The Rat Parliament 2005-10

Picture: Dead Rat in Croydon on a Midsummer Morn (c) William Gazy 2008

Cheltenham

In racing, the adage about the king is dead, long live the king is very acute. Kauto Star was expected to win the top prize in jump racing yesterday but I knew that his jumping could be dodgy. I’d tipped Imperial Commander for the Cheltenham Gold Cup to anyone who was asking and so was well pleased to see him win.
The only problem was that, apart from an ante-post yankee which had fallen apart in the course of the festival, I wasn’t on Imperial Commander; I was on Denman, though the old tank wasn’t carrying much of my money.
Myself, Ange and Mick were in one of those ale and pie pubs that are absurdly expensive and make their money out of corporate entertaining. We were there because they were showing Cheltenham on the telly. As I walked in a posh man was at the bar with his son; they were dressed like Princes Phillip and Charles visiting Gordonstoun in 1963, and sounded like it too.
There was a time when I would have sneered at them. But I have little class war left in my soul. The past 13 years of “social democracy” has made me realise we have a great deal more to lose than our aitches, to paraphrase my hero, George Orwell. Or as my mate Butch says: ‘I thought I hated Thatcher till I saw Ed Balls.’
Anyway. One useful thing about the wealthy is that they’re usually tight with money. This puts them in a sort of canary in a coalmine role in the marketplace. Thus, as I approached the bar I heard the older man say, with well-modulated incredulity, ‘I beg your pardon? Six pounds ten for a glass of wine?’
I felt like elbowing him in the ribs and saying in my best Alfred Doolittle, ‘aye, cap’n, a man can’t get himself drunk without laying out a fortune. Tax, captain, tax and brewery greed. It’s how socialism fucks you up the arse twice. Tax.’
The difference between conservatism and socialism, really. Once up the arse or twice.
I watched him shell out the money. It amused me. Perhaps I have got more class war left in my soul than I thought.
We settled down and watched Berties Dream hold off Najaf and win at 50/1 in the County Hurdle. Ange, who is a coincidence bettor, had it in a 25p trixie with Thousand Stars, which had won the previous race at 20/1. So she was £300 to the good already. If her third selection, Balthazar King, pulled it off in the conditional jockeys’ hurdle at 4.40 she would be in for over £7,000.
Both my bets in the previous two, Tito Bustillo, Fionnegas, had gone west. But I didn’t mind because my third top bet of the festival, Soldatino, had won the Triumph Hurdle at 6/1 with £50 quid of mine on its back.
If you’re into racing I think there is three different types of bet: a racing man’s bet, a punter’s bet and a mug’s bet. I mainly do the last two, but occasionally I’ll pull off the first type and it gives me a kick. I saw Soldatino win at Kempton a few weeks back – backed him as a well – and I thought: here’s class. French class as it happens.
The race was for me the best of the festival. Barizan had front run and was at one point 20-odd lengths ahead of the rest of the field. Soldatino was lost in mid-division. Then he came wide and started to slowly reel Barizan in, all the way up the hill, and won. I nearly put the whole lot on Tito Bustillo in the following race. But it was good that I didn’t, because he was beat halfway.
I’d had a racing man’s bet on Sizing Europe the first day and that had also won at 6s. During the week I’d had punter bets on Big Zeb, which won at 10s, Albertas Run at 14s. I couldn’t complain. I’d had a few losers and all my multiples had gone west but I’d made a profit, which I then dissipated with fermented liquor and its ancillary expenses.
As we sat in the pub – me drinking ESB, which is a hell of an ale – I suddenly looked at the screen and saw Denman had drifted to 5/1. I thought: McCoy, champion jump jockey and remorseless winning machine on *Denman*, the barrel-chested tank? At fives? So, even though I tipped Imperial Commander to everyone, including in my role as the tipster Flash Harry in a friend’s publication, I decided to back Denman. I was right in two ways. Kauto Star’s jumping let him down, Denman would be better value than Kauto and Imperial Commander would win it. Paddy Brennan is my favourite jumps jockey, so it was very cheering to see him chin Denman on the way up the hill.
We strolled up to the Ladbrokes to watch Ange’s race. Balthazar King looked good and was having some mighty money punted on him. He opened at 20s and was soon down to 10s. I had a small each way. Ange was nervous. ‘I just want to get this over with,’ she said.
Balthazar King had a talented three pound claimer on him but fell after about four fences. Ange picked her 300 up and we went to the nearby Wetherspoons for a bottle of competitively-priced veuve cliquot.
On our way out of the betting shop we saw Fat Boy and a rather sly Asian youth who is sometimes referred to as ‘p**i on the moon’, for reasons I will explain below.
They are a sort of double act. Fat Boy aged about forty-five, white, with the choleric face and massive waistline of a veteran form lager addict. Sanjif, to give him his proper name, is thin, about 30 and, if the rumours are true, slowly conning his crippled uncle out of his savings. They both only back favourites, to ‘buy money’, which is the most pathetic form of horse playing, in my opinion. They always look miserable when the big meetings come round because they lose their money as short-price favourites get turned over again and again.
They don’t like us, I feel, because we *gamble*, we have sport from it. They could never do this, the pain would be too great for them. They’d rather lose on a ‘certainty’ than win on a proper tilt. They feel more comfortable that way. They both employ ‘prison queue’ tactics in the betting shop towards people they don’t like – “accidental” shoving, barging in front at the betting window.
On my way out I smirked at them – they knew we’d had a win, but they didn’t know how much, so we acted like we’d picked a few grand up, just to annoy them.
The reason for the Asian man’s unpleasant nickname among the pub/bookie’s denizens is that he once borrowed ten pounds off Charlie, the fence and gambler and failed to pay the money back. Charlie said to him in a loud voice in the middle of the Corals: ‘If I don’t get that tenner by Friday, Sanjif, you’ll be the first p**i on the moon.’
Please don’t shoot the messenger; this is reportage.
I’d seen a mug bet that morning. Pigeon Island, in the Grand Annual at a massive price. I’ve always had a soft spot for that horse because it appears to have been named after the popular but unofficial name of that little area outside Tooting Broadway Tube where the statue of Edward VII is and which is home to hundreds of
Anyway, in all the to-ing and fro-ing I forgot to back it. Yes. It did.

Last Chance to Smash the Pigsty!

If you, like me, hate both parties and believe that the deadlock created by the current intellectually and morally bankrupt political class needs to be broken, then vote Labour.
A hung parliament will likely mean that the LibDems will shore up a Mandelson-dominated Labour Party. This would be bad as it could lead to a new centre left party with all the terrible assumptions and sense of entitlement the Political Class but hardened into a broader power base.
The coming general election could prove tumultuous. At present the Labour government is borrowing £500million a day to maintain the illusion of a functioning economy. If the Tories win they will stop it, allowing Gordon Brown and the Labour Party to blame the consequent hardship and misery on the Tories, even though he would have had to have stop the borrowing if he won. It would also allow Labour and its supporters to blame the consequences of the economy they wrecked on the Tories - a game they play every time they are voted out.
No, only an outright Labour victory will do. A Labour victory would destroy the party because its owners, the union Unite, would then expect preferential treatment in return for bankrolling the party. However, the money is all gone, the budget deficit as a wide as the jaws of hell and we're a year or so away from the I.M.F bailing us out so Labour won't be able to satisfy its client base and will consequently collapse into internecine warfare.
A Labour victory would also destroy the Conservative Party, because if they can't win against Gordon Brown in the current situation they'll never win again. This is also good.
Potentially, the deadlock created by the two utterly useless ruling parties taking turns to mess up Britain could BE BROKEN ONCE AND FOR ALL! So, Vote Labour and smash both of them to pieces! You know that removal of power or or the possibility of power is the best way to punish these people.

