They're Joking. Aren't They?

Paul Blart: Internet vigilante

2012-02-23T09:45:00.009Z

Read the awesome brevity of the original first. Dumb Jon exposes official secrecy at the Met here.

The very idea that our paid, professional protectors are loath to co-operate with a charity (I think it’s some kind of victims’ pressure-group, but let’s let that pass) that simply reports incidents of violence will need some explanation.

In a statement, the Met said: 'We do not endorse the reporting of street crime through the MPS website or any other third party website.

'This is predominantly due to concerns over victim safety and the importance of deploying officers in person as quickly as possible to scenes of serious street crime.

'Street crime is taken very seriously by the MPS, and in order to reduce street crime and catch offenders, the MPS urges victims to contact police in the quickest way possible by calling 999 or speaking to an officer on patrol nearby.'

Of course, some of today’s Twitter-addled youth might just be stupid enough to believe that posting a crime report on the Net is as good as calling the actual police (they’ve been ill-educated enough to think their self-esteem matters above all other things including what we adults fondly call ‘reality’, so that publishing their pain is being just as good as being an active citizen), and if so that seems a fair enough concern.

Except… What’s that ‘predominantly’ doing there? What else might worry the professionals?

As Jon hints, it might be that such a map might show some disquieting patterns after a few months of use. Perhaps – and you’d better hold on tight here because it could get rough – it would show an uneven distributions of violent crime reports. What if (to choose absurd examples and for effect only - do NOT try this at home) Golder’s Green and Kensington and Chelsea showed a disappointing lack of violent street attacks but that, oh, I don’t know, Brixton and Tower Hamlets sprouted a veritable forest of little flags? That wouldn’t be fair, would it, because it’s unequal and inequality’s the worst thing in the world ever: rproper Room 101 stuff, yeah? Perhaps to even up certain social inequalities thus exposed it might prove necessary to accentuate the crimes that are never punished because no-one in power cares. Someone could add flags for hurtful snobbery, or not renting spare rooms to welfare claimants, or being visibly religious – amongst the Left’s most feared and most untouchable 'real' crimes. Or somebody could add in the positives in cheerful colours to break up all those tedious patches of red and orange - cool blues and soothing greens, perhaps - for posts such as;”It was 3.30 AM on Tuesday and through my bedroom wall and along all the joists in the roof and from the very foundations of the house I could suddenly hear the sunny sounds of merriment as music redolent of warm beaches and rum-filled pineapples. This replaced my anxious dreams about tomorrow’s early shift at the warehouse with a comforting reminder of multicultural reality here in London,” or; “It was nine-thirty PM on Saturday and I was followed from my home by a group of good-natured youths who very vocally and charmingly complimented me on my modest good looks and the glittering dress I was wearing for a night out dancing, and who invited me to party of their own. At one point, their flattery became quite insistent.”

Nah.

I think a likelier explanation is that the Met is concerned that somehow cyber crime reporting will be inauthentic. A poster would miss out on the true feeling of reporting assaults against person and property in today’s professional law-enforcement environment. Perhaps high-ranking police officers areconvinced by their own personal experience that a virtual event that is enjoyed crouched in front of a PC or Apple is likely to be less rich and engaging than the real thing with all its sights and sounds and smells, such and the tactile joys of Police Station plastic benches pressing up against the tired thighs of a freshly mugged pensioner. If any single group in the land knows the difference between online and real world experience personally, it’s likely that London’s New Labour-endorsed Met hierarchy is it.

Perhaps the clever people at Witness Confident should ask their techies to make streetviolence.org more real for their customers. After all, in an industry that produces games where you mow down hundreds of realistic-looking zombies or race virtual Ferraris around London’s smooth, unblocked streets, surely streetviolence.org’s functions could be redesigned to fit in a five hour delay for posts to appear on the browsers of the capital; only then to be wiped an hour later and require re-posting with all the fun of filling in endless fields and ticking boxes all over again - and maybe then it still fails to post inexplicably? Perhaps after two days they could send the victim a helpful email sympathizing with their plight and offer them a phone number for victim support? And after that no more communication from streetviolence.org, ever?

The Witness Confident spokesman seemed to think so.

Mr Dehn added: 'As a way of telling the police you can help, the site is a welcome alternative to hanging behind at the scene, standing around at a police station or waiting in line at a call centre.

'This matters as there's little chance the police can make our streets safer if witnesses don't come forward.

'One of the things that has been lost in recent years is engagement with police ... If you want to help police, this allows you to contact them 24/7 at the convenience of your computer.'

Actually, on reflection I think my own musings and Mr Dehn ’s above might be more than a little naïve.

Now, if Witness Confident were to market the website to the Met as the culmination of the decades-long evolution of police work and crime reporting from its primitive and barbaric past they might win a greater acceptance from the Met.

