you going. You never took ‘em seriously, but my, how they entertained and, now one comes to consider it, how they have colonised one’s memory of that decade. Along with MR BUYRITES and Farahs. Here’s me on my way to school, winter, 1981,
FISH PASTE SANDWICHES in my carrier bag. I pioneered the shopping carrier bag as against the satchel and sports bag. (That, the fringe, the taste for Razzle and Jackie Collins, Tarzan and Biggles and the biro-smothered hands ((no, not Biggles and The Biro Covered Hands)) perhaps signalling the dysfunction that would overtake me in adult life). A radio plays:

And I never thought I’d feel this way, the way I feel about you…IT MUST BE LOVE, LOVE LOVE LOVE etc

. Much better than Labi Siffre’s original, was Madness’s.
That was a grim old, filthy-snowed under winter. My sister developed a penchant for Godley and Crème’s Under Your Thumb Forever. Sunday nights for her being all about listening to the new Top 40 on Radio One. My antagonism to fashion perhaps beginning with her love of Duran Duran etc. Have you noticed how nobody puts Duran Duran videos up on Facebook? Too fucking embarrassed. Anyway, winter passed and I decided I liked the mad bit in the middle of ABC’s The Look of Love. Following this, as I bounced my skinless leather football up from the playground one lunchtime, three girls from the year above snuck up behind and fondled – a recently learned word, that was- my bum. The most ‘at it’ one, a half caste girl, like a heftier Gauguinian amazon stuck her mauler down my trews. I told her to fuck off, so taken aback was I! But I walked away with leady you could have gone shark-fishing with. IT WAS A LONG AFTERNOON OF DISTRACTION IN MATHS. Something was happening… And lo, the following winter, 1982, we saw the Young Ones go in that boozer, Suggs go ‘You hum it and I’ll smash your face in’ and House of Fun begin. The elemental First Squirt could not be far away; indeed, this song seemed to augur it. THE FIRST NOCTURNAL SQUIRT had already happened before my molestation. During a dream about the television advert for a film called Xanadu starring Olivia N.J and after my nightly prayer that a nuclear war would not occur; I’d had the early warning beacons at Dover pointed out to me and thought, blimey, bit real. My parish priest gave it the biggun about CND from the pulpit and there was enough on TV. My idea of the next war was sort of The Tardis meets Reach for the Sky. That all changed when the BBC put Threads out, right, popkids? Anyway, back to Olivia N.J. Olivia had caught my eye at the cinema in Grease some years earlier, and the idea that you might literally fly off in a 50s car with your loved one remains attractive.
The summer of 1983 was rather wonderful and I seemed to spend all of it riding a bike near Selsey Bill. Which, incidentally, was mentioned in Madness’s Driving in My Car. But the song that summer, apart from Long Hot Summer was Wings of a Dove, WO-AH WO-AH. Released, so wiki informs me, on August 20, 1983. Then there was Our House, which I didn’t like for some reason that I can’t now remember. Then the acutely melancholic Michael Caine.
Oh well. I could go on – the weird winter of 1984 and The Sun and the Rain, the end-of-crush melancholy of Yesterday’s Men and my early pub expeditions with Uncle Sam by Madness playing (My old man thought Uncle Sam was great, he didn't see the anti-Americanism of it) and later their valedictory Ghost Train – but I’d better not: lest Reeves arrive at the Dog and say to Sunshine: ‘fucking old Jackanory Gazy sent me! Cunt wouldn’t shaddap, like usual. The only living boy in Penge East indeed! Who d’yer think you are, fuck sake, GUNTER GR-ARSE? Percy Proose? Clean yer elbows! Eat the Rail. Sit on it, Chachi!’ Sufficey to say that, one way and another, The Liberty of Norton Folgate stirred up a lot of memories for me.

And I never got to tell you about Sunshine and the Tooter’s Hat and how he threw a lighter at me. Oh well, see you in the bar.