Save the Beeb

It’s interesting that the BBC has chosen to start throwing ballast - or what it thinks is ballast - out of the balloon. Reality must have penetrated Portland Place at long last. By reality I mean that the piss-taking of the upper echelons has now made the BBC the target of all parties and it is now a case of jump before you are pushed. It didn't need to be this way, but it was always going to happen after John Birt had control. He set the course for the micro-management membrane that has taken over the whole corporation.
Before its recent run of bad publicity I was fully in favour of abolishing the BBC on the grounds that it had moved from being the boldest experiment in public education in history to the boldest experiment in propaganda.
Ten years ago, when I started complaining about the BBC’s left/liberal bias, my intelligent friends – bar Butch – all thought I was mad. It struck them as a lunatic proposition, like accusing a maiden aunt of being an axe murderer. (Notice how nobody calls it Auntie anymore?)
These days, the same people get more exercised about the BBC than I do. The main complaint being that ‘it’s out of control’ and there are whole areas of news and culture it cannot approach objectively – you know, climate change, the Middle East, immigration etc.
I now annoy my friends by saying that in some small respects the BBC has improved. Which is why I don’t think it should be abolished. Its most intolerable phase, what I like to call the Africa Lives on the BBC*/Jonathan Ross years, may have passed.
I think it could be reformed and for once I agree with Jeremy Dear, the Chavez-loving Bennite dreamer who leads the union I used to be an official for, when he says that if executives at the very top had not arranged themselves vast salaries and perks then workers further down the pipe would not be facing redundancy. It’s one thing you see again and again with the liberal media class in its middle years – having spent all their youth acting as if concern with money was infra dig and morally shabby, they are now completely obsessed with getting vast amounts of it for themselves and sod the consequences. See Yentob, Mandelson, and many others.
But yes, the BBC needs to be saved and reformed. Which is why cutting the Asian network and the website is the wrong thing to do.
Cut all the frivolous crap like antiques and property shows and so on. BBC drama needs to be reformed and desperately needs fresh and radical approaches. By radical I mean telling stories about life in Britain from a non-Guardian feature viewpoint. Just think; the realities, tensions and consequences, good and bad – as opposed to the odd heavily deodorised, happy-clappy doc or drama – of the Labour government’s vast social engineering project 2000-10 has never really been accurately reflected on the BBC. That’s a bit like the BBC going from 1960 to 1970 without mentioning the Pill or the Beatles. Not really public service broadcasting after all.


My favourite bit of the BBC is Radio 3. Yesterday I listened to composer of the week – Chopin – as I did some yoga before going to work. There was some winter sunshine outside, a tiny herald of spring; and intelligent talk between the nocturnes and mazurkas. Chopin, like all great music, takes you beyond words and coherent thought. I lay in the corpse pose at the end, watching the dust spin in the sunbeams above me, thinking without words. You don’t get that from the One Show with Adrian Chiles.
I shaved as Lunchtime Concert came on and, as I occasionally do, I thought: this is it for the beeb – it’s not about Jonathan Ross and rap stations, it’s about civilisation; the best that has been thought and said; it’s about high art and, when it is middlebrow, it should be the best middlebrow. Keep following that disastrous mix of dumb-arse populism and media studies-level leftism and it’s a dead duck in the long scheme because anyone can do that.
Of course, the TV execs in Charlotte Street restaurants wouldn’t agree, but so what? If they knew anything television wouldn’t be as awful as it is.


*The actual catchphrase of a series of programmes that gave a smiley, decaffeinated Marxist, all-the-fault-of-white-men overview of the continent.

Extract from an email to a pal

'Yes the Tory slump is wonderful. I hate Cameron and Osborne, because they’re our generation and we know what they think and what they’ve done why they’re full of shit. As you say, they’ve spent the last eight years preparing for power on the mistaken idea that Blair © was the new reality. What people want is Billy Bigballs, not trendy vicar.
I want Labour to win because that will bankrupt the country fully and irrevocably. Some of the shit and vomit will get splashed on Obs readers finally and they won’t be able to be righteous when an axe wielded by a socialist humanitarian falls on public services. The Tories will be destroyed: good.
With the money all gone and the IMF knocking on the door all those little consumers who are living in la-la/ryanair land now will suddenly wake to find themselves in a sort of post war country with a lot of draughty shopping malls getting boarded up; Europe will end up having the bits of control it hasn’t already got; immigration would go on as it is now, causing further rent rises and pay slumps; queuing and overcrowding would get even worse; unemployment would soar; the country’s credit rating would be downgraded, there’d be no growth, massive budget deficit, tax hikes, super tax, race riots, a General Strike, militant Mohammadanism running amok (on taxpayers’ money, given to ‘promote non-radicalisation’), the extreme right boneheads fighting the Muslims and everyone else, barbed wire enclaves in Burnley, the handing back, by Miliband, of the Falklands to the Argies with a little smirk; mutinies in the armed services when Labour try and merge them with the French forces*, and possibly even a coup d’etat if we’re very lucky. And in the middle of it all that lying, autistic fucking dunce Brown. Someone will shoot him.
It would be such *fun* to watch, so much better than four years of Cameron and Osborne and with the added piquancy of seeing a proper bit of history: the swan dive to EU banana republic.

Exile: I doubt the doc will be done well, because Jagger will have control of it and he’s never had any idea about that sort of thing and doesn’t understand the appeal of the band or what makes it great and never has had. The Stones were just lucky that they could hire the hippest filmmakers in any given period – Godard, Robert Frank, Scorsese. As Keith Richards said when Watts asked him what he thought of Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil: ‘crap – but we look good in it.’
Jagger said when the record was released: ‘There’s a lot of rock and roll on it. Too much. I like to experiment, I don’t like to go over the same thing again and again.’
Trouble with that is that the reason the Stones were great, particularly on Exile, is because Richards DID like going over the same thing again and again. If he hadn’t liked jamming the same four chords around for hours on end with Taylor and co All Down the Line etc would never have got written. And the world would be worse off.
Experimentation, on the other hand, took the Stones to Their Satanic Majesties and Undercover of the Night.
I rest my case.

Punk will become the property, if it hasn’t already, of academia, which will distort it even further into a Marxist reading of 70s social history.

Reading wise: I read Roger Lewis’s Seasonal Suicide Notes. Funny stuff, if a little too in debt at times to Waugh’s later diaries. He can be very funny though. Do you remember that letter I got from him after I wrote how much I laughed at his Burgess book? Scruton’s new wine book is a very fine read, but I hardly ever drink wine these days.
I had another bash at Crime and Punishment recently but it’s such a monumental bore and the lack of style makes it ‘hard shoulder’. Bits of Conrad’s memoirs. I’ve been reading some Simon Raven. Ever tried him? Funny, half-queer, snobby, public school, cricket, cad, army, gambling, writing; sort of Captain Grimes with a bit of Stringham. Very clear stylist and fun on the train. He disgraced his regiment through his gambling on horses and was warned off. But at one point he had a yankee up for about five grand in the early fifties. Can you imagine? He bought a Bentley with some of the winnings.


*See left wing think tank’s proposals for the armed services. Reported on by the BBC’s website as A think tank. Have you noticed it doesn’t prefix left wing think tanks with ‘left wing’ but always does ‘right wing’ for right wing think tanks?'