They should look wryly back together to an unlamented past when police officers physically pursued criminals (how quaint that judgmental old word sounds today!) with the intention that the evidence, witness statements, the process of the law and sensible magistrates and twelve good men and true would come together somehow to put a miscreant off the streets for a time long enough to a regret hurting other folk (as if that ever worked at all!).
Then the Met would realise that streetviolence.org is the final step towards the intelligent design of the Last Men who - long ago warned off by the Police against ‘having a go’ or ‘taking the law into their own hands’ and terrorized against becoming that supreme evil; a vigilante - will simply and passively enter the tragedy of their crime-ruined lives where they can become anonymous and ignored statistics as is right and proper.

Isn’t this what modern policing actually wants from us?

At least the fat bloke had a mission statement (however gentle) to combat rowdiness in his New Jersey shopping mall by calling for official backup;

Detect, Deter, Observe, and Report.

What’s the Met’s mantra for those poor bloody cockernies?

Complain, Endure, Ignore, and Forget.

Picture from here.

Point : blank

2012-02-20T08:59:00.008Z

More good sense from The Guardian.

The concealed handgun licence 'controversy' is just mud flinging

In decrying a safe and effective weapon, the anti-gun lobby is again undermining self defence for young people.

"The strategy of the United States' anti-gun, anti-concealed-carry lobby is to keep flinging mud until some sticks, draining security professionals and advocates of time and energy by inventing battles that need to be fought and throwing up misinformation that needs to be corrected."

These were words of warning from a colleague at a meeting just yesterday. She could have been talking about Harriet Harmon, who within the past six months has tried to remove small-bore pistol shooting from the Home Office-regulated Firearms Advice Bureaux, and tried to make schools teach young people passive resistance. Today, Harmon writes in the Daily Mirror expressing outrage about tried-and-tested street safety policy and practice – the provision of handguns to young people under 16. This stuff is straight out of Code Pink activism 101.

The right to information, advice and self-defence provision for under-16s has been well established since 1985, when Tony Benn famously failed to stop gunsmiths selling firearms to young people without parental consent. Since then, gunsmiths have been required to assess their customers' ability to consent to firearms training, and to explore with young crime victims the benefits of talking to their parents or carers.

This is something that the 4,000 professionals we have trained around England take very seriously. Everyone's ideal scenario is that young people and their parents have the kind of relationships in which they can discuss these issues openly and safely. For those who can't, most parents would rather their children did have the option of talking to a trained self-defence professional than the alternative – which is no information or advice, no deterrent and the risk of being murdered.

The concealed handgun, on which the latest "controversy" is focused, is one of four short-range self-defence methods available to individuals (including teenagers) in England and Wales. There has been a drive to make these methods more widely available because they are so extraordinarily effective at preventing rape and murder. There are undoubted benefits to being able to access methods that are non-user-dependent, but they are not a panacea.

There are, of course, risks that people need to be well-informed about before choosing a self-defence method, and the Northern Ireland for Police Service (Nips) makes this very clear in its guidelines. Each person will feel differently about a given weapon and the procedure needed to use it. There are no quick fixes, and good quality security counselling – which addresses a person's needs, lifestyle, the acceptability or otherwise of different risks, and ways to minimise collateral damage – is absolutely vital.

If there is any controversy, it should be about why, 70 years after the invention of the 999 phone call, we still haven't found the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow – the perfect 100% reliable, risk-free self-defence method. Or why young people are still deprived at school of good quality, accurate information and education, about self-defence and violent crime. Or why parents and children in this country are so ill-equipped to discuss these things with each other.

However, I don't think the inventors of today's brouhaha really care about any of that. This is just mud-flinging plain and simple. Today's salvo is probably the first in a new campaign against young people's right to self-defence and weapons. Tomorrow there will be another baseless scare story about firearms – which will see rape rates spike as women abandon a trusted self-defence method. The next day there will be a moral panic about a classroom resource which depicts two people loading rifles, and the next a call to censor The Muppet Show for its violence ... and so our energy is diverted from our actual work with actual young people providing safe streets instead of the death penalty for those who murder them.

Oh dear. Did I hit the US English button again?

Picture from here.

Buy Mohammed a pint and a pork pie

2011-12-27T15:21:00.002Z

England’s green and pleasant land: but which sort of green?

In this year’s edition of my now-traditional and legendarily pompous Yuletide Broadcast to the Commonwealth I scribbled: “I don’t intend to stop insulting them and fighting them however I lawfully can and neither, I’m sure, will you.”

Me quoting me. How good is that?

One way I have done that and I suggest that if you’ve got a few quid left here or there after Crimbo but before the sales something you might also do is to support IKWRO that supports Iranian, Afghan and Kurdish women living in the UK and affected by forced marriage, ‘honour’ based violence, female genital mutilation and domestic abuse.

I suppose they couldn’t call it Muslim Women Victims of the Islamosavages – not given this little piece linked to by Julia in Orphans of Liberty:

HORRIFYING LINK HERE.