I am sir, your royal, loyal correspondent.


The Colonel.


PS: All highlighted items in this letter will form the tracklisting for my next platter


*Nick R says calmly and instantly: China Crisis? What’s the big deal? What was that song about Amsterdam that came out at that time? Was it Lloyd Cole? I quite liked that.

Clock's Ticking

There'll be some shouting and cursing in the bunker tonight. As close readers of this blog will be aware, I detest the Conservative Party; but anything that annoys Brown and his coterie puts a smile on my face. Oddly enough, I find this new Cameron Tory Party more repulsive than the old one. At least the old lot had lived in the real world. Look at this new MP, Chloe Smith. A 'former management consultant'. Ugh. God save us all from management consultants, policy wonks, spin doctors and all the rest of the know-nothing, gobbledygook-speaking clever dicks who infest politics today.

Chairman Johnson

Sorry for radio silence but to be perfectly honest the only thing I feel like writing at the moment is rude words about this government. I mean seriously rude words. That old middle English/Germanic c-word, used in the plural.
Last week’s star c-word was Alan Johnson. His comments about the population reaching seventy million tempted me to write a green ink letter to him, interrogating his logic and beliefs. But is it worth it? Wouldn’t I be better off studying the form for Goodwood? Yes, I would.
Her Majesty’s Home Secretary said:

“I don’t lose sleep over the population reaching seventy million…I am happy to live in a multicultural society. I am happy to live in a society where we not only welcome those coming to live and work in this country but where we can go and live and work in other countries.”

First, indulge me some sarcasm. Since it is the lifeblood of the orthodox Left’s model of debate, I think I’m entitled to a shred of it: Oh, what a utopia! Behold the queues of British people wanting to go and live and work in Somalia or in a light bulb factory in east Poland! That reminds me of a facetious and doubtless Aaronovitch-borne wheeze in the Times back when Mandelson had his problems with the nuclear workers in the north, who were protesting about foreign workers. Mandelson, with Tebbitonian contempt, had blithely informed the strikers they ‘could go and work abroad’. The Times followed up with a feature showing vacancies in Eastern Europe. Salaries and medical provision were, naturally, not mentioned.
That whole episode demonstrated to me that even I had quite underestimated the arrogance in the Labour Party in the matter of dressing up Marxist internationalism as nothing more than the benefits of globalisation.
Back to Alan Johnson. As is traditional for the new Labour front bench, Johnson has been an active Marxist:

“…I was… CPGB [Communist Party of Great Britain]. I did consider myself to be a Marxist – I read more chapters of Das Kapital than Harold Wilson.” New Statesman, 29th November, 2004