Dreamer in a Landscape

John Craxton. Dreamer in a Landscape, 1942. Ink with pen and chalk


Andrew Lambirth's Spectator tribute to the painter John Craxton, who died recently, is a lovely read:

An artist with a particular interest in the inhabited landscape, Craxton could summon up the spirit of place with a wit and ingenuity that left most painters of his generation standing. Aware from youth that there is no art without other art, he sought out essence rather than originality, but achieved an original vision by the depth of his understanding and interpretation. John detested labels and pigeonholes, principally because they encouraged unjustified assumptions and lazy thinking, and he is frequently quoted as disliking the term ‘neo-romantic’, which was attached to his own work of the 1940s. It was the ‘neo’ he objected to particularly, being proud to admit his indebtedness to the Romantic vision of William Blake and Samuel Palmer, just as he would be the first to claim the inspiring influence of Byzantine art.

I had nearly forgotten about Craxton. When I studied painting nearly 20 years ago I found his work intriguing. I was in those days a devotee of Caravaggio, Degas, Van Gogh, Freud, Bacon, Whistler, the impressionists, the fauves, Stanley Spencer and the Camden Town painters. I still am. But it was a few years before I discovered my taste for English Romanticism. I had a good working knowledge of Turner, Constable and Samuel Palmer, however it was some time - after much solipsism and many nights spend wandering under harvest moons that I fell truly under their spell and was properly awed by their achievements.
Constable is out of fashion now, but I always think of him when I walk in a betting shop during the Flat season and see evening racing from Salisbury: not having the BBC's budget, the SIS only has cameras for long shots and this is a boon; you get a complete picture: the gaily coloured jockeys galloping through a blue and gold dusk, lush green turf dappled by evening sunlight, trees and the cathedral behind them in the distance. I must paint that view one day.

Walking through a warren of dark wet streets the other night I turned a corner I don't normally turn and there stood a pub, a proper pub with a proper name, lit up from one end to another with coloured bulbs and glowing with friendly light. It's a good pub that myself and my friends have fallen out of the habit of using. It was like encountering a lit-up pleasure boat on a dark and wintry river. Just the sight of it was a pep without even buying a drink.
I hope we don't lose too many places like that as England disintegrates - they make winters in these bleak cities a bit more bearable - but of course we already have.

Some scattered opinions

A quick apology for saying in my last post that single parents and the welfare/social arrangments of the underclass produce the Doncaster Junior psychopaths. I was careless in my use of language. Obviously I ommitted 'can' from the sentence.
While we're on the subject, I haven't got carried away with the flock that says that the whole thing was a sort of freak thing that could have happened anywhere and at any time. In this country it is only in relatively recent years that small children could have been subjected to such prolonged exposure to violence, drug ingestion, hardcore pornography, horror films and alcoholism. Yes, yes, the medieval period and the workhouses and so on, yes I understand. But monkey see monkey do.
A friend of mine who is a hairdresser said a friend of hers came into work a few weeks ago and told her that she'd found her two sons, both under ten, naked and 'spitting on each other's anuses'.
Evidently she was more bemused than worried by her discovery. But when my friend told this story in the pub all those present - some of whom were parents themselves -immediately came to the same conclusion: her children had been watching and acting out hardcore pornography.


So, James Purnell, Blairite golden boy and model member of the Political Class leaves the circus to find a proper job. At first I was surprised and was almost tempted to say well done, son: these sort of people never like letting go of power, but then I thought again. An intrigant like Purnell, who did his indentures in power-gathering under Tony and Mandy, will always have a good analysis of his own chances: he obviously sees defeat and a lurch to the Left for Labour leaving him on paltry money - by political class standards anyway - and well out of power for years to come.
Merely doing his job as a backbench MP won't excite Purnell, which, when you contrast it with his cant about serving the public as a 'community organiser' rings the bullshit bell for me.
He is well mourned in the Murdoch press today as well he might be: my contacts at Wapping have seen him down there often, currying favour back when the going looked good. He is 'bright', he is 'brilliant', was a 'rising star' etc.
If only the journalists who reeled this stuff off had practical experience of being within the jurisdiction of Mr Purnell's power.
In the middle of last year I found myself in dispute with the Department of Work and Pensions, Purnell's responsibility at the time. The incompetence was breathtaking. I spent many weeks without being paid what was due me. The call centre staff at Stratford Benefit Delivery Centre always directed me back to the Job Centre and the Job Centre always directed me back to SBDC; its staff were mainly foreigners who had no colloquial English, which made explanations time consuming and next to impossible. Two months passed and still no payment.
I contacted my MP and wrote to Purnell. I never heard back from Purnell but I got a very swift reply from my MP, a Tory who had just been exposed as exploiting the additional costs allowance to get himself a second home even though his actual home was only half an hour from Westminster.
In a roundabout way I heard that my MP planned to raise the matter of maladministration at the DoWP and its satellites in Parliament because of the sheer number of complaints he was getting from his constituents.
Meanwhile a reporter friend of mine from Wapping made a study of the DoWP - when ringing it up she always asked - could never find - anyone who knew who James Purnell was.
I sent in a few FoIs asking the things one always asks in FoIs to government and civil service: how many staff are off long term with anxiety and depression, how many are in rehab on the taxpayers' nickel, how much have you spent on prayer rooms, religious toilets, interpreters and halal menus, and, important in this case, how many complaints and disputes about Benefit Delivery Centres are under way. You usually get evasive verbiage or a request to reframe the question. In the case of complaints I seem to remember it would cost them more than the justifiable allowance to find out.
But let me make it clear, I've been in and out of the benefit system over the years and I have never known such incompetence and faceless bureacracy. I couldn't help but think: modern socialism: be shit and be untouchable for being shit.
All under the benign aegis of the great white hope of centre-left politics, James Purnell. Anyone who now says that Ministers cannot be responsible for their departments - a common view now among political class apologists - is essentially playing into the hands of the hard-core libertarians, such as Dr Sean Gabb whose hilarious book on how the libertarian Right might capture England, proposes simply abolishing departments such as the DoWP and the Foreign Office at a stroke.
Incidentally, Gabb's book is a splendid read as long as you don't take it too seriously. I read it in 2007, on trams and buses while commuting through chaotic south London, which was going through the high watermark of the teenage cult of stabbing, skunk and violent disorder caused by Mayor Livingtone's and New Labour's interference in police work.
Can anyone disagree with the basic premise of Gabb's book?

We face a new ruling class made up of the student radicals of the 1960s and 70s. Now in power, they are creating in their own behaviour all the corruption and bigotry and hypocrisy that they falsely alleged against the liberal democratic rulers they have replaced.

Dr Gabb's solutions are far more debatable; and I took issue with him dismissing the BNP as a vehicle for change only because they were 'tainted', and not because they are modelled on the Nazi Party of 1933.
You can download a free pdf on that link.
As for Purnell, he'll be back in about five years with 'street cred' to fight a floundering Tory Party.