"The picture is horrific. Aisha’s beautiful eyes stare hauntingly back at you above the mangled hole that was once her nose. Some of my students could not even raise their eyes to look at it. I could see that many were experiencing deep emotions.
But I was not prepared for their reaction.
I had expected strong aversion; but that’s not what I got. Instead, they became confused. They seemed not to know what to think. They spoke timorously, afraid to make any moral judgment at all. They were unwilling to criticize any situation originating in a different culture.
They said, “Well, we might not like it, but maybe over there it’s okay.” One student said, “I don’t feel anything at all; I see lots of this kind of stuff .”

Another said (with no consciousness of self-contradiction), “It’s just wrong to judge other cultures.”

I know that IKWRO does, sometimes, help illegal immigrants stay here (no-one’s perfect) but really while they’re here doesn’t Britain; the abolisher of the transatlantic slave trade and the imperial suppressor of suttee owe it to its own civilised history and self-respect to have such human beings treated as human beings as long as they are here – rather than as cattle or other property to be branded or butchered at will?

After we’ve just spent a festival celebrating the idea that the weak and the helpless ought to be cared for and in which all people, regardless of race or sex or status are human beings, and here’s a chance to make it just a little bit real in Britain.

Now I’m not a violent man and therefore I’m never going to do what I want to do which is to fill up the mouths of these goat-smelling daughter-selling, cousin-marrying, sister-strangling, clitoris-cutting head-bagging inbred six-a-day head-banging barbarian baboons with minced pork and bury them alive in pig shit with the Koran stuffed up their arses and with their aforesaid rectums facing Mecca.

I hope you feel the same about violence as I do and that you do something more or less like what I actually did and put three quid or more (I gave a tenner, tight sod that I am) to help poor noseless Aisha’s sisters here in the green and pleasant land.

Look at that horrifying link and tell yourself you can’t afford three quid or more here, to buy Mohammed a pint and a pork pie.

Picture from here.

Merry Christmas

2011-12-25T07:22:00.003Z

Damn this insomnia and God bless you. At least I can post this good and early.

The Jokers aren’t going to stop their campaign of humping up the world today: communists and Muslims have a habit of choosing other peoples’ holiest days to attack civilization, and I don’t suppose a glance at the news today will show anything very different from the same old, same old infanticide and all-round bullying of the ruled that typified the unchecked powerful two thousand years ago.

I don’t intend to stop insulting them and fighting them however I lawfully can and neither, I’m sure, will you.

It’s just…Just that today of all days embodies (whether you go for the supernatural side of it as I do or not) two ideals that our culture and our civilisation have carried and upheld for centuries and for which, I believe, we conservatives must always fight.

One is that we should treat our fellow men as we would like to be treated ourselves. That’s your actual Jesus, that is:

"Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them" (Matthew 7:12, see also Luke 6:31).

Other people matter, just as you do they feel and dream and suffer. So don’t shaft them just because you can and because they’re weak or foreign or girls or the wrong class. They matter. It’s what libertarians are asking for and conservatives have built into our idea of trust the people and also into the notion of duty. It’s even what liberals intend, even if they turned out to be really, really bad at figuring out how to do it. Marxists even got the idea, but never understood the maths; not for a minute.

The other idea is Yes, we can!

A bunch of stroppy, powerless Imperial provincials kicked over the traces of their own awkward-squad whack-job religion, removed its one-people parochialism for a wider audience by adding the idea that everyone’s entitled to a place at the top table in Heaven if they’d only live right led to the culture that abolished slavery for the first time on 4,000 years and whose sons walked on the Moon. Many of them got around to not wanting to hurt or allow hurt to the Jews which is a relatively new achievement in the world and is a very precious thing indeed.

They did so despite the death of their only teacher and leader – who in life had been some Nowheresville building trade craftsman rather than any of the expected types of leader: not royal, not a philosopher nor a magician nor a political figure at all.

You start weak, you start poor and stand outside power and established society and yet if you think right and act right you can build something huge and beautiful and worth conserving. That’s not just for the process of going from open-air preaching to building the great cathedrals and especially the little churches in Little Dreaming-on-Avon or Nowheresville, USA; but also the spirit that upheld the founders of science, the British Empire, America, the Internet.

Annoying as life is, and as crass as the Jokers can be, scarcely a day goes by in which we can’t achieve something to hold back decay and even to make the world (however slightly) a better place because we are surrounded by people who we can treat as decently as we wish to be treated ourselves.

... Which I plan to let you do right now by stopping reading this guff and sending you off for some carbs or other stimulants and to enjoy the day.

Thank you for visiting my erratic and variable output during 2011. Have a blessed Christmas Day and feast for all it’s worth because we have important work to do next year.

God save the Queen, God bless you, and have a Merry Christmas.

Picture from here.

Caliban’s Taliban.

2011-12-22T22:41:00.000Z

O brave new world! That has such people in it!

…

We are such stuff as dreams are made on.

Via House of Dumb.

