the brilliantly leaping gazelle

It must be awful being Repulsion right now. Yet it is hard to feel any pity for him. He created the troubles that now engulf him. He ignored the paradox inherent in any pandering. That the more you pander to peoples needs, attempt to appease them and mollify them, then the more they’ll demand. Nothing will ever be enough.

One of his troubles was that he wasn’t aware of this. Or perhaps he was but calculated that by his pandering, he was cubing their worst excesses. He was wrong. The people he was pandering too didn’t consider their demands excessive. Quite the opposite. Party membership had quadrupled since he came to power and some of brought with them radically different values to those of a party that had previously been dedicated to saving the planet.

The correct word for these new members, the ones with a markedly different outlook and who wanted the change the party to better reflect their views, is ‘entryists’. They practice ‘Entryism’ which has a long and ignoble past and was first coined by Ice-pick, which in itself is worrying. It describes the gradual hijacking of an established party by means of infiltration by a smaller group. This smaller group, being both determined and focused, has an clear objective.

In the case of the Greens, it was to turn it into little more than a single issue party. A single issue that had no conceivable link with  had anything to do with environmentalism, but had everything to do with ensuring electoral success. By constantly claiming that there was a ‘genocide’ in Gaza, that Israel was a ‘ colonising occupier’ and most frightening of all, asserting that ‘Zionism is racism’, the Greens pandering to a well organised virulently anti-Semetic mob was working well for them.

Until it wasn’t. It was the most spectacular political own goal I’ve ever seen. Repulsion was absent when the  ‘Zionism is racism’ motion was put to the vote and adopted by the party conference. He thought that his energies were better directed in attempting to become the MP for Holborn and St.Pancras. He even offered to pay the travel and hotel costs for any conference delegates willing to leave Brighton and assist him. Few did, and even if they had, it wouldn’t’ve made any difference.

Because I imagine that voting for a party that implicitly advocates for genocide is still a few steps too far for most people. Because that is what the ‘Zionism is racism’ ultimately means’. It calls for ‘the establishment of a single democratic Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine’.’ And makes no mention of the Jews who currently live there.

Because as far as the nutters in the Greens are concerned, Jews only exist as something they can define themselves by  and being ever more opposed to. Their notions of tolerance and equality are both conditional and highly subjective. It’s Napoleonic. Everyone is equal but some are more equal than others. Repulsion has only himself to blame for this. He forgot the pandering paradox; that the more you give, the more that they’ll want. And now everybody hates him. The older members, the pre-2024 kind, hate him for not putting up any resistance to the extremists, while the extremists hate him for not being extreme enough.

The Greens used to be all about environmentalism. Now they’re all just mental.

**************************************************************************

Rape is wrong. But it seems that some wrongs are wronger than others. A least in the opinion of the media, that is. Consider the trial of Russell Branded. He’s accused of three rapes, three sexual assaults and one act of indecent exposure. He denies everything. But in the eyes of the media, he’s guilty. If not of those specific charges, then of having a voraciously promiscuous sex life. Worse still, he felt none of the shame, no regret or even a scintilla of the remorse that the public expects ‘celebrities’ to display when confronted with such tales. The problem for the public was that it was Branded himself who was telling the tales. And it was the media who were more than happy to tell them.  Everyone won. He gained a reputation, which the public could either enjoy vicariously or condemn Whitehousisly, and then only because the media had been gushing so much about it.

But now is not then. Even though ‘then’ was less than twenty years ago. Because ‘now’ is a time of a new puritanism. ‘Now’ is a time of extremely subjective collective amnesia. When we are expected to look back at the ‘then’ and feel revulsion for those pitiable degenerates who abased themselves. ‘Now’ is when we forget that we are the degenerates who,  even if we didn’t actually commit any of the excesses of ‘then’,  we were degenerate adjacent.  We were more than happy to buy whatever the media sold it to us.