I saw a bit of Tarantino's Kill Bill Part 2 on the TV the other night. The last film I saw at the cinema was Kill Bill 1 nearly seven years ago. When I left the cinema with my then girlfriend - who was equally bored by it - I thought, in an obscure way, 'that's the last time they do that to me'. By 'them' I mean the American film industry in general.
Among self-styled hipsters you are not really allowed to dislike Tarantino. Or rather you are allowed to not like his films but you will be branded narrow-minded and provincial if you do. A friend at the time took this tack but I said that you could hardly call a man narrow-minded and provincial who has seen and found merit films such as, for example, Last Tango in Paris, Roma, Pasolini's Salo and The Devils.
I watched about an hour of Kill Bill 2 and I suddenly I remembered very clearly why I dislike his films so much: it isn't that they are comic strip silly, I don't mind that. What I don't like is that within the framework of silliness and comic strip plot is pretension, pomposity and self-indulgence. The dialogue scenes that go on and on - like the absurd death scene of Bill - and demonstrate to me that even though Tarantino boasts of his multi-million dollar masturbatory plagiarism, he wants to be taken very seriously as an artist. His sensibilities are really that of the, horror of horrors, graphic novel. I think he thinks he's a sort of new Sam Peckinpah. But the difference is that while Peckinpah was self-indulgent he had a soul and was an adult and you can see this in his work. No so Quentin.
The exploitation films he adores were rightly regarded as down-the-bill rubbish - sometimes enjoyable rubbish but rubbish nonetheless - but Quentin the video store nerd doesn't like that. He doesn't think they are getting 'nuff respeck. He wants to bring back the old rubbish, pump it full of 'clever' dialogue and adolescent cruelty, and place it at the centre of the culture and have the critical establishment genuflect and the kidults go bandy.
And he's done it, more's the pity.

The Bonfire of the Economist's Vanity

Sorry for radio silence. I had a month off from blogging. As James Brown sang: I’m back!


A friend of this blog asked me to comment about this editorial from last week’s Economist. Its angle is that Cameron’s ‘Broken Britain’ doesn’t exist.

Stepping back from the glare of the latest appalling tale, it is clear that by most measures things have been getting better for a good decade and a half…The broken Britain of legend is one where danger stalks the streets as never before. In the real Britain, the police have just recorded the lowest number of murders for 19 years. In mythical broken Britain, children are especially at risk. Back in real life, child homicides have fallen by more than two-thirds since the 1970s. Britain used to be the third-biggest killer of children in the rich world; it is now the 17th. And more mundane crimes have fallen too: burglaries and car theft are about half as common now as they were 15 years ago. Even the onset of recession has not reversed that downward trend so far.
Comatose teenagers line every gutter in the boozy Britain of popular imagination. Yet after a long period of increase, there are tentative signs that Britons are drinking less alcohol. The overall consumption of drugs is dropping (though some narcotics, including cocaine, are becoming more popular) and rates of smoking are now among the lowest in Europe.
As for family breakdown, some commentators seem to think that sex really was invented in 1963. British grannies know differently. Teenage pregnancy is still too common, but it has been declining, with the odd hiccup, for ages. A girl aged between 15 and 19 today is about half as likely to have a baby in her teens as her grandmother was. Her partner will probably not marry her and he is less likely to stick with her than were men in previous generations, but he is also a lot less likely to beat her. In homing in on the cosier parts of the Britain of yesteryear, it is easy to ignore the horrors that have gone. Straight white men are especially vulnerable to this sort of amnesia.

As an aside, and as a betting man, I would bet that the person who wrote this article is under thirty, either female, Asian or gay (or all three), from a middle to upper middle class background; they are some sort of senior intern following up an Oxford degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics with a stint at the Ec while pondering which career to pursue in the Political Class. They pitched the editorial and got the gig. That’s why the piece is so redolent of the flippant intellects, shrivelled moral imaginations and brazen incuriosity of the graduate class of today.
Anyway, enough of the rhetoric.
To take it point by point:

Regarding the ‘crime is going down’ mantra. Yes, certain types of crime are going down. Mainly the crimes that are motivated by Mr Marx’s commodity fetishism – burglary and car theft. This is indubitably a good thing. But why has it happened? In my view because consumer goods have never been cheaper, welfare provision is generous and credit was plentiful. If DVD recorders, computers and the like were well out of the financial range of the criminal class they would come into your home and take them off you, as they did back in the days when video recorders were the ne plus ultra of consumer fetishism.
When the truth about this country’s financial situation is laid bare after the coming election and the borrowed money tap is turned off for the first time in years as well as a new austerity applied to welfare culture, the behaviour of criminals is likely to change. It’s always worth remembering that when people can get something easily they don’t bother with the hard way – until they decide they have to.
The crimes that have escalated over the past 15 years are crimes such as violence and the use of knives among the young. That has rocketed. Any comparison of teen-on-teen knife murder in the past five years and 20 years ago will show that violence has exploded in recent years. But Left/liberal commentators shamelessly hide this in the general statistics.
I have argued about this many times with a well-known Labour-supporting journalist and he airily refuses to engage with it. Many crimes, particularly petty violence and shoplifting simply go unreported. The police make it abundantly clear they are not interested in ‘minor’ crime. This is the result of a highly privileged, socially liberal judiciary and public administration thinking it social justice to not enforce the law on these crimes. They forget that honest people in poor areas are the people who have to pay for their big-hearted actions. It’s hard to see Hackney, Croydon and Lambeth and their drugs, knives and welfare problems from Hampstead Heath.

The middle par is a splendid example of Political Class doublethink. Yes, every provincial town is a mess of violence and vomit several nights a week – my town centre most definitely is – but ‘there are tentative signs that Britons are drinking less alcohol.’ What signs are these?
Drink isn’t the problem anyway. It’s the entire social and cultural orientation of people that’s becoming a problem. Drink just unleashes it. Drink is just a detonator for the morons our society creates.

More doublethink:

The overall consumption of drugs is dropping (though some narcotics, including cocaine, are becoming more popular).

Nothing to do there but titter.



The third par is also doublethink. Or, perhaps, no-think. Like many a flimsy argument blithely put, it contains the seeds of its own destruction:

As for family breakdown, some commentators seem to think that sex really was invented in 1963. British grannies know differently. Teenage pregnancy is still too common, but it has been declining, with the odd hiccup, for ages.’

A girl aged between 15 and 19 today is about half as likely to have a baby in her teens as her grandmother was. Her partner will probably not marry her and he is less likely to stick with her than were men in previous generations.

How quick that last sentence is rattled off and how much nuance it contains!
And why won’t the man stick around? Because often he will have had no father himself from which to learn moral responsibility and civilised behaviour from; because the stigma of fatherless children was abolished by ‘progressives’ and because he no longer has to because everyone else – via the state – is paying for his children. This ‘empowers’ women, according to the Labour Party. An extreme example of the sort people these arrangments produce is the recent case of two junior psychopaths in Doncaster.
But,

…he is also a lot less likely to beat her.

Yes, well, you can’t beat someone if you’re no longer with them.

I will admit that I don’t like Cameron’s phrase ‘Broken Britain’. It’s as phoney as a newspaper campaign. Of course, most of the people currently objecting to the phrase were the very people who were forever screaming about ‘Thatcher’s Britain’ and blaming every last ill on her government. For example, within the past few years the late Richard Stott in the Daily Mirror was still blaming every violent crime that occurred in Britain on Mrs Thatcher, 15 and more years after she left office. Labour must be careful over this.
Having interviewed Cameron I know that he has the single-mother welfare industry created by Labour firmly in his sights. Personally I think he’ll bottle it when the time comes but we shall see.
The Economist has long been a magazine extolling the selfishness and hypocrisy of liberals in love with consumer capitalism: Blair’s old speechwriter, Neether, in his role as comment editor of the Standard, seemed always to be getting senior editorial staff from the magazine to pen the spurious from-business-class defences of Labour’s insane immigration levels. Defences that have subsequently been proved by the House of Lords report on the matter to be completely wrong. Still, cheap labour’s cheap labour – it’s not called The Economist for nothing.
The more people I meet who are involved in the Political Class at even lowly levels, the more I encounter this idea that somehow a mixture of the preeminence of pop culture, feminism, gay rights and ‘multiculturalism’ means that Progress Has Happened and It Is Not To Be Gainsaid in Any Way. Anyone who asks awkward questions is held to be opposed to gay rights, feminism etc and is liable to be called a ‘fascist’ or ‘rightwing’.
I am in favour of gay rights and feminism, but I stop short at surrendering to the ideological fantasy that the family is not THE building block of a civilised society but A block and that everyone can do exactly what they like and it's all for the best in the best possible world. I've seen enough of it going wrong to know that is the moonshine of the socially leftish middle class.