“Catherine Silverton, for Shahzada Khan, said he was brought up in Afghanistan, Pakistan and then the UK by a couple he thought were his parents but discovered when he was remanded they were his aunt and uncle, his real parents having died in a car crash when he was young. He had expressed remorse.

She added: 'Nothing I say on the defendant’s behalf is intended to suggest that these offences were anything other than the stuff of nightmares.'”

Or what we swivel-eyed hate-crime racist types with parking ticket records as long as your pinky finger prefer to call the reality of liberal England.

The stuff of nightmares or liberal England: which is it; because surely it can’t be both, can it?

You decide.

Oh, and to continue Dumb Jon’s metaphor about what floats on the top of ponds, the justly punished would-be rapist Caliban has been portrayed as a hero/victim by several impeccably enlightened, one might almost say liberal thinkers, since to understand all is to forgive all, right?

Can’t do Right...

2011-12-17T17:40:00.002Z

…for doing wrong.

None of my friends here in Castle City nor, I hope, more than a very few of my loyal and dwindling band of readers will accuse me of being much in the way of a politically-correct, pinko com-symp bleeding-heart liberal. If they did, I’d have to get my prose style fixed toot sweet.

However, I did recently find myself in a trap laid for me by the other side of the culture wars.

A charity here was doing a new and nearly-new toy collection for the poor children of Castle City. In these days of globalised trade and very cheap mass-produced and high quality toys it takes a special; almost a magical, kind of fecklessness for the non-working recipients of Child Benefit, Child Tax Credit and the super-charged (you breed like yeast so have lots more money for all those extra bedrooms) Housing Benefit not to be able to afford a brace of generic Power Rangers action figures, Toy Soldiers TM -style action figures and nowhere-brand pseudo-Barbies. From a pound shop (do they have such emporia Down South, I wonder?) a tenner will buy you ten sets of toys of better quality and robustness than the US- or UK-manufactured Thunderbirds and Action Man toys of my long-ago youth.

No doubt the children of the good and aspirational charity workers would view my choices as tatty and it’s possible their luckier kids would sneer at them for being naff themselves, and happy I am for them about that, but I work in the Bloated Bureaucracy where welfare manufactures hereditary helplessness and where aspirations for one’s children aren’t merely low; they are often non-existent. The cost of twenty cigarettes could haul their kids a doctor and nurse medical bag plus a set of green scrubs; two fast-wheeled dune–buggies; a mini-Uzi and holster and a matching pair of shiny-dressed ‘fashion-model’ dolls.

The dolls were labeled as ‘girl toys.’

I have to admit it seemed that PC paralyzed my brain for a while. I fully expect boys to go, generally, for the troop helicopters and commandos and the girls to gravitate towards the shiny-dressed blonde dolls. It seems to be the natural way to go, but still… perhaps Mrs. Northwester’s feminism has got to me a little bit, as I asked myself whether saying to scraps of things living in grey, plasma-screened and vegetable-free ‘Social Housing’ estates that these are the toys for girls might not somehow be adding a further limit to their welfare-stunted imaginations. Happy as I was to spend a few coppers letting the lads and lasses of Castle City’s Swamp Estate spend a few hours playing with tanks and semi-automatics and ground-attack Apaches, I still felt iffy about saying something that implied that a little girl’s face is her fortune and that physical beauty is her sole or most important goal. Sugar and spice and all that; as a social conservative I accept that nature has made the male and the female different and that it’s silly (at best) to treat the world as if they are exactly the same, but you’ve got to be pretty is not a message that girls need in this hyper-sexualized and rotten society of ours.

So I backed off from buying a doll; aghast that something was telling me to avoid something that I’d rant against forever if a Labour MP or fakecharity rent-a-mouth announced that it should be stopped. What if the feminist argument that glamour is not a healthy thing for girls to aspire to and the aspiration will lead them only to degradation and submissiveness to brutal men is right?

If you stand away from any anti-Semites in any political fight, you can be fairly certain that you aren’t in the worst place. That’s a general rule I’ve derived from decades of watching the say/do dichotomy of political groups and movements. Good, too, is the general rule to avoid or oppose something that might tend to sexualise children further, or otherwise erode their childhood. So no pseudo-Barbie, right?

Then I remembered this:

'A'isha (Allah be pleased with her) reported that Allah's Apostle (may peace be upon him) married her when she was seven years old, and he was taken to his house as a bride when she was nine, and her dolls were with her; and when he (the Holy Prophet) died she was eighteen years old.

Here is a page of arguments and counter-arguments if you care to follow them.

There are worse things in this country and our world (hold your breath before you scroll down) than little girls playing with glamourous female dolls.

So I bought a doll and added it to the sack. I can do little enough to help Aisha’s sisters, but like you I can make a start. Perhaps one little girl might have a bit of fun and grow up thinking that her uncovered face - if not her fortune - at least is not her curse.

One way might be to support this charity this Christmas.