Then compare the Branded media obsession with the near total silence that to the whole rape gang scandal.  Hundreds of victim, thousands of rapes and sexual assaults and the victims were predominately young girls . Who, if not in local authority care were ‘known to them.’ So widespread across the country were  the area’s in which the gangs operated, and yet  so similar were their methods, both in who they targeted and how they abused them, that is inconceivable that some information wasn’t shared.

We do know what wasn’t shared. Concerns expressed by many of the girls parents were either ignored or dismissed. The basic function of a state is to keep its citizens safe, but every level of the state – local and central – failed. Various local authority departments, for whom safe-guarding was meant to be a key function, also failed. Unless they understood safe-guarding to mean protecting the reputation of a local authority that had failed the children in its care.

Where is the public enquiry? Where are the angry editorials in the media week after week after week? Where is the outrage? But yeah, bang on about Russell Branded. Get worked up about that. He’s performing the same distraction that The Prince formerly known as Prince did. As did his billionaire American friend. From the exact same scandal, using the exact same techniques and achieving exactly the same results.

I was only thinking about her the other day. Thinking of how she’d been remarkably quiet of late, how she was fast becoming a dimly remembered memory. And then she appeared. It was almost as I’d wished her back into existence simply by thinking about her. If only that were the case. Then I’d never think of her again.

But her visitation in Paris a few days ago demonstrated that the best kind of virtue signalling is, of course, the kind that allows it be utilised in support of many issues.  The most audaciously successful example of this modern phenomena is Grating Thunberg. She started off by reframing her bunking off school  as a ‘school strike’. Her way of protesting about climate change. Genius. Quite why no-one called ‘bullshit’ on her little stunt, I can’t explain. Nor can I fathom why no-one ever challenged her on why it was a Friday, and not a Wednesday that she choose to bunk off on. That would’ve caused much more disruption. But a Friday? I bet even her teachers were thanking her for the long weekend, occasioned because of the – shockingly – widespread and immediate adoption of a ‘school strike’ among her peers.

But fair play to her. She got away with it. And if she’d have stopped there, had thought ‘It was good while it lasted, but I don’t want to push my luck’’, then she’d’ve played a blinder. The old adage about leaving the audience wanting more is true her case. Because what is charmingly precocious in a 15 year old girl turns into being an insufferable hectoring bore years later.  

Now she is yet another one of those self-righteous annoyances who manages to be wrong about everything. But as long as she’s wrong about the right things, no-one seems too bothered. No-one asks her the obvious question. Namely, how exactly did she manage to pivot from being a world famous truant into being a cruise ship entertainer and how exactly did she finesse that into her current incarnation of being an apologist for vandalism.

And thats because the answer is an indictment of the values of the time in which we live. Of a society with a culture that has allowed an indulgently ideological groupthink to flourish. One that places a greater value upon the sort of performative symbolism that generates social media content and promotes one as being perpetually engaged for fighting against a perceived injustice. It doesn’t matter if that particular injustice is actually an injustice or simply the fortunate beneficiary of it having been deemed to be one.

Even more fortuitous for everyone involved, the very people who loudly proclaim it to be an injustice are often the people fighting on behalf of it. And so Grating continues to grate. As long as she has something to protest about, something else she can be seen to be against, the happier I imagine she’ll be. She reminds me of Marlon Brando in ‘The Wild One’. When his character is asked “What are you rebelling against?”, he replies, “What you got?”.

I’m still here on holiday in Herne Bay and the weather is still glorious. I was here last at the same time last year and it was even more glorious then. What made it even more glorious wasn’t because the sun was shining especially brighter, nor had the chips more of those deliciously crispy bits of batter one finds hidden amongst them. No, the main reason why it was so glorious was that on the drive into town every lamppost had a flag with the Cross of St.George on it. 