Johnson comes out of union politics and, when I was a union shop steward, I met a few people like him. Self-righteous on a scale only seen elsewhere in organised religion, often shockingly deluded about human nature, enthusiastically conspiratorial and fanatically chippy.
His comments demonstrate a man committed to Marxoid ideology over any practical considerations. It has already been demonstrated that the mass immigration of the new Labour years has had negligible economic benefit and considerable ill-effect on the very people the Labour Party purport to represent. This hasn’t swayed Johnson. To put it simply, he’s so out of touch he doesn’t realise that the policy he is defending has driven down the salaries and driven up the rents and mortgages of people he entered politics to help. Jobs are now scarce and foreigners, it must be said, have taken a great proportion of them. I enjoy pointing out to right-on lefties that the old cab driver’s complaint of ‘foreigners taking all our jobs’ only became a reality under new Labour. They don’t care, of course, because it either hasn’t affected them or, and much more common, they are too badly informed or stupid to work it out for themselves. They cling to the idea that all criticism of the political class is based on lies made up by the Sun and the Daily Mail. If only.
Why are Johnson’s comments so outrageous? Add to the negative consequences of mass immigration already detailed we must also take into account the simple fact that Britain is a small and very overcrowded country in massive debt with a lot of problems and many more looming; it has an overloaded infrastructure that cannot be maintained or improved to meet the demand of 70 million people because of the huge financial problems the country faces. I would have a small bet on public spending falling consistently (Gordon Brown would call that ‘non-rising’) for perhaps a generation. For many "hard working families" - (c) Alistair Campbell, 2004 - these times will be hard times.
I find it amazing that anyone can actually support the Labour government given the simple facts on offer, without even mentioning the two silly wars. Peter Mandelson, the kingmaker and prime mover of the Labour government has now admitted that cuts are coming (after Brown denied it for months). This is an understatement. We have been told by Labour politicians and Labour client journalists that mass immigration was a sort of economic master trick that would obviate conservative spending niggardliness in the future. Even taking into account the recession – and politicians always should, though our current rulers told us it was impossible: 'no more Tory boom and bust' – Labour’s spending has taken the country into the foothills of bankruptcy, without much to show for it beyond a massive growth in public sector non-jobs and a huge expansion of state benefit. The miracle of migrant work has not saved us from a pension and investment timebomb nor filled the country's coffers.
Note Johnson’s outspoken support not for a multiracial society but a *multicultural* society, that is a society organised by the enforced state doctrine of multiculturalism, a classical example of satellite Marxism. This man, like so many other communist baby-boomers in the Labour Party, is a dangerous and destructive near-idiot, masquerading as cheerful cockney ex-postie with a heart of gold. He will be useful to Brown in the coming scorched earth movement of no-going-back-policy drives in the coming months.
The final irony, if he could but see it, is that Alan Johnson has become the thing he probably hated the most back in the 70s: a powerful and wealthy politician, ignorant of the problems of ordinary people.

Yentob and the BBC's future

So, Alan Yentob, BBC arts panjandrum and a man whose biggest contribution to the world is a David Bowie documentary in 1975 and the Arena series, is in possession of the second-largest pension pot in the entire public sector, a figure of 6.3million pounds paying him a yearly divvy of 216,000 for the rest of his life. Paid for by we, the licence-paying serfs; people whose values, tastes and attitudes Yentob and his ideological colleagues despise and have been making war on one way and another for 30 years.
Even the Blairite middle-classes are choking on this one, if the comments on the Times website are representative.
I strongly suspect the young Guardian-scanners (I don’t call them Guardian *readers* anymore for obvious reasons) who form the backbone of BBC staff will be annoyed about this because it is becoming obvious that this baroque epoch at the BBC has now become a political eyesore and something will have to be done, or at least talked about being done, in due course; and that may mean the gravy train stops for them as well.
The current big idea, that the license be scrapped and the bill worked into people’s council tax, should be resisted violently. It is a typically crafty bit of political class thinking: appear to solve the problem in the eyes of the public while actually collecting even more money than the license fee brought in, therefore strengthening the BBC into the bargain. Once that television tax is made invisible, we will all be paying more to keep people like Yentob in luxury as they sedulously continue to promote the creed of the media baby boomer: Cultural Marxism in all its forms.
Until that happens I think it is quite likely the BBC’s solution to its profligacy will be to ask staff to take pay freezes/cuts in order to fund the vast pensions of its ageing senior management.
The orthodox left are never impressed when confronted with analogies drawn from Soviet Russia or the old Warsaw Pact countries. They weren’t in the 40s when Orwell used them and they aren’t now, when the socially liberal middle classes’ ability to gain power and privilege at the expense of the working and lower middle class (who they nominally support) is very strong indeed. But the analogy of the Nomenklatura is valid, and every day brings new evidence of it. Once again, one can only conclude that the ideas and belief systems of the liberal elite, cultivated in the Labour Party, liberal newspapers and think tanks during the long hiatus of socialism, 1979-97, have turned out to be far more disastrous than the hated Conservative rule, bad as that was. Private sector fat cats are hard to take but they have been a fact of life from, I would imagine, the first stone age man hoarded more coloured pebbles than any of his neighbours. However, I find public sector greed, cant, hypocrisy and self-serving behaviour just as objectionable, perhaps more, for obvious reasons.