Merry Christmas.

Picture from here.

Nemesis Draco

2011-12-10T10:14:00.000Z

Our loyal subjects.

This week we have slain the dragon that has of late threatened the realm with destruction. We have become the very first of all the kings of Albion to do so when we slew the recently-feared and invisible dragon in mortal combat and have now returned to you to rule you all amid the peace and security that our personal valour has won.

Though we can never know the name of that awful creature; nor display its hide and broken bones to our relieved and grateful subjects; we stand before you in the warmth of your praise and love. Let the doubters be silent, let the soldiers of our Guard sheathe their rattling sabres once more in faith that their liege lord has done his duty and that all is now well.

We can only pray now that our reign can henceforth be peaceful and righteous; undisturbed at last by the bickering and suspicions that have racked it for so long. We hope that the money-lenders will still their cowardly murmurings of alarm at imaginary monsters - rather than this very real dragon and that they will return to their honest tasks of lending modest sums to our treasury and helping our very humblest subjects and supporters place a tiled roof above their heads, (though never an old-fashioned thatched one.) We hope also that our poorer subjects will return to their honest toil undisturbed by the deeds of their betters here at court, obey our wise judges, and continue to give generously from their harvests to support our Royal almshouses and for modest poor relief and to house and clothe the strangers now settling in our lands to the benefit of all.

We hope also that Papal legates may once more move freely amongst our subjects about their godly tasks undisturbed by dissent and disrespect, and that our own alliances with foreign princes and our marriage to a foreign Queen will be thought of warmly as the great good that they are, and that our over-mighty subjects shall learn to know their place and cease their prideful calls of fear and alarm that there be greater (and visible) dragons off our shores, for they are surely in the wrong.

Cnut Rex :

Lord of the Isles, dragon slayer and Prince of Anagrams.

Picture from here.

Ask the family

2011-12-03T11:52:00.000Z

Quite.

Sometimes, despite its ceaseless shilling for everything sinister, the BBC accidentally lets something good and true get through onto the airwaves.

Or at least necessary and true.

Tuesday’s Radio One teatime Newsbeat programme started as usual wiv da hard-voiced street-cred mockney ‘newsreader’ stating (I paraphrase here, but pretty closely I think): “After a year saying it’ll take the Coalition the whole parliament to beat the deficit, George Osborne today admitted they still wouldn’t be able to fix it by the next general election.” True; Osborne did and now he doesn’t.

Nice, typical BBC work there: it’s the Coalition’s fault that the economic crisis won’t be fixed soon (and have been promising a quick fix from the start) as if David Cameron clicked the Economic Meltdown app on his iPad the moment he strode into Ten Downing Street and even before Samantha could even start recycling Sarah’s Amazon boxes. Oh, you won’t know who Sarah Brown is or what her husband did, and how long, and who to, but don’t you worry your edgy little Radio One listeners’ heads about that. There’ll be Coldfrapp or Goldplay on soon.

So far, so Mark Steel.

But then it got interesting. They interviewed someone (female, working class or a very good SFX replica thereof) who said that nobody’s buying stuff in the shops for Christmas because everything’s going up except for wages and benefit. That could have been interesting if qualified in any way, but Newsbeat didn’t seem to have time to contextualize in any or discuss anything about her statement. So it must be one of those freestanding truths, right? Self-evident, in fact; as in The Declaration of Independence?

Never mind, because here comes the true and necessary (if not good) bit.

Then they spoke to two youngish ‘mums’, I think, who discussed their Christmas shopping.

(More pretty damn close paraphrasing coming up.)

“Oh, we’re looking in the shops alright, but we’re not buying anything this year.”

“Yes,” agreed her friend. “We’re having to buy second hand this year, or go on eBay or Amazon to find stuff cheaper and we’re having to make lists and buy only what we can afford where before we’d have just bought whatever.”

Woah there, partner.

What? I mean, what the bloody what?

Decide what you can afford and spend no more than that? Try to find better ways of spending money than the most expensive option and don’t go on a spree that has no upper spending limit because otherwise bad things might happen? Maybe have a bit left over at the end?

If two ordinary women without any economics degrees of BBC economics affairs jobs or anything can encapsulate the main cause of the economic crisis (civilization-wide global financial meltdown) and show how quickly they have responded to it (and in so doing implied that their cure might help, like, the whole country?), I have to ask myself why all the BBC-licenced pundits, carefully chosen interviewees and correspondents aren’t making a big thing of this startling revelation.

Perhaps they should question Labour’s ‘policy’ that the government should promote economic growth through greater public spending and borrowing even further beyond its means than the Coalitions’ current Rip It Up policy of It’s Saturday night and I just got paid. Or by sprinkling magic sparkly fairy dust on the money plants.

So it all kind of slipped out, and the BBC chose not to follow this vox populi wisdom up.

Strange. Perhaps they simply missed the point? After all, what can a low-budget outfit like the BBC be expected to do?