I don’t know why exactly it pleased me, but pleased me it did. I’ve never considered myself in the least bit patriotic. I’d never even given it any thought. My parents were the type of immigrants for whom their past was better off left in their past. They weren’t the kind of immigrants who would compare their past with their present and who would invariably find their present worse.  They weren’t misty eyed about the ‘Old Country’. They weren’t nostalgic for it and they hardly ever spoke of it much. In fact it was only during my first holiday to Ireland where I met met all of my Aunts and Uncles, that it  dawned on me that my parents had been born there. 

For me, home was wherever I happened to be at that particular time and it just so happened that London was where I spent most of my childhood. Which I was more than happy about.  The more I saw of the world – through TV, magazines and books – the more I appreciated having been born here. Except that it wasn’t a conscious appreciation. It was a vague sense that there was an order  to everything around me.  That where I lived had rules and that people – more or less – abided by them. That these rules had been made by people who had to abide by other rules. Other places didn’t and they seemed all kinds of worse.

Except now those same TV programmes, books and magazines which shaped my worldview are damned by people who have created a job for themselves by damning things. Who have somehow managed to carve out a very lucrative career for themselves by damning all manner of things and damning the people who oppose their damning. How exactly this has happened, quite how we find ourselves living in an increasingly censorious time I don’t know. I also know that I’m unsure of all the myriad and opaque connections that have over time led us here to this sorry state of affairs. But I feel certain that Fifth Columnists are involved somehow.

For a long time now, I’ve been convinced that there are Fifth Columnists busy at work in the UK. Exactly who they are and exactly how long they’ve been working as Fifth Columnists, I’m not sure either. Which is precisely the way they’d want it. Other people may have a different definition of what a Fifth Columnist (FC) is, but to me a FC is someone who works to undermine society by whatever means possible. Secretly, sometimes peaceful, sometimes violent, sometimes not even being aware that they’re being manipulated by other FC;s   I know that the term is usually applied to domestic actors in times of war, but if a little artistic licence is employed, and if we then imagine ourselves in a cultural war, then their malevolent presence is undeniable.

The various nonsenses concerning the flags along Herne Bay seafront demonstrate this. If anyone is guilty of hijacking the Cross of St.George ‘for  political purposes’, then it is the various grifters, activist and other busybodies who are. They bang on about community tension being inflamed by extremists, hoping that no-one will notice that they are ones doing the all the inflaming. Are not community tensions exacerbated by prioritising one community over another? Is that not more divisive? Other than it being claimed to exist, is there any actual evidence that it causes anxiety? In what way exactly does it make people feel unsafe?  

Such questions never seem to be asked. No proof is ever  demanded to substantiate them. They’re just meekly accepted as a self-evident on no other basis on them than having been asserted to be so. This is where the FC in the media come in. They’ve already prepared the groundwork. After all the ‘re-appraising’, ‘confronting our historical legacy’ and ‘acknowledging the evils of empire’, the flagellation can really begin in earnest. And this where the other FC’s play their role, and to give them their credit, the play it very well. Politicians – both local and central – reinforce and amplify the message, that English patriotism – and only English patriotism – is wrong and that the flag of the Cross of St.George is the ultimate expression of just how wrong it is.

But as the child of immigrants, this doesn’t make sense on any level.  How is the flag of the country people have come from somewhere else, suddenly such a cause for so many concerns? Were these concerns always there, or have they been, if not invented then massively amplified by FC’s in pursuit of their own agenda’s? Separate agendas to be sure, but all mutually reinforcing each other. And why is that whilst the flag of England is endlessly suspected of being a harbinger of all manner of unpleasantries, the Palestinian flag is immune to similar censure?

The flag which was so enthusiastically brandished by large numbers at the Gaza hate marches, how is that not considered even more disturbing? The Crusaders committed their atrocities nearly a thousand years ago. The genocide committed by Hamas on Oct 7 was a bit more recent than that. But there is no widespread demonisation of that flag, no impugning the motives of the people who brandish it, a near total absence of any negative associations anywhere.

