the brilliantly leaping gazelle

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I’ll admit it, I was wrong. 

In an earlier post I suggested that rather than twat about with all of that fake news malarky to cast doubt on the integrity of the election result, the Russians could instead gotten their people to create multiple fake identities, have them all join up with online opinion polling companies and through them cast doubt on the veracity of the polls. By using the ‘bandwagon effect’, an effect which describes, well the bandwagon effect. Basically everyone wanting to back a winner and so they jump….

Much, much simpler than that, and possibly more damaging in the long term for Plonkers claims to have any legitimacy or a mandate, would have been for them trust in the apathy of the British people and let them not do the work for them. That, and our way of allocating each seat based on the result in that individual consistency

The results of the 2019 election were bad enough. Then there was a voter turnout of 67.3%, and Labour only got 32.2% of that. They still got 203 seats though. The Lib Dems fared even worse, their 11.5% share of the vote got them, er, 11 seats.

Fast forward to 2024. This time, despite voter turnout being lower at about 60% and despite Labour getting a lower share of that, 34%, somehow they got 412 seats or 63% of them.

One might be forgiven that because the Lib Dems got 12% of the vote and paddle boarded that into 71 seats, that Reform’s 14% share would translate into something meaningful. 

It was mean. 5 seats. The Greens were similarly stitched up. 7% of the vote but only 4 seats.

Had Britain been using proportional representation (PR) – a system whereby the share of the vote translates into seats – the results would’ve been been very different indeed. Labours 412 seats would be reduced 195 and the Greens blatantly outrageous 4 would’ve to a far more respectable 45. 

The real winner wouldn’t have been Reform. I mean if PR had been used, their 5 seats would be 91 and that’s great, if you voted for Reform that is, but it kind of makes my point, that the real winner would’ve been democracy itself.

There’d be no need for tactical voting. There’d be no such thing as a wasted vote, which because of how all of my adult life I’ve lived in so called ‘safe seats, all my votes have been. This time I didn’t even vote. Sure I went to the polling station and got my ballot paper, but I didn’t spoil it or mark it any way. I just put in the ballot box blank, like the French do. Had there been PR I probably wouldn’t. 

Had Plonker urged voters throughout his campaign to vote, even if they weren’t going to vote for him so that a high – 90% – voter turnout might confer some legitimacy upon the eventual winner, that’d be a refreshingly selfless thing for a politician to do. It would also throw down the gauntlet for the other parties to do likewise. And if he followed that up by promising that if he did win, that the larger his majority was, the greater the chances of him being able to reform the voting system so that it better reflected the wishes of the totality of the electorate, astonishingly so.

But he never would. He knows the present system is as fucked as England are this afternoon against Switzerland. Why would he change it? 

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There used to be a left wing – proper left wing, not the champagne socialism without the socialism kind – agitprop theatre group called 7:84. It got its name from a statistic on distribution of wealth in the United Kingdom, published in The Economist in 1966, that 7% of the population of the UK owned 84% of the country’s wealth. 

I was thinking about what I’d call this blog going forward, seeing as how “ Election Notes 2024’ seems as redundant as Prada’s premiership. The title of this blog will be an updated twist on that idea, one that reflects just how undemocratic our democracy is, 34:63.

And if some extreme evangelical religious nutter happens to find ’34:63’ on the internet and thinks it refers to a missing gospel bit of the bible, even better.

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One of the things that really waxed my woody during the election campaign, and which I thought I’d seen the last of for a while, were opinion polls.

On election night, as a super special treat for us all, at 10pm, when all the polling stations had closed, meaning no voter could be influenced, the BBC announced the result of an exit poll. Now I’ve come across these before in election night coverage, but I’ve never been too sure about what it exactly it is, except that the media imbues it with an almost religious reverence.

According to Channel 4’s ‘Fact Check’ page,

‘Its purpose is to predict the number of seats each party will win.
The poll – commissioned by Sky News, BBC and ITV News – is designed by an academic team of political scientists, led by Professor Sir John Curtice of Strathclyde University, and is carried out by the research company Ipsos.’

Whoa, back up there! Is that the same Professor Sir John Curtice who, in addition to reminding me of Professor Calculus in the ‘Tintin’ books, also has a side hustle as the BBC’s resident poll guru, explaining what the polls tell us, and who has appeared regularly throughout their whole election coverage? Blistering barnacles, it is! 

‘Ipsos goes to about 130 polling stations across the country and talks to around 20,000 people in total. A team of interviewers are outside the entrance of each polling station all day, stopping a sample of voters as they leave and asking them to complete the poll.’

More whooping, more backing up! They asked around 20,00 – 20,401 to be precise – how they’d voted? That’s not entirely true is it? How many people did they ask and how many refused to answer?  

I referenced this before, when I looked into this poll published by the Independent, based on the opinions of 1,624 adults and discovered that whilst an impressive sounding 18,252 adults had been invited to take part in the survey, the overwhelming majority of these – 16,616 –  had either declined or else had not properly completed the survey in some way.

And they were in the comfort of their own home! They hadn’t been waiting patiently in a queue until a bureaucracy  reminiscent of the 1950’s examined their voter ID, handed them a ballot paper so they could finally discharge their democratic duty. And as they’re on their way out, out of the shadows appears someone who wants to stop them and ask them a question? They’ve just had their first experience of having to queue at a polling station – a polling station – like it was the deli counter at Sainsbury’s and that’s a good time?