Then there’s this pearl:

The waning of the manufacturing jobs that used to be the mainstay of the working class has created a generation of young males, in particular, who don’t know what to do with themselves.

Could have been written Marie Antoinette, couldn’t it? What has created the generation of young males ‘who don’t know what to do with themselves’ is the impact of trendy and ‘progressive’ social developments in homes and schools. Where nobody can or is allowed to stand up to these children before the road to the underclass is taken. Meanwhile the middle classes get the glittering prizes. And they call this social justice. As I once said to an Oxbridge graduate journo who was extolling the virtues of decriminalising skunk: ‘It’s all right for you. You can get away with it. Thousands of kids round here won’t be so lucky.’

The editorialist mentions how Britons are sentimentally looking back on – vile expression – ‘yesteryear’.
I don’t. I like to think I have a level head about what we have lost and what we have gained. And we have gained much. But some things, some worthwhile things, have been or are being lost. To point this out is not to be a sentimentalist. In my opinion, children who grow up on nothing but telly, the net, computer games and porn on their phone will be less pleasant, less lovable, less use and enjoyment to themselves and to others than children who grew up using their imaginations through playing with each other and reading and drawing so on. I may be wrong but what I see so far makes me feel I am not that wide of the mark. The innocence and space of childhood is being stripped away, sexualised and, somehow, nationalised. It fills me with dread. To note this is not to be nostalgist, surely?


To conclude. If The Economist want to see the sharp end of the pluralism they are in love with, they should get out of Shoreditch and spend some time hanging round the sinks, where the crack and kicking-heads-like-footballs culture is. Broken Britain may be a cliché, but you could hardly say it was in full working order, what with nearly 10 million people economically inactive and/or in the welfare system and a government which still insists we need foreign labour. After 13 years of an enormous socialist spending spree, the current situation leaves Blairite capitalists with some very thorny questions to answer.

Amjem's March...

...is being discussed in a waffly way at Harry's Place. The usual High Left response that it's all an illusion cooked up by the Press and if only we could have censorship nobody would ever need to consider religious extremism in Britain again.
I replied:

Islam4uk is just the tip of a massive iceberg. By which I mean there are a huge amount of young Muslims in Britain that think that killing in the name of religion is justified*, that a caliphate is good news and that this, their home country, is at war with their religion. Their demonstration, if it had gone ahead, would have caused the first major battle of a second English civil war which now looks unavoidable in any case. How decisive Brown and Johnson are on this for once, how unequivocal! That’s because they too know it would become the first battle – and also be nicely illustrative the logical end of doctrinal multiculturalism, something both men have backed for years. A street battle between bearded fanatics and respectable middle-Englanders in a country town like WB would demonstrate vividly the mess that modern socialism and its siren suicide note of moral relativism and cultural Marxism has got silly old England into. No, you bet your arse they don’t want that.

*Last year, a poll by the Centre for Social Cohesion** found that almost one in every three Muslim students in the UK said that killing in the name of religion was justified, with one third also in favour of a worldwide Islamic caliphate, or empire, based on Islamic sharia law.

** Started with money from Civitas, which probably means that the High Left will airily ignore its survey results as 'right-wing propaganda'.

Cheer yourself up with Butch

From Keep Thinking Butch,

'Gordon Brown, our Prime Minister, and his six-year-old chum David Miliband have said rude words on China for executing a drug smuggler according to their legal code. That’s right. A man who aimed to bring misery to thousands in order to enrich himself has been whacked by the world’s next superpower, and our [non] elected representatives have a problem with that. I wish I could live another hundred years, if only to see Guardian readers’ faces when China takes over the role of Great Satan from their hated America. Human Rights Act? Toilet paper to the Chinese, my liberal friends. Also, I love the fact that every Brit in chokey abroad these days has got a ‘psychological condition’. Yeah, they have. It’s called being British. From a court case in the near future:

DEFENCE LAWYER: M’lud, although it is indisputably true that my client was found in the same room as seven dismembered corpses, with a bloody axe in his hand and repeating the phrase “I am death”, we would move for a plea of mitigation due to a psychological condition suffered by my client.

JUDGE: And what is the medical term for this condition?

DEFENCE LAWYER: Britishness, m’lud.

JUDGE: Case dismissed!

In other news, we can’t stop telling Iran how to run their internal affairs, either. It has absolutely nothing to do with us if a bunch of theocratic spastics want to club opposition supporters, be they women or children, half to death for the unislamic activity of having an opinion. So why are we getting so wobbly lipped about it? These people have yet to enter the eighth century; why do we think they will suddenly respond to adult suggestions, even those made by Childe Miliband? The only concern we have with Iran is keeping nuclear weapons off the menu and, if we lack the courage to do that, Israel will do it for us and I, for one, will have a street party on the day the first mushroom cloud is spotted over Tehran.'

And if you didn't laugh at that, well, as Rod Stewart says on the Faces' live version of Maybe I'm Amazed, 'I dunno where yer bin.'

"Mad" Mel

The we-know-best-and-you-don't left/liberals call her Mad Mel. They never have much to say after a terrorist hit or near-miss. She does. I knew a very noisy left/liberal years ago who said that all terrorism was caused by poverty - a cursory glance at the backgrounds of leading terrorists - especially the current crop of jihadist psychopaths - demonstrates that, like so much contemporary left/liberal dogma, that particular nostrum is fucking poppycock. But it shows you they'll believe anything.

Radicals flocked to the UK, attracted by Britain's toxic combination of criminally lax immigration controls, generous health, education and welfare benefits and the ability to perpetuate their views through the British veneration of the principle of free speech.
Despite 9/11, the 2005 London Tube and bus attacks and the dozens of other Islamist plots uncovered in Britain, the astounding fact is that Islamic extremist networks are still allowed to flourish in Britain, largely through the obsession of its governing class with multiculturalism and 'human rights'.

As a result, Britain remains - to its eternal shame - the biggest hub of Islamic radicalisation outside the Arab and Muslim world.
Extremists are still slipping into the country. The courts are still refusing to deport terrorists in order to protect their 'human rights' abroad.
London boasts the shameful reputation of the world's premier money-laundry for terrorism, which shelters behind a label of 'charity' that the authorities choose not to challenge.
Not only is no action taken against extremist mosques and madrassas, but many British universities have been turned into terrorism recruitment centres.

Rest here.

As Madness once sang, if this is madness then I'm filled with gladness.

Because totalitarian governments always label their opponents insane in the end. See soviet Russia.

Is it "Mad" Mel, or is it "Mad" Gordon, Ed, Harriet and Tony? The answer depends on whether you prefer your head in the sand or not.

Local effing government

After last night weather, I felt moved to ask a friend of mine to stick this the local paper round here:

Dear XXXX,

I will buy you a beer or two if you put this letter in your paper.