I’d be ashamed to wave a Palestinian flag. I wouldn’t feel ashamed to wave an English one. I don’t know why anyone would. In England there exists the freedom to be ashamed of the English flag, to heap opprobrium on it and to damn it six ways to Sunday. Even to burn it. Try doing that in Gaza and see what happens. Nothing good, I’d wager. That’s why the sight of the flags along the seafront pleases me so. Because it’s a visual representation of my freedom. Free to think what I like and free from anyone telling me not to. 

Well not yet, anyway.

It was always going to be a matter of ‘if’ and not ‘when’, wasn’t it? And although the ‘when’ isn’t ‘yet ‘now’ we know that is where we are heading. In the latest announcement by our government by press release and not to parliament, we are informed by newspapers that a betrayal as astounding as it is inevitable is to be soon to be foisted upon us.

Andy Capp, in a move that has surprised exactly no-one, gave  his clearest indication yet that he plans to ignore the wishes of the British people. Well, those British people that didn’t vote for him. Oh dear, silly me. My mistake! Hardly anyone did. Less than 25,000 . But they were Northern, most believed his guff about respecting the Brexit result and besides, they were simply a means to an end.

That end is the start of the of the long journey back to to Brussels. That end is also part of an ongoing attempt to appease disaffected Labour Party MP’s, activists and supporters. And at the same time, capitalise on the divisions currently engulfing the Green Party and woo back those who are only too willing to be wooed.

This also applies to some of the media. Whilst they appeared to support the Greens and bolstered their claim to be something radical and new, their support was only ever as strong as the paper it was printed on. As transient as the hot air used to inflate Repulsions ego or to convince the credulous that sometimes in order to be anti-fascist, one had to be fascist. It was a totally calculated move by them. One that not only proved how utterly green the Greens were but also the wisdom of the old adage ‘flatters to deceive’

They were just biding their time. Firing warning shots across the bow, as it were. If we had any ships to fire those warning shots or even bows to be fired over, that is. But those shots were never intended to cause any damage. They were for appearances sake only. Not to be taken seriously.

Just like the promises Andy gave to the voters in Makerfield.

So it turns out that Repulsion failed in his quest to become an MP. Good. But equally, not so good. One reason is that he may be forced to resign as leader of the Greens. More pushed than jumped, probably. Only when one considers the rapid increase of new members to the Green Party that followed his appointment of leader, can one begin to fathom why the party strayed so far from its traditional environmental concerns to pursue a more aggressively confrontational ideology. 

That his usefulness has expired is undeniable. The Greens are now a viable electoral proposition for some. Therefore whoever follows him is likely to be a standard bearer for the new member and their various contradictory nonsenses. They will usher forth an even more regressive notion of ‘progressiveness’. And with it, demand ever greater debasements of tolerance, inclusivity and respect. 

The other problem is more fundamental. The turnout for the  by-election – his bye bye-election if you will – was less than 39% of the electorate. Think about that. Think about what it means, not just for some nebulous imaginings of democracy or for some increasingly outdated concept of a shared civic responsibility. But means about the people who didn’t vote, who couldn’t be bothered enough to tear themselves away from watching ‘The Traitors’ on TV, doom scrolling on their ‘phones but doing anything other than express their willingness to defend a moral principle. A defence that would cost them no more effort than putting a mask on a piece of paper. A defence, which if it were denied them, they’d be sudden lifelong practitioners of. 

39%. Less than a week after the genocidal motion was adopted as party policy at the Greens conference. Less than a week after the mask was finally pulled off and their virulent anti-Semitism was exposed in its full horror. Less than a week during which all of its dangerous implications had been endlessly discussed in the full glare of the media. That was week in which the residents of Pancras and St.Holborn had to decide whether to stand up and be counted or not. 

61% choose not to.