Picture from here.

Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work I go…

2011-11-30T08:10:00.000Z

Perhaps I’ve lost my fine edge of rantiness this week, but the complicated stuff, it seems, just doesn’t cut the mustard for today. Perhaps to keep it simple is the thing and what could be simpler than a list? Like learning times tables it’s simple and does the job.

So I’m going to work during the public sector pension ‘day of action’ because:

David Wilkie died, and thousands of workers faced violence and brutal intimidation (including threats of rape and murder against their families while on shift) during the miners’ strike of 1984–1985, and there was similar mass violence later at Wapping. This is for them.

My labour is mine to give or to withhold: the right to work is a God-given right: not one bestowed at the whim of unions.

This strike is wrong, and by working I can oppose the continuation of the tax-drinking, debt-ridden entitlement-junkie culture that has bankrupted so many businesses and is busily aborting many other new enterprises for which my daughter’s generation will now not be able to work.

Anything supported by the very same trade unions who did so much to elect and support the Labour governments that bankrupted the public finances and impoverished many families and led to the decades of hardship ahead of us is, on the balance of probabilities (let alone the evidence), going to be completely wrong.

The strike isn’t intended to win, but rather to radicalize the casual and first-time strikers. One day off threatens no-one in power but will put a nice, symbolic hole in pre-Christmas pay packets. It’s a political strike all the way, and we have elections to decide the politics.

Pigs in Cloverfield

2011-11-27T11:00:00.010Z

What do the words actually mean?

Spoiler alert. Today I might give away the plot of a major SFX blockbuster for those who haven’t seen it yet, and shame on you if that is so.

So I did it right last month.

Along came a tiny pay increment from the Bloated Bureaucracy for which I work. Having shed two whole layers of management without any loss of efficiency that I can see; as well as several non-useless lower-ranked bosses whom we do rather miss; the deletion of several layers of useless checking and all-round pointless waffle means that there’s a banana from the aforementioned BB as compensation for now having to use the BB next door’s frankly insane web servers. But a few extra quid a month - with care - can make a difference in the world before they abolish my slice of the BB a few years from now and I have to return to relocating glistening, cheese-crowned bread snacks around Castle City’s glittering nightscape…and you private sector types will all get to cheer about that while shivering around your braziers full of Carbon Trust leaflets and waiting for the wind to blow and the rotors to start turning again for a bit.

Thus I could plan ahead a little bit and rearrange my finances. Out came the Excel spreadsheet, with my new, higher net wage (thank you, O generous taxpayers,) at the top and then the big bills shading through middling to low bills at the bottom…just like the ordering of the chapters in the Koran but without all that Jew-killing and girl-hurting in perpetuity.

Having been the dopey victim and collaborator in an, ahem, disordered financial regime in a previous life I’m utterly coprophobic about going overdrawn and am now a major obsessive on the subject of personal financial planning, and I now budget ever-more anally as the Cat Who Hoards the Cream… Imagine me alphabetising my classic shoe horn collection and add the Sterling symbol and decimal points. Financially, I’m now Columbus in Zombieland and a black monthly spreadsheet bottom line is Cardio for Cats.

So… Leave a margin untouched for the inescapable price rises: motor insurance, mobile phone bill, pro-rata Child Support, and then, what? Oh. Admit that inflation is every bit as awful in the Real World as it is in all the Tory textbooks and top up Tiny Northwester’s pocket money and pass on her regular college savings for her to squander right here in the barn at Claire’s Accessories or by sending vegan food parcels to #occupyyeovil or whatever before the Pound hits Reichsmark levels, or at least the 1970s Lira. Missing the Lira yet, signore e signori?

Sign up for a middling subscription to Love Film – why buy utter dross when you can send it back and get different utter dross, and so on and so forth, repeat as necessary? Note to politicians, the Greeks had a word for this idea, I think. It’s on the tip of my tongue… No; it’s gone. Maybe it’ll come to me later.

Ooh, a few quid freed up for a children’s hospice to add to my existing charities and the church that I support via the Joy of Direct Debits. Not being a saint, I literally can not imagine what it is like to be a child, or the parent of that child, who is definitely going to die young. And did you know that children’s hospices are mostly privately funded? For all its mammoth funding, irreproachable public image and a million-strong army of unionised employees set to go on strike next week, the few children who definitely won’t get to spend the Christmas after next at all get barely a look-in from the National Health Service. Think of that; just about the most helpless and hopeless and harmless people in the kingdom have to rattle the tin and trust to our better instincts or the tenderness of the consciences our parents taught us to use. Imagine: raffles and doorstep collections for doomed children and their already-grieving parents – after all, the health service portion of our taxes are buying us much more important stuff than that kind of luxury, right? Five a day advice and stop smoking advice is all well and good to help problems that might possibly occur one day…but easing the last months of a definitely doomed childhood as best we can? Not so much.