Dear Sir,

When I emerged from ****** station at around 12.30am on Dec 17, I found a blizzard blowing. In the space of two minutes I saw three people take heavy falls in the slush - there was, of course, no grit down. Walking through the snow I saw several other people take heavy falls. I called out to one man, who had fallen very heavily and appeared to have done serious damage to his arm, and said: "wonderful, isn't it, that we pay a fortune in tax and AND council tax to keep the council offices full of local government staff who are supposed to be 'managing' everything but they can't even grit the roads and pavements, even when there's 12 hours notice.."
Of course, the above sentence was shorter, sweeter and punctuated with bloodcurdling swearwords.
When I finally reached my road, after half a mile uphill of ungritted pavements and roads, I checked the box at the end of the road to see if there was any salt that residents could use for the road come the morning. Naturally, it was empty - we used it all in the February blizzards and, though the council can have a diversity and green policies of byzantine intricacy and bully everyone into having four different recycling boxes, it cannot refill the salt supply tub for the road.
I would write to my councillor about this but last time I wrote to him he never wrote back.
The moral of the story is what the point of local government? Five intelligent people - who actually live in the borough and understand its needs - could meet once a month in a room above a pub and make all the financial and planning decisions necessary to 'run' this borough. Local government is an expensive, useless racket and it should be abolished now.

William Gazy

Balls

Privately educated 'toff' Edward Balls has responded to Andrew Gilligan's Spectator piece about the Labour government giving money to a school where a former Hizb ut-Tahrir campaigner with extremist views is working(see past posts)with a letter to said organ saying that no hardline Islamic attitudes exist within the school because the school's Ofsted inspection didn't find any.
I'll say that again. In a slow, mockingly sarcastic voice. Because Ofsted didn't find any.

This is how socialism does its business. This is how it sleeps at night. The same thinking that results in Baby P and the doctor who couldn't see he had a broken spine and the social workers who filed reports while his father kicked him round the house. Why pensioners lie in their own excrement in hospitals. Why people end up in court for having opinions that the Oxbridge intelligentsia don't approve of. Why Victoria Climbie was tortured to death under the noses of Haringey Council. Why Fiona Pilkington was driven to suicide as the police did nothing. Why a hundred or more teenagers have been shot, stabbed or beaten to death in London in the last couple of years. Why the national debt is heading for £1.5 trillion.

Because Ofsted didn't find any.

Victoria, Midnight

Study for Victoria, Midnight; charcoal on brown packing paper
14x19in

It was Van Gogh who said that night was just as interesting to paint as day, if not more so. I think he was right.
If you ever come round the corner into Terminus Place, as the area outside Victoria Station is called, on a bus, you will notice how the recorded female voice announces it. She says it quite unlike the way she announces any of the other streets.
She says 'Victoria Station' in the voice of a woman who has just had a very good time in bed.
I like the front of Victoria Station at night. It has grime and grandeur; a monstrous wedding cake left out in sooty rain. I've been coming in and out of that station for thirty years and the front always has something new to show me, if only the way the light catches it.
The impression I want to give here is something vertigious, tottering almost, with immensities looming. Some lights still burning but many switched off.
I hope to work it up into something majestic and damned, like England is.

Post budget record, sing in a Scotch accent, if you please.
Here we are again. The money's all gone. Osborne is right when he says that at least in the past when they'd pissed it all away on their bureacratic utopias they had the balls to take the tough decisions. Not this bunch of devious cowards.

The Liddle Incident - Night Thoughts II

Anyone who takes notice of the news and spends significant amounts of time on streets and on public transport in London will know that Rod Liddle has a point - the culture of young black males has been pathological for a very long time now and liberals and the Left cannot face it and have gone to extraordinary lengths to hide/deny it.
If you've seen a fair bit of life from, as Kipling has it 'the underside where the lath and plaster is not smoothed off', you will know that Liddle is being provocative but broadly correct.
(Sorry to bring Kipling in - that won't help anyone's case in the eyes of an urban liberal)
The usual suspects have all howled with rage - you won't see Bonnie Greer or Diana Abbott getting so exercised about Hizb ut-Tahrir - and let them howl. Abbott is one of the biggest and most ridiculous hypocrites in the parliamentary Labour Party - and that is a very crowded field.
She refused to give her son the socialist education her party insists children should have, for the very reason that she did not want her son to become involved with the pathological culture of young black males - which socialist comprehensive culture can do absolutely zilch about, except invent ever more fantastical explanantions and excuses for it.
So she packed him off to a private school, paid for with the money she makes from 'representing' the people whose sons she does not want her son mixing with.
And she calls Cameron and Osborne toffs...
Bonnie Greer was reported in yesterday's papers to have responded to Liddle's piece by saying:

'My response would be that the overwhelming majority of paedophiles, murderers, warmongers and football hooligans are white males and all we got in return was beans on toast and Top Gear.'

Now, doubtless this is sarcasm and I should not bother to refute her outburst on the grounds that I have never seen Miss Greer say anything that even appeared intelligent or wise, even when she had a golden opportunity to do so when she found herself sitting next to that repulsive and stupid man Nick Griffin on Question Time.
But still. They are very intemperate comments for someone who is Deputy Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the British Museum, don't you think? As well as being a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Member of the Franco-British Council.
Guess who personally put Bonnie on the board of trustees for the British Museum? Gordon Brown, that's who.
The Left can't handle crime when it's done by anyone - but their especial supinity is with black crime. Which is why it has escalated over the Blair/Brown years.
In fact, the near-weekly fatal stabbing of young black men by other young black men which occurred during the late baroque wrongness of Ken Livingstone's mayoralty has only been reduced because that heartless communist and his tame copper Ian Blair were turfed out by someone on the Right who could face the truth and do something about it.

Three cheers for Andrew Gilligan - he's proved that the Labour government ARE funding what amounts to a Hizb ut-tahrir madrasah. Gilligan, no righty he, called Ed Balls a 'disgrace' to his face, which must be a wonderfully cathartic thing to be able to do.

The main evidence that Mr Balls has made a massive blunder is a chapter in a Hizb ut Tahrir pamphlet, ‘Education and Identity’, written by one Farah Ahmed. Mrs Ahmed is the head teacher of one of the two schools, and also a trustee of the Islamic Shakhsiyah Foundation (ISF), which runs them both. If I were a Muslim parent, I would not let my child within 20 miles of her.

Just when bien pensants were about to start playing their well-worn record entitled 'all an invention of the right wing press', old Gilly gets to the bottom of it. Well done son.

I approach Taki in the Spectator with caution. He can make you laugh or he can make you think he's an old Germanic word beginning with c. But he's very funny this week about Dubai threatening to go pop. I particularly enjoyed this bit:

Sam Goldwyn once said that if you want to send a message use Western Union. Hollywood didn’t listen and lots of crappy movies were made. Well, I liked old Sam, not that I ever met him, but we should follow his advice and send a message through Western Union to the Maktoum Brothers comedy act. It should read as follows: Palace intrigue old hat stop decision making lousy stop greed comma arrogance comma and all round hirsute facial ugliness too much stop no longer welcome to rainy comma full of towels already comma London stop. Not that it will ever happen. Because you can fool all the people all the time when you promise them riches. Because that’s all the Dubai debacle ever was. A desert mirage fueled by greed and sold to suckers by tawny types whose ancestors used to sell flying carpets to dumb Englishmen with sunburnt noses, knees, and elbows.