As my comrade-in-arms (drinking crony) Mark Brentano pointed out as we lounged on Brighton beach a couple of weeks ago, the BBC must have been extremely pleased that Michael Jackson died when he died. Its senior management’s expenses indulgence had been partially exposed and its Director General was all over the papers and television hastily explaining why the largesse would have been larger had the claims occurred in the private sector. That was nonsense and even the political class’s (the BBC is the largest media arm of the political class) usual defenders in the Press were generally unconvinced by Mark Thompson’s explanations.
The expenses didn’t surprise or bother me much; the salaries, however, did. I won’t bother to repeat them here, suffice to say that, like most BBC employees, the senior management is massively overpaid. The top brass are paid more than any cabinet minister. This overpayment culture goes all the way down the ranks. I know people working there who are on absurd salaries for their level of expertise and knowledge. A News 24 presenter can be paid nearly a hundred thousand. Television presenters are paid enormous sums of money for doing jobs that require little more than the ability to appear agreeable and make banal small talk. The obscene salary of Jonathan Ross is the prime evidence of the modern, profligate and degenerate BBC.
I hesitated over the keys before typing the adjective degenerate. It smacks of Mary Whitehouse and the language of suburban repudiation that is seized on by lib-lefties as evidence of ‘fascist’ and ‘right wing’ arguments. And we all know what happens when you give a lib-lefty cause to damn your argument thus: the dialectic stops, because they have found a convenient way to stop thinking and discussing, something they generally don’t like doing anyway. Oh well. The BBC *is* degenerate in the sense of definition number one of the word in the Ox. Con. Dic. ‘Having lost the physical and moral qualities considered normal and desirable; showing evidence of decline.’
There isn’t space here to detail the BBC’s long drift to its current mix of overwhelmingly leftist bias and its lazy and intellectually corrupt content. It was always full of lefties, but the lefties of yesterday, George Orwell among them, were a different breed. Generally speaking they still believed in the value of high culture and that for all its faults western civilisation had something to be said for it. That’s my kind of lefty.
What to do about the BBC? I favour abolition, because the corporation abandoned its remit long ago, or rather artfully began a comprehensive propaganda policy that could, if necessary, vaguely resemble its remit. Come their seemingly inevitable election win, if the Tories don’t take several huge axe-swipes at the BBC then they will miss a golden opportunity. One of the odd things about the Thatcher governments – and a sure sign of left-wing exaggeration about its vileness – is that they though they complained about the BBC they never properly attacked it by turning the money tap off, which is the simple way to silence the trendy left, because they never do anything with their own resources – it always has to be your cash they spend on the revolution.
However, I enjoy Radio 3 and other areas of high culture. I think a solution to the BBC could a massive downscaling, so the corporation has just two channels, one showing decent middlebrow family viewing and the other showing culturally elitist content with a total lack of populism: art, lit, philosophy, religion, ballet, history, science etc. Plus about half the radio output they have now. If this was done with sufficient rigour it would be very cheap and a beacon of civilisation in a country now showing the fruition of the forty year liberal education project: mass-ignorance, tastelessness and cultural relativism. It would also get rid of people such as Jonathan Ross, Graham Norton and the Yentobs of the next generation, of which there are many.

Sharia/Andrew Marr/Yvette Cooper/The Gods of the Copybook Headings

The stories that caught my eye today are nicely representative of the dog days of this Thatcho-Socialist government. The Mail’s front page tells us that Britain has 85 sharia courts. This is the sort of story (along with stories about teen crime, drug abuse, immigration and cultural Marxism in the civil service) that the orthodox Left, be they Obs readers or Spartists, always depose by saying that the Mail has “made them up” or “exaggerated” them.
The story’s source is a report into British sharia courts by the think tank Civitas. The Muslim Council of Britain, a dubious organisation at the best of times, declares the report to be “scaremongering”. This is likely to prove a sort of integrity affidavit in reverse. I haven’t read the booklet yet but I’m willing to bet the information inside is far from fabricated or distorted. Yes, the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal is recognised under the same act as Jewish Beth Din courts, but Dr David Green, director of Civitas, says:

‘The reality is that for many Muslims, sharia courts are in practice part of an institutionalized atmosphere of intimidation, backed by the ultimate sanction of a death threat.’