So far, so tender-hearted. But lo! What’s this? In addition to asking for an extra wedge to capitalise on its current level of support on a par with the Lib-Dems, and on top of my annual subscription needing renewal, dear old UKIP only actually wanted a regular monthly payment to continue its Awful Work, that’s all. Well, what with the price of Alcan going through the roof and hats being styled on the roomy side this season…. Plus all those wavy Freedom Association Douglas Bader haircuts don’t come cheap, you know; appearances to the contrary.

After the three-line whip from Cast Iron Dave and the unfolding Eurogeddon, I don’t suppose there’s much traction to be had with the voters via, say, the Taxpayers’ Alliance, God bless them; not in the short time we have left as anything like a free country. So, bung a few more regional trading tokens to the ‘Kippers as a patriotic chore and hope it makes a difference. If I want freedom, I suppose there’s no getting around the fact that I ought to dig a little less shallowly into the linty heart of darkness that is the Northwester trouser pocket because our nation’s Freedom Ain’t Free. Alright then: ‘Isn’t.’ ‘Aren’t.’ Whichever. Democracy (that’s the word I was looking for!); you must pay for it yourself.

So this is what free and responsible people do, isn’t it? They prioritise and budget and make sacrifices, large and small, for what they hold to be important and just and take their chances on choosing right and making a difference.

Then I read this.

Political parties should get an extra £23m of taxpayers’ money to reduce reliance on “big money” donations, an independent inquiry has said.

To say that I was upset about this would be an understatement akin to describing the 1998 US film version of Godzilla as the story of a French Polynesian tourist’s all-you-can-eat weekend for one in New York City.

As an intellectual exercise and as an ammunition-saving alternative to avoid unseemly brushes with the court system, I thought I’d try a mind-game and see if there were any conservative reasons why the taxpayer funding of political parties might in some way be better (or at least no worse, which is also a conservative value) than the current arrangements.

So: is there any way that a conservative or any other freedom-lover can describe this egregious idea as better than what we have right now?

Shall we try ‘preventing radical change’ for a good, Burkean starter?

Sudden, radical change of those in power often bring both inexperienced and ignorant rulers, who may have little understanding of how the system of government works, and thus may destroy some or all of what is good (or even merely functional) in a country. Think Russian Revolution: think French Revolution; think Iranian Revolution, think Weimar Republic. Given that the proposed system is clearly designed, if it is instituted at all, in such as way as to only finance the main three nationwide parties and the establishment parties of the devolved assemblies, such a move might indeed be viewed as ‘conservative’ ; assuming that conservative means ‘achieving an absence of political change as the paramount objective.’ But what is the ‘independent’ inquiry afraid of? An incoming Revolutionary Guard pouring into Westminster on the high tide of public funding and destroying every cherished institution built up over forty years and more of liberal Britain? How could allowing a little bit more funding (if a more open system of state funding were considered) destroy the tapeworm presence of left-liberal hegemony in our major national and regional parties? Perhaps, if funded by a Texas oil millionaire with a Merchant Ivory complex or an eccentric Aussie expat who wants to bring the Heir to Blair’s Britain to its knees in order to recommission a big-budget CGI reimagining of the Tellygoons from the Old County’s State broadcaster and that an UKIP-dominated House of Commons is the only arrangement that can realise such dreams, how could even the injection of, say, fifty million pounds in unmarked Obamacredits or Bondi Bucks overcome generations of prejudice and tribal voting in any meaningful way? Assuming that it really is ‘big money donations’ that have corrupted our political process, that is. Given our hilariously-named working class’s solidarity with Labour and that memories of Great Granddad queuing in the snow for a daily wage have allowed our last remaining labouring classes to mortgage their own and my children’s futures to pay for the Indian space programme and a 50% youth ‘higher education’ intake, I can’t see a few flag-waving chumps like me, however well financed, turning the UK into the Norris McWhirter Reich. And a ‘right-wing’ ‘Conservative’ party whose members stand still for the abolition of the Royal Navy and whose leadership helps to install a couple of Islamist governments in North Africa as the Incredible Shrinking RAF closes the door with its arse on the way out… Will people like me really restore the memorising of times tables in primary schools and reintroduce the shilling and red telephone boxes just because we were given a few hundred thousand quid to beguile the British People into making an Awful Mistake?

Oh, and given that the Good Friday ‘process’ has worked so hard to place the sponsors and formerly active members of Fenian and Loyalist terrorist groups into permanent, shared power in Northern Ireland; carried there as they were on a river of US dollars and EU finance, and amidst opera-level political class paeans to the moderation and conciliatory behaviour of the IRA itself, isn’t fear of radical (and therefore harmful) political change just a little weak, as arguments go?

But I don’t think even Cameron would have the conservative nous to support this move in such terms.

"All three main parties now depend on large donations from a very small number of rich individuals or organisations for the funds necessary for their survival," Sir Christopher said. "This cannot be healthy for democracy."