Of course, I'm more struck on the Maktoums than Taki is - I've backed a lot of their horses and won fat sums off them.

Night thoughts

It occurred to me as I gazed out of the train window going past Battersea Power Station at midnight the other week (I work nights) that the seed of Labour’s disastrous years in power was this: when you and your members/supporters are out of office for a generation you start to think you’re right simply because the government of the day is wrong - and so does everybody else. That’s exactly why I warn people from voting Cameron. The prime lesson to be learned from Blair’s tenure was just because it’s all gone wrong don’t think the incoming cabinet are going to be anything other than shit with bad ideas.
The English middle classes and the English working class Tories developed a kind of in-advance version of Stockholm Syndrome about the Labour Party back in the dog days of Major. The media onslaught against the Tories and the recession – remember how thick it was laid on compared to Labour’s recession? – pushed these sections into loving something they normally hated with a passion and they voted and voted for ‘Home Counties’ Tony, and by doing so they entrenched a gang of former and not-so-former Communists in power.
Well, as an old gangerman I knew when I worked in the building game used to say when someone had injured themselves through their own stupidity: ‘that’ll fucking learn yer.’



When are all the young urban liberals – and the comedians, pop singers and DJs who manufacture their attitudes and ideas – going to start shouting about President Barack ‘W’ Obama, as I am pleased to call him?
He announced his upping of the ante in the AfghaniNAM war this week in an assertive speech at West Point that would have made every young urban liberal I know absolutely venomous with righteous indignation – if, er, he didn’t happen to be black and a ‘liberal’.
But I see nothing much about it. If it had been Dubya himself, then it would have been a very different matter. It is this squalid hypocrisy among the young that I find so disgusting – they want to lead us in the fight for a rainbow world of equality, low carbon consumerism, middle-class bummer rock and quality coffee shops, and yet, when confronted with a Jack-and-Jill test of their moral reasoning, they fail at the first. Dear me. All that whining, all the marches and gigs, all those Marcus Brigstocke gags and then tumbleweeds when a Black Democrat does the warmonger boogie.
Do you remember when comedians, pop singers, the BBC and actors used to criticise British governments? It happened for a while during what I call the Luvvies’ Interregnum – the freezing winter of 2002-3 – when, after five happy years of Thatcho-Socialism (that’s where you can be a pig for money, power and privilege safe in the knowledge that your tax money is financing Cultural Marxism) Blair made his fateful, stupid decision to go to war and the Left split down the middle. (You may also remember that apart from the Iraq scrimmage, Labour’s pop culture vanguards never had anything to say about Blair’s other wars)
But apart from that, this appalling government – far worse than Margaret Thatcher’s government and I’ll award ten English pounds to the first person who can write below a convincing explanation of why that statement is wrong – has never had any serious opposition from popular culture and as regular readers of this blog know that makes me mad.
It’s all very well to say that centre-left governments are always the darlings of the arts, media and academe, but when things have become so pisspoor and people who could speak out don’t, then you have to question the intellects and morals of these people. And I do. And I find them wanting and so, therefore, I find the mainstream culture wanting.

One of my strongest dislikes these days are so called stand-up comedians. Among my extensive network of friends and acquaintances I find so many people’s beliefs about how the world works are shaped by men like Eddie Izzard. This amounts to a pathological sarcasm about western civilisation, or rather the defence mechanisms of civilisation – the nation state, empirical thinking, cultural conservatism. See Izzard’s routine about flags, on youtube. I long for the day that people such as Izzard and Stephen Fry get some of their own medicine from a younger generation.
Of course, scratch one of these ‘comic geniuses’ and what do you find? Neil Kinnock. By which I mean dreary, socialist EU fanatics. Izzard is a Labour party groupie and last time I heard an aspirant MEP.
The only contemporary stand up comedian who I find consistently funny is Harry Hill.

A few of useful things that have come out of the Iraq and Afghanistan fiascos: It has clearly demonstrated to the British public that, as ever, a Labour government cannot behave in a responsible manner towards the armed services. We forget that at our peril.
Injudicious comments from ministers have revealed that a major reason Whitehall will not countenance pulling out is because they fear the legal and immigration ramifications a retreat would cause – extraordinary but check Hansard. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1225177/British-troops-fighting-Afghanistan-stop-immigrants-coming-Britain-claims-Phil-Woolas.html
Finally, a lot of intellectual bigheads have had to shut their mouths about what a jolly good thing these wars are. You don’t hear so much of C Hitchens and his merry men these days now the whole thing’s gone tits up. I am not an intellectual bighead but I was pro Iraq and I am big enough to admit I changed my mind. As I was writing this I thought about some of the arguments I used to have with a blog called Drink-Soaked Trotskyist Popinjays for War, a group of Australian Hitch-ite left-wing ‘hawks’. They didn’t half like to give it the big one, as they say. I decided to look them up on the net and it looks like they’ve disappeared. I wonder why.
Finally, I like to say to people in regard to the mass media/culture’s attitude to the war in Afghanistan: Imagine what people would say if it was a TORY war…
Good night all.

A song Georgey boy would have enjoyed.

Some months ago I noted with some considerable sadness that Chas and Dave had split up. Dave Peacock could no longer continue touring after the death of his wife.
Anyone who has been to a Chas and Dave gig will know they were the greatest rock and roll band in modern Britain. I do not say that 'ironically' nor facetiously but in the sense that they could play the music known as rock and roll better than any other band at work in the contemporary scene. Get them on the right night and when they played old rock and roll numbers in that propulsive Little Richard/Jerry Lee Lewis style and it was simply magnificent. They were great lyricists as well.
Anyway, I wanted to post a small tribute to them and I forgot to. So now I am. Where does the greatest English journalist come into it, you ask?
Well, click here and you'll hear a song that I think the author of Politics and the English Language would have enjoyed.
They've turned the language upside down
And aimed it out the door.

Quantitative Easing, or, The Coach

Study for Quantitative Easing, or, The Coach. 60x45cm, charcoal on brown packing paper.



Continuing with my drawing project (see this post for more details). A while ago I sat at the bar in the Coach and Horses, Soho, and idly made some small very rough sketches of the room and how the light falls in it - light readings, really - and took some phone pics to back it up. Then I promptly forgot all about them until this evening when I was looking for something else. I used them as the basis for this drawing, which seems to continue the theme.
I slightly warped the perspective here and there, partly to make the viewer feel he is in the bar feeling a bit drunk or emotional; and partly as a salute to Keith Waterhouse's play Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, which featured the Coach and Horses all at crazy angles, as if CRW Nevinson had got juiced up and designed the set.

When the Nomenklatura turned into the Political Class

'...Moreover, because learning, culture and the European spiritual heritage were, for them, symbols of their own inner freedom, and of the national independence they sought to remember, if not to regain, they looked on those things with an unusual veneration. As a visitor from the world of fun, pop and comic strips I was amazed to discover students for whom words devoted to such things were wasted words, and who sat in those little pockets of underground air studying Greek literature, German philosophy, medieval theology and the operas of Verdi and Wagner.

In 1985 the secret police moved against me and I was arrested in Brno; visits to Czechoslovakia came to an end and I was followed in Poland and Hungary. But our team kept going until 1989 when, to our surprise, the catacombs were opened and our friends came pale, staggering and bewildered into the sunlight, to be hailed by the people as the natural trustees of their restituted country. This was a wonderful moment and, for a while, I believed that the public spirit that had reigned in the catacombs would now govern the State.