It is clear to me this situation has come about and gained power due to the endemic cultural and moral relativism within the liberal elite*.
I am aware I make this point again and again, but since our rulers have no intention of easing up their agenda, I am afraid those of us who disagree must not cease pointing it out. Our rulers in government and across the major institutions have a great belief that their obstinate casuistry can prevail via a never-ending campaign of attritional pressure on the public; simply wearing everyone down and repeating and streamlining an official version of language, language designed to alter thought, and therefore reality.
Though it is admirably and cheerfully honest about the smugness and hypocrisy of the middle-class Left, Andrew Marr’s Observer column from Sunday, 28th February, 1999, is a great example of the totalitarian attitudes that have driven the “social democrats” of the last 20 years:

What then can be done? (Apart, of course, from widespread and vigorous miscegenation, which is the best answer, but perhaps tricky to arrange as public policy.) First, we need to raise still more taxes …And the final answer, frankly, is the vigorous use of state power to coerce and repress. It may be my Presbyterian background, but I firmly believe that repression can be a great, civilising instrument for good. Stamp hard on certain 'natural' beliefs for long enough and you can almost kill them off. The police are first in line to be burdened further, but a new Race Relations Act will impose the will of the state on millions of other lives too.

Hmmm. Here we are, ten years later, with the BNP in Brussels and Marr’s beloved Labour violently hated by large parts of its purported constituency. Imagine if Marr’s proposal – final solution, so to speak – of effectively breeding the white working class of Britain out of existence was applied to other ethnic groups? There would be some little outrage, wouldn’t there?
But, even though it is obvious that relativism, pluralism and multiculturalism of the Labour project have been divisive and destructive, the agenda doesn’t change. They keep on with it. Witness today’s story about the Department for Work and Pensions busily engaged in sending to thousands of fake job applications to businesses to find out if they’re racist. This was a wheeze from Yvette Cooper’s (Mrs Edward Balls) Ethnic Minority and Employment Task Force within the Department of Work and Pensions. This story, more almost than the expenses racket, made my jaw drop. Possibly because I have extensive dealings with that ministry and have been shocked at its incompetence. Like so many departments under Labour, they cease to perform the basic function they are charged with and instead begin to carry out new and exotic functions borne from the abstractions of Oxbridge-educated Islingtonistas. Government by smart asses with gold-plated pensions and soft, pudgy hands.
It appears Gordon Brown has finally realised that the indigenous working class, white, black or brown, got the worse deal under Labour. So today he launches his ‘houses for British people’, a textbook piece of Labour moonshine, created by robbing Peter to pay Paul, i.e. nicking money out of the Transport budget and hoping The Sun will big the scheme up for them.
The proposal, like 99 per cent of government schemes designed to buy off public opprobrium, will quietly disappear into the deep freeze of civil service wrangling and bureaucracy in due course.
The other story I noticed, which shows up the sheer incompetence of the Brown/Blair double act, is the Army chiefs memo to the Iraq inquiry, saying that once the war had begun, funds for the Army were not released by Brown’s Treasury, which meant necessary tools to prosecute Mr Blair’s war were not available. The adverse affects of this have been seen in our newspapers many times. Blair has also been criticised in the memo by army chiefs. I wonder how they speak of him in the regimental messes? Which brings me, in a way, to Kipling’s great poem The Gods of the Copybook Headings, which speaks for itself:


As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place;
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four—
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.


As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man—
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:—
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will bum,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!