But simply capping such donations and inviting the establishment parties to cut their coat according to their cloth doesn’t seem to have occurred to Sir Kit; just as one corrupt MP paying his son out of expenses for work he didn’t do led to a blanket ban on ever paying family members for parliamentary support work. They can screw their more expensive secretaries from now on, since their wives can’t work alongside them almost for peanuts.

Is it willful ignorance or actual brain damage that keeps our owners from seeing that the government itself, if not hedged around with checks and balances and established limits and overseen by representatives chosen from the populace at large; is a special interest in its own right? After all, if the government pays for scientists to do specific kinds of research, it is likely that over time much of what you will get is government science: that is, ‘science’ that recognises and supports governmental attitudes, policies and power. So the government-funded political parties, even without their existing, bone-marrow statism, will tend sooner or later to identify with and uphold the powers of government over and above the interests and wishes of the people. The people are, after all, those for whose welfare government is supposed to serve in the first place – however badly. So this will, almost certainly, lead to greater statism within the establishment parties. Except for the SNP, of course, which doesn’t seem to have a single molecule of respect for private endeavour in its body.

Now, as a conservative I have no inherent problems with granting privileges for certain groups; the constitutional Monarchy and hereditary Peers, the Church of England; powers of legitimate force that the police hold that private subjects do not have. A small State broadcaster to conduct overseas propaganda for the benefit of the nation and to make some kind of impartial or honest news coverage available in addition to the bias of private and voluntary news gathering. (Hollow laughter). Public welfare for the unfortunate minority over and above what charity might provide. Tax breaks for married couples better than for those merely cohabiting.

So perhaps political parties might be entitled in some meta-constitutional way to tax revenues - even from people that don’t support them at all. In principle, that is.

While I really do believe that some institutions are so vital to protecting us that they should operate under different laws from the private citizens, political parties and the think-tanks undertake the policy research needed in opposition and the support networks that help them get elected are supposed to be the squishy, rowdy, competitive, replaceable and above all unofficial parts of the democratic system. They exist to be influenced, joined, replaced, reformed, lobbied, split from, divided and reunited by individual people who use their work and commitment and their finance to check the policies that the leaderships adopt in opposition or office and which they then offer to the voters at election time. I can’t see it being much better if the Tories can start ignoring the City of London (which our economy needs to be prosperous and untouched by the EU more desperately than ever right now) or the Labour Party stops listening to its trade union founders (who sometimes demonstrate a clue or two about what some workers want) or even blocking the Liberal Democrats’ leaders’ ears to the ideas of people who are sometimes dedicated enthusiastic employees of the county council and local education systems, however naff. Political parties are either alliances of interest groups who have to face some kind of political supply and demand, or they become centralising tyrannies of one sort or another.

But if a closed shop for finance is enforced via taxation (let alone the horror of knowing your taxes go directly to the parties you personally despise rather than their leaderships at least having to pay attention to someone outside the inner circles), then that squishy centre will solidify into a hard and rather nutty core of policy wonk statists who will never take risks or significantly reform institutions and processes that need it, such as paying down the National Debt or actually taking on powerful and dangerous influences such as supranational bodies and over-mighty bureaucracies. Why would they do any such things when an easy life can be had taking the public dole and running elections as beauty contests in which everyone wants world peace, to take good care of the children who are our future, and Europe. Granted, we’ve got that right now, but this new proposal (craftily suggested to be voted on after the next general election rather than obliging the parties to compete for votes by opposing it, QED) will not change that.

And of course, the party leaders could utterly, utterly ignore their members’ unfashionable policy desires, so that’ll be the end of any idea of EU membership referendums, immigration controls, the effective punishment of criminals, public sector financial prudence, tax cuts ever, visible policeman walking around the neighbourhood, the dilution of compulsory and capricious ‘progressive’ educational fashions… So, no conservatism, ever, nor hope for the law-abiding and aspirational working class.

So, as this will bring no change to the political status quo but we all get to fork out directly for the established parties I ask who will gain from all this? As the Romans said: who in fact is the hypocritical tax-loving, tax-avoiding Irish millionaire?

Why, it's the Socialists, the Tories, the Liberal Democrats, Sinn Fein, the Democratic Unionists and the Scottish and Welsh (but not the British) Nationalists.

The Political Class alone in all its hidebound and untouchable corruption will come out well from all this.

Which is what ‘Independent Inquiry’ really means.

Picture from here.

PS

Oh, and I’m a real conservative who believes that there are damn few saints left anywhere - so this UKIP queue for the gravy train surprises me not at all:

But UK Independence Party Treasurer Stuart Wheeler, who gave evidence to the inquiry, said there was a danger a "political cartel" would be created - particularly if parties like UKIP were excluded from the taxpayer-funded support.

"It is essential that parties should be defined in such a way that a party like UKIP, which obtained nearly a million votes in the last general election, and which came second, beating both Labour and the LibDems in the European election in 2009, should be included."