It was not to be. Having been excluded for decades from the rewards of worldly advancement, our friends had failed to cultivate those arts — hypocrisy, treachery and realpolitik — without which it is impossible to stay in government...'

Roger Scruton remembers his dealings with the anti-communist/socialist underground in Eastern Europe 25 years ago; and how the tentacles of Moscow have been replaced by the chicanery of Brussels. (No, he's not saying the EU is as bad as soviet totalitarianism, but, and there is a but...) The rest here:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6906694.ece

Boom Times

Many thanks for all the good feedback on my drawing.
When I said I undertook it to take my mind off the political situation I didn’t express myself very clearly. What I meant to say was that in the past few weeks I have formulated and even begun to write quite a few posts, but all of them have been abandoned, partly because I’ve seen the same things said better elsewhere and partly because, well, savage indignation and the great morass of cant, lies and bullshit known as contemporary political discourse are draining materials to work with.
I find it interesting that now the political class and Labour government’s mistakes are piling up thick and fast it seems to have a deadening effect on all our moral imaginations, by which I mean we are being worn down by living in the logjam; what would once have shocked me now provokes nothing more than a disgusted sigh: responding freshly to a situation of permanent chicanery, incompetence, arrogance, hypocrisy and moral nullity is hard work for the human brain. As Orwell said, sometimes the hardest things to see are right under your nose.
However, these are a few unpolished thoughts provoked by the past month’s events.

The present government, political class and contemporary culture represent the full flowering of the baby-boomer generation. It is the received opinion of forty years of liberal thought made civil and constitutional reality. In many important areas it has been an utter failure, disguising rather than solving many of the old social problems, while creating many new pathologies and problems, which it often refuses to admit exist and always refuses to take the blame for.
Although socially speaking there has been a welcome easing up of the old class boundaries and social snobberies, these boundaries still exist in education and many of the boomers’ remedies have simply turned out to be wishful thinking: levelling gestures that have punished talent emerging from the lower social spectrum, while leaving the moneyed middle classes to carry on as they were.
To write the above is to generally invite a chorus of sneering retorts along the lines of ‘what, would you rather live in the 50s?’ To which the answer is most certainly not. I simply turn the boomers’ triumphal view of history around a little bit: we know the bad things that have disappeared, but let’s consider what was worthwhile. Sometimes it is worth considering the baby and not the bathwater.
When you consider the burning social injustices that drove most boomers to righteous decaffeinated Marxism – having to wear short trousers until the age of 14; having old men tell them to stand when they played the national anthem; being told to get their haircuts and take their feet of the seats on trains – you have to laugh when you compare them to the injustices these grammar/public school boys eventually thrust on the subsequent generations: the rights of passage now are knives, drug delirium, absent fathers, a landscape of strong and casual violence, gang rapes, feral behaviour, legitimized ignorance, unpunished violence, unexplored potential, low paid work or a life of welfare.
Even the boomer complaint that in their youth difference was severely frowned on – John Osborne’s comment about not being able to walk through a provincial town wearing a yellow cardigan comes to mind – has to be digested in the knowledge that anyone these days who doesn’t conform to manufactured reality of television (the boomers’ superhighway of liberal babel) is liable to be singled out for belittlement: pre-cultural revolution, people were not jeered to self-immolation for having long hair or wearing yellow cardigans. If they were attacked repeatedly the law would do something about it. Now, thanks to boomer government, the police will only act if it is a ‘hate crime’. Anyone who decides this is an exaggeration had better study the recent Fiona Pilkington case in detail.
I wondered what had made the boomers the way they are. I can understand a lot of it: I was a wayward youth and adult, embraced rebellion, sex, drugs and rock and roll plus left wing politics. I still believe that two of the most repellent sights in British politics are young conservatives and old socialists.
But you grow up, you notice the hypocrisies of the new boss, same, as The Who sang, as the old boss – but in the case of the boomers often a deal worse (put Blair next to, say, Macmillan).
That is not to say you suddenly believe that Britain should be run by Mark Thatcher types and that greed and the corporations are good, far from it; but you come to realise that the same problems keep coming up, and that there are, perhaps, reasons for certain attitudes. That standards are there for a reason and that without authority there can be no justice.
But a social democrat boomer would tell you that there has never been more justice – a ministry of justice here, supra-national ministries of justice on the continent; a mantra of social justice running through the media and academe like letters through a stick of rock. But this brave new world keeps producing more and more inversions of justice. While the EU creates a legal framework which protects Islamic terrorists, it simultaneously bans Italian schoolchildren from wearing crucifixes to school.
While we are on the subject of Islam it is always worth repeating that the rise of radical Islam in Britain, while in part was allowed to flourish by the security services, was largely a result of the boomer class's vanity: they considered themselves so non-judgemental (of non-white groups anyway) that even when an organised far-Right death cult began to gain influence all the boomer class did was make excuses for it and give it money (recent example: Hizb ut tahrir - the far Right Islamic group that Tony Blair boasted he would ban - has just received a large grant to run its own schools) This is institutional folly on a grand scale.
The boomer left claims to hate elites and yet it has given its weight to creating and sustaining an anti-democratic elite in Brussels.
Multiculturalism, mass-immigration, the curtailing of freedom of speech – all things that were decided in a wholly undemocratic way by noisy social democratic boomers. The effect? A flagging civil infrastructure, overburdened schools and services and a growing urban tension. A demoralized, low-paid workforce struggling with crippling accommodation bills – the privileged boomers, however, got the cheap au pairs and Polish plumbers. Now fascism is on the rise. Before 13 years of boomer government the BNP was a tiny, fringe organisation with less than 2,000 members. Now it has 20 per cent of the population considering whether to vote for it, two MEPs in Brussels and a regular spot on Question Time to look forward to.
And still Jack Straw (a textbook boomer) would not connect his government and its policies with this alarming rise of support for a fascist party.
The principal of free speech replaced by political license: in the bad old days homosexuality was illegal. This was wrong. It achieved legal toleration. This was right. Now it has become virtually illegal to disagree with it. You are no longer allowed to disagree with the state orthodoxies. Is this the liberty that boomers shouted about? I don’t recognize it as liberty.
Sure, there is more liberty than there was in some respects and what is worthwhile I enjoy. But the boomers’ relativism and hatred of their parents’ manners has dovetailed perfectly with consumer capitalism to create the blank-eyed, ignorant, utterly selfish, burger-stuffing iPodista we sit next to every day on the train. For such people, independent thought means what crap am I going to buy next. Does saying this really make me a soulless fogey? I don't feel like one. I feel young, actually, with a soul. (I'm listening to Otis Redding as I write this - but I do listen to the more melodically pleasing Elgar now and again...)
But why did the boomers become as they were? I’ve come to the conclusion that it was an inferiority complex about the Second World War. They had to grow up in the shadow of it and the achievements and resilience of the people who lived through it and this pushed many of them into a kind of permanent adolescence, rejecting on principal – not reason – anything that reminded them of their parents’ and grandparents’ attitudes (I am not saying that all their attitudes were right and proper).
But it is a good irony that what the boomers’ destroy they eventually need again: hence after years of decrying the suburban archetype of ‘the nosy neighbour’, the government is now planning to have local snoopers, paid by the state. They do exactly the same in the failed Communist state of Cuba, where each block of flats has a party snooper on the look out for any seditious comment or behaviour. Our local snoopers will soon find their list of trangressions to look out for widened to take in the political manias of the boomers.
There is one silver lining, I suppose: the boomers will all retire soon, most of them on fat pensions – they had the good times and queered the pitch for many of those that followed.