*I try not to overuse the phrase liberal elite, as it seems to break Orwell’s commonsense rules laid down in Politics and the English Language, but since there is a centre left ruling class of politicians and other bureaucrats, from the government through the civil service to the BBC, you have to use the expression.

Standing on the shoulders of, etc

Drinking with a friend of mine on a boat by Embankment at dusk last night, I was reminded of these lines by Conrad, which are worth sharing:


'Forthwith a change came over the waters, and the serenity became less brilliant but more profound. The old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the decline of day, after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth. We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and departs for ever, but in the august light of abiding memories. And indeed nothing is easier for a man who has, as the phrase goes, "followed the sea" with reverence and affection, that to evoke the great spirit of the past upon the lower reaches of the Thames. The tidal current runs to and fro in its unceasing service, crowded with memories of men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles of the sea. It had known and served all the men of whom the nation is proud, from Sir Francis Drake to Sir John Franklin, knights all, titled and untitled -- the great knights-errant of the sea. It had borne all the ships whose names are like jewels flashing in the night of time, from the Golden Hind returning with her rotund flanks full of treasure, to be visited by the Queen's Highness and thus pass out of the gigantic tale, to the Erebus and Terror, bound on other conquests -- and that never returned. It had known the ships and the men. They had sailed from Deptford, from Greenwich, from Erith -- the adventurers and the settlers; kings' ships and the ships of men on 'Change; captains, admirals, the dark "interlopers" of the Eastern trade, and the commissioned "generals" of East India fleets. Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! . . . The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.'

Gazy McGonagall

Newborn

I held the tiny ship with care,
As she grew accustomed to the air.
I knew not her, nor she me;
Her eyes shut tight – as well they might be.
Gripping fingers but no teeth,
Cheeks of fine, rare roast beef.
She’ll do for a journey crossing many borders,
Without a map and missing orders.
The voyage begins.