61% gave tacit support to the creed of abnegation. By doing so – by choosing not to express a presence at the ballot box – by default they expressed one. Actually, its worse than the 61%. They’re bad enough. But there were 14 other candidates, most of whom lost their deposit, but some of whom had nonetheless managed to persuade others not in their friendship group to vote for them. Excepting the winning Labour candidate and Repulsion, that accounted for roughly 20% of the votes cast. How much this increases that 61% by is not relevant. The fact is that it did.

This will only embolden those in the Green Party who see the fellow travellers of today could be the voters of tomorrow. Who discern, however misguidedly or opportunistically, that it is only a matter of time before an extreme stance becomes less so the more it is discussed, given credence and eventually respectability.  

With an inevitability that made it almost a certainty, the post that I had started to write and had every good intention of finishing, has fallen prey to another topic. A topic which ostensibly has nothing to do with the one I’d planned, but which in my mind are at least are related. Not in a sibling or even second cousin kind of way, but more of the Danny Dyer being related to King Edward III kind of way.

I had started to write about how Andy Capp may not have lied in the strict dictionary definition of the word or even in the many weasel ways most politicians find to deny it. But lied he certainly did, in the way most normal people mean it when they call someone a liar anyway For example, how some of the voters in Makerfield who elected him as their MP might call him now. 

Specifically, the ones who’d voted for Brexit. The ones he needed to convince that he accepted the result of the referendum and wasn’t going to do anything to undermine it.  Because if they didn’t vote for him, he wasn’t going anywhere, not to Westminster and certainly not to Downing Street. But they did and just as I was getting properly energised by all of it, I saw this headline on the BBC website; ‘Glastonbury 2027 tickets sell out in 42 minutes’.

My first thought was that Glastonbury had sold out years ago. Then I saw the price of a ticket. £408, plus a £5 booking fee. Which seemed only fair. I mean if you’re only too happy to shell that out then whats another £5? About 210,000 people agreed. But then it struck me. The kind of people who convince themselves that a weekend in Somerset is worth that kind of money are exactly the kind of people who think Brexit was a disaster. Who had long waited for the day when the version of democracy that had has always worked for them was restored. When the bigots, the racists and all those manipulated by the ‘far right’, the Russians and the Illuminati, were finally put back in their place.

I know its a bit of stretch, to link the two, but to me they share the same mindset. The sort of mindset of a person thinks nothing of buying a toothbrush for over £400. Who thinks it ‘progressive’ to believe a man can become a woman simply by saying so. Who thinks that a genocide happened in Gaza. Who thinks a racist is someone that disagrees them. That feelings are more important than fact, that lived experience has greater value than expertise and that by simply born white, one needs to constantly atone for it. Them.

The sort of people who pay over £400 a ticket for a music festival without knowing who’ll be playing at it. The sort of people who think it fine that we have yet another unelected PM just as long as he makes their dream of rejoining the EU a reality.      

Yesterday, I visited Golders Hill Park. It was the first time I had been there. Because, despite having lived a few miles away from it for most of my life, until a few days ago I was completely unaware of its existence. I can see why. It’s great and I imagine that the people who use it want to keep it that way. I’d keep quiet about it it too.  It has has a great view looking down onto Central London, a rose garden, a butterfly enclosure, a small zoo, and tennis courts.   All in all, a hidden gem. Seemingly content for nearby Hampstead Heath to get all the attention whist it quietly gets on with being ignored. 

It was also my last time going there. I won’t be going back. And its not on account of the slope. As mentioned, yes, the view, is wonderful, but in order to look down on something, one has to be above it which necessarily means a slope up and equally, a slope back down. Slopes are not easy for me to navigate. Downhill, my walking aid becomes difficult to control and uphill  sometimes my support worker has to help push me up. And it wasn’t because of the cafe. And not on account of It being a mostly cafe either;  inasmuch as the sandwiches were mostly bread, the salads were mostly lettuce and the cake portions were so small that they were mostly the plates they were served on. 