WG 25th June, 2009

Brown Studies/The Immigration Reckoning/Tory Millionaires/Yeats/62p trixie

“Don’t say Brown, say ‘useless’” was, I believe, a commonly used jeer against Harold Wilson’s alcoholic Foreign Secretary Lord George-Brown in the 60s. Yes, it needs to be brought back into service.
The news that the autistic Scotch control freak (who, like so many control freaks, has no control over anything) will very likely step down before the next election made me pause for this thought: never elected, never voted out. Levered into power and inflicted on an electorate that could never stand the sight of him. What pathetic and dishonourable men govern this country. I would have a smidgin of respect for Brown if his arrogance meant he’d go to a general election, took the humiliation and destroyed his party along the way. Great leaders need a touch – just a touch, mind – of Ahab. (Good album/blog/novel title, that: A Touch of Ahab)
And the Labour Party does need to be destroyed. As does the Conservative Party. The Labour Party’s policies have become antithetical to civilised life. Ditto the Tories.
Of course, there are fringe benefits from Tory rule: they tend to not want to interfere relentlessly with personal liberty, they are a little more empirical, something we badly need at the moment. Unlike Gordon Brown, they won’t go running down to Buckingham Palace to serve notice on sexist monarchical lines of descent just when the British economy is going into full-scale meltdown. A Conservative government might – might – just be able to save British pubs, for example, or at least stay the execution, by reversing the punitive tax and other regulations, which Labour inflicted on them and which are now destroying them as a result. The Conservatives might be more practical in matters of law and order. Labour’s interference in that area has been truly disastrous. But by and large, the Conservatives will simply continue Blairism, which was Thatcherism with socialist spending plans. The rich and privileged will continue to be pampered, and everyone else can just lump it. This was proved to me last week when Boris Johnson announced his idea for an amnesty on illegal immigration. Boris doesn’t know shit about London life, as was proved with his ridiculous booze ban on Tubes and buses (incidentally, I flout this rule whenever I feel like it). Boris doesn’t have to queue. If he did he’d know that the basic objections to his plan – London is hellishly overcrowded and its services, from health to transport, stretched to breaking point – are correct and moral. But of course the Tory fetish is always and at all times a quick buck, and big business loves an immigrant who comes cheap and, to quote Boris’s adviser Anthony Browne, “pays their tax”. Socialists love them for their demographic-altering properties, as a McGuffin for all manner of non-negotiable culturally Marxist civic alteration and for vague righteous notions of post-colonial guilt (even if the immigrants come from Turkmenistan).
I never had a problem with immigration until Labour had been in charge of it for a few years. I don’t know anybody who did. Now I know lots, including members of ethnic minorities.
I could see the way things were going nearly a decade ago. I knew the people who would be the losers would be the indigenous poor of Britain, a constituency held lower in esteem by Blair and Mandleson than excrement on the bottom of their very expensive footwear. Both those men, with crocodile tears flowing, would be most hurt by that observation. But always judge a politician on what he does and not what he says. On that basis my observation is correct.
One of Blair’s most audacious feats of chicanery was achieved in the field of immigration policy. He simply and repeatedly lied, while the evidence that he was lying was freely available and often published. In 2005 he made a speech at Dover on immigration that perhaps was the ne plus ultra of new Labour doublethink. He said that his government was working hard to create strict controls on asylum seekers, which would therefore bring down immigration. This gave the impression that the main cause of rising immigration would be checked. Of course, asylum seekers never were the cause of rising immigration figures; it was the government’s policy of issuing work permits for non-EU residents and their dependents that accounted for the huge rise in immigration. A full account of the nuances behind this policy can be found here.
In the light of the recent election of two British fascists to the European Parliament everyone should be reminded of the key Labour policies that put those two men on the Brussels gravy train. They were policies held dear by the money and privilege-loving ex-Marxists who constituted the Labour front bench in the middle of the decade.
Three years after Blair’s speech at Dover, and eleven years after Labour’s victory, the first of many reckonings on one of their most obstinate policies was published. Note:

The verdict of the committee, which boasts a brace of ex-Chancellors, a former Bank of England governor, sundry ex-Cabinet ministers and prominent economists, is unambiguous. The record levels of immigration since Labour came to power have had "little or no impact" on our economic wellbeing, while the Government's assertion that immigration is essential in preventing labour shortages is "fundamentally flawed".

I was talking to a girl at a party last week, and she took a sort of amused stance at my concern at the rise of the far-Right. “Oh, I wouldn’t worry. The BNP getting elected wasn’t about immigration, it was just the credit crunch. It’ll all blow over.”
This is exactly what Edward Balls would say. It is the orthodox Left’s comfy place of denial. Just as soon as we can get another credit boom going, everything will be all right.
I don’t agree. Which, to return to my original point, is why both main parties need to be destroyed and new parties emerge. I believe we are at a crossroads: one road leads to a balkanised and deeply divided society, the other to a civilised and free society. One road is easy, the other hard.

But enough of that; we know which road the two Etonian millionaires will be driving us down come next election. I had a week away from this blog to concentrate on Royal Ascot, where I picked up some small winnings and nearly won the Tote jackpot. I was not in a financial position to attend, but was quite happy to watch it on television – the most telly I have watched for a very long time. It was enjoyable: two of my favourite popular musicians were there: Mr Rod Stewart and Mr Charles Watts of the Rolling Stones (himself a noted horse breeder) and the racing was the best you can see in the world. The star of the week was undoubtedly Yeats, who made history as the first horse to win the Ascot Gold Cup four times. What an animal. Had Yeats the poet still been with us he would have written a poem about Yeats the horse’s performance. Someone was very confident in Yeats’ abilities because they had 25,000 on him to win. Which he duly did. You can watch the race here. Note Johnny Murtagh crossing himself at the end of the race. Although I am a non-believer I found this rather touching.

Although I didn’t win the Ascot jackpot, I did place a 62p trixie on three horses running at Goodwood on Friday night. I was most pleased when it won me eight hundred pounds, or the equivalent of 16 weeks’ dole money. Victoria Sponge 12/1, Yes Mr President 8/1, My Shadow 7/1. My hat is off to the horses and jockeys.

The Last Raspberry

The recession hasn’t actually started yet. By which I mean the public narrative of the recession hasn’t started yet because it hasn’t affected the public sector yet. It soon will. The recession proper will start the day the staggeringly huge subcutaneous membrane of paper shufflers and middle management in the civil service and public sector start getting their marching orders.
This section of society will have watched the events of the last ten months unfold with slightly worried eyes while safe in the knowledge that though the P45s were being handed round in the sector that pays for their padded existence they knew they were on for a pay rise. Well, sooner or later that party will be over and then the trouble will start in earnest.
Government sympathisers within the media may be reduced, but many journalists addicted to the Thatcho-Socialism of Labour are still at large and occasionally they lob a ‘green shoots of recovery’ story in to help out. A cheery economics reporter on the BBC this morning: “Why is everybody being so gloomy?’
Once the grim scythe comes towards his people, the state employees, the tune will change rapidly. Popular culture will suddenly discover the recession; indignation will appear; it’ll be like the early 80s all over again. Perhaps The Specials will make a record.
Had the economy had been wrecked by a Tory government we would have heard a great deal more from all movers and shakers in our culture by now. Brown would have been the butt of every comedian and DJ’s joke, as Thatcher, Major and their cabinets were in times of economic distress. But most of the people who control popular culture in Britain thoroughly approved of Blairism and new Labour (it was a superb way of being an absolute pig for money, power, advantage and privilege while maintaining you had a conscience and were not a ‘wicked Tory’. That is why so many TV and newspaper people were new Labour supporters) and still do. Now all the wheels are off the wagon and there is truckloads of evidence about sleaze, incompetence and downright deceit you might think there’d be an emerging strain of opprobrium for Labour, with its Goebbelsian deceit, its wars and its incompetence, but I don’t see much of that.
Contrast this with Cameron’s likely tiny-majority government come next year. There’ll be some noisy and righteous condemnations of government then. Marches, benefits, placards, the full monty Just you wait.

Encouraging events! Revolt in Iran and the Times’ leader calls Gordon Brown a liar (the Ed Balls fan club known as the Financial Times has, last Friday, also declared this government’s stance on spending plans to be dishonest).
I have nothing to say about the Iran rebellion other than I wish them the best of British luck, as people used to say, they are going to need it. Let’s hope Barack Obama can find some time to yell them on. That will upset Ahmadinejad but I don’t think that matters much, does it? As a pal pointed out to me yesterday, ever since Obama became King of America that country’s enemies have been rattling their sabres with rare energy. Do they sense a weakling has taken over from a bull in china shop?

Back to Brown. He’s unveiled the big lie that will take us to the general election: Labour Will Spend, Tories Will Cut. We know that this man is incompetent, but to castigate the Tories for spending figures straight out of your own government’s plans and projections is pretty incredible incompetence.
The money’s all gone and the only course of action any future government will have is to cut spending and raise taxes. It’s a simple as that.
I take no Thatcherite relish in this but I long ago came to the conclusion that if any form of modern socialism – fairness versus inequality of resource and opportunity – is to win the political argument then it must confront its many Achilles heels; the big one being bureaucratic sclerosis and managerialism. It won’t, but there you go.

Ooh, we get an Iraq inquiry. All done behind closed doors. What a surprise. It will be finished long after Brown is finished and I’m quite prepared to bet cash this very afternoon that the big dirty secrets of that epoch – and the major guilty parties – will remain largely untouched. The Iraq inquiry will be Labour’s last long raspberry at the truth.

Finally, a June Evening

Free pleasures. The two landscapes are of the allotment up the road. My attempt to do Samuel Palmer with a mobile phone camera...