I mean I can choose to go up or down a slope just as much as I can choose to eat in a cafe or not. What I can’t choose to do however, is whether I need to to go to the toilet or not. 

The disabled toilet I used at Golders Hill Park wasn’t just  appalling. I’m used to appalling by now. So much so that I just kind of accept it and wish I didn’t have to. But this was on a whole other level. The walls weren’t just dirty – this wasn’t the kind of of dirt that hot soapy water, a sponge and some elbow grease could wipe clean – this was deeply ingrained dirt. The kind of dirt that only years of neglect have created.  The kind of dirt that blackens the wall under the hand-dryers so much that I thought, ‘Who would use that. Obviously the kind of person who saw the state of the taps, the sink and the soap dispenser and thought, Yeah, I’ll touch those with my bare hands. That seems like a good idea. They’ll be nice and clean afterwards.’

There were the old cobwebs. Everywhere. On the door hinges,  the window frames and high up in the corners. Miss Haversham would’ve been right at home. Whatever ‘cleaning’ had ever been done gave desultory a new meaning. The floor looked more like the changing room after a rugby match than an amenity for the public to use, the bins were so overflowing that people had clearly thought, ‘ I’ll just cut out the middle-man.’ and started using the floor instead. One might almost think that the whole thing was an installation Tracey Emin. The whole place stank of…well it was a toilet, what do you think it stank of?

My resolve to do what I needed to do as quickly as possible was secondary to my fear of any bare flesh of mine touching  the surfaces. To this end I thickly carpeted to the toilet seat with tissue paper before use.  I used tissue paper to turn the taps on and off and I used yet more to open the door to exit. Why would a door handle  get special treatment when everything else didn’t?

And therein is the problem. Who it is that gets special treatment and who it is that doesn’t? Golders Hill Park is run by the Corporation of London (CoL)  That would be the same Corporation of London (CoL) which has been embroiled in a long running legal battle over its decision to allow trans-women – deluded men – into the Women’s Pond at Hampstead Heath. 

Taking a leaf out of the Pontus Pilate guide to buck passing, the CoL held a ‘public’ consultation on the matter. Of the 36,000 people who took part, 86% favoured the policy continuing. It didn’t seem to occur to the CoL that this was perhaps evidence of a well organised campaign by activists determined to getting their way, as opposed to the genuinely held beliefs of the women who used the pond. It served its purpose though, and provided the necessary illusion that the CoL needed.

I’ve tried to to find out how much the CoL have spent defending a legally settled matter – the Supreme Court ruled that in  law,  a‘man’ is defined as being someone who was born biologically male and a ‘woman’ is defined as someone who was born biologically female –  but to no avail. But ultimately, it is less about how much money is actually spent, but more on what that money is spent on that matters. The fact is that if they’re spending money on one thing – fighting a court case that they’ll lose anyway – then someone at the CoL has deemed it a better use of public money than cleaning toilets. I know that this isn’t exactly the way budgets work, but still. Granted, its more ‘sexy’, more ‘progressive’ and more likely to garner approving headlines in the kind of newspapers the CoL leadership wants to be approved by. By contrast, the CoL knows very well that a campaign by disabled people demanding that that the toilets in Golders Hill Park be properly cleaned, maintained and inspected by them on a regular basis is unlikely to happen. Even if it did, it might get story in a local newspaper, maybe a brief segment on local TV news, but beyond that? 

It seems that we are now livening in a world in which enough people claim that there is an injustice and if these claims are backed up not just by emails or angry letters but by boots on the ground, the greater the likelihood of  their demands being met. It’s a grotesque inversion of the notion of inclusivity,  if it involves treating delusional men as women and pandering to their delusion at the literal expense the physically disabled. Biological reality is biological reality. One can’t wish it otherwise, no matter how much some trans-women feel it in their boners.