It gets better or worse, I’m not sure which because, ‘Javier Sajuria, reader in comparative politics at Queen Mary University of London, told FactCheck that “as polls go, it is probably one of the most reliable”.

As I’ve pointed out before, that’s not really a high bar is it?

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And just a quick moan about the election night coverage on the BBC. It was appalling. 

Whoever was responsible for this visual bludgeoning, should be hung up by their pixels. Quite why anyone imagines that what election night really needs to coney the importance of what’s happening was loads of CGI graphics and shouty people telling us how impressive these were, is a mystery.

What’s wrong with people just sitting behind a desk, trying to make sense of it all for the viewer? Boring yes, certainly not as ‘sexy’ but undeniably much more informative.

And the thing about the exit poll is that it takes away any possibility of surprise. One can’t have a Portillo moment if you know that these moments are going to happen because the probability of them happening is endlessly discussed in advance of them actually happening. 

It was so bad that I ended up watching ITV.

Yeah, it was that bad!

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Usually, I stop writing these blogs quite soon after the election result has been announced because, well…it normally reverts back to business as usual, but just with some newer passengers riding the gravy train.

But, much like in 1997, I think Plonker will do exactly the same thing but in newer, worse version. Then we imagined that all Labours pledges that they’d stick to Tory spending plans, wouldn’t reverse anti-union legislation and would press ahead with more privatisation was just there to woo wavering Tory voters to trust them. It was a bluff, once in office….oh you weren’t bluffing, you really did mean those things?

I suspect Plonker will do the same, except it won’t be him will it? He’ll be speaking other peoples words, and as I alluded to in a previous post, those people are the ideological activist zealots, which have successfully embedded themselves in the Labour Party I can’t trust anyone who once believed that 99.9% of women didn’t have a penis, certainly not one who chooses what to believe and then what to unbelieve depending on calculations of expediency. He’s as trustworthy as an unlicensed butcher

But last night I got a bit too champagne-tastic. So maybe in a day or so.

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Obviously I wrote that yesterday evening, before fizz bucked me up.

One of the problems with drinking is that when you don’t do it on a regular basis, your tolerance for alcohol collapses, which can be your fate if you think it a good idea to drink a whole bottle of champagne, on a stomach fortified with crisps and not much else.

I woke this afternoon with my mouth feeing like the bottom of a parrots cage, everything being much too brig bright after some bastard thought it a good idea to start using an angle grinder or some other invention of Beelzebub in a nearby garden seemingly moments after I’d fallen asleep. And I’d only gone to bed in the first place because the remote for the TV had going on the blink. So I missed both Lettuces’ and the Honourable Member for the 18th Century’s own Portillo moments. But I got see to Grant Shatts and Penny Lessthans have theirs so, you know, swings and roundabouts.

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What is it with (former) Conservative MPs and stupid names?

I mean Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is one thing, but Richard Grosvenor Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax?

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Today is finally here!

In the same way that yesterday happened yesterday and that tomorrow will probably happen tomorrow, it seems fitting that the arrival of new day should seem as tediously inevitable and as boringly predictable as the almost certain Labour government.

I get that we now live an world where to get properly excited about anything other than an incredibly expensive piece of branded gadgetry or a ‘celebrity’ scandal isn’t seen as that exciting, but I can still remember the palpable sense of excitement that summed up Labour’s 1997 election campaign.

After the Conservative election victory in 1992 there was an understandable feeling of utter bewilderment at the fact that so many people had still voted for them. Knowing first hand of the  the carnage that Thatcher had wrought upon the country all through the 80’s, still they voted for them. Despite the miners strike, the privatisations, the whole ‘greed is good’ culture, the sheer callous disregard of vast swathes of the country being decimated, despite all this, inexplicably, we had another five years of this to put up with.

One realises how utterly useless words are sometimes when attempting to describe the mood of positive emotions that seemed to grip Britain in May and June 1997. The whole nation was genuinely excited by the prospect of a Labour government, and that by voting Labour, it expressed a collective sense of optimism, that Tony Blair embodied a newer type of politics, dynamic and transformative, the kind that that Britain hadn’t had for so long and so desperately needed 

Of course, we know better now, we know what actually happened, we found out the hard way that ‘I’m Tory Plan B’ wasn’t just an anagram of Tony Blair MP, that it was, in fact was the truth. But back then there was there was real hope, that better future was now a very real possibility and that after 18 years of Conservative rule, that that possibility might finally be shared by everyone. But do I get that feeling now, do I a detect similar tsunami like surge of optimism for a Plonker. 

No.

Instead, there’s an almost nationwide yawn, a yawn moreover that feels as if the jaw hasn’t opened wide enough for it to fully escape and leaves you with a vague sense of frustration. There isn’t a sense that there’s a fundamental ideological divide that both unites the individual parties and at the same time presents voters with a clearly unambiguous choice between between the Britain the Conservatives offer and the one Labour envisions.

It has been said that it isn’t so much that Labour are popular, but more than the Conservatives are so massively unpopular, and that’s what that accounts for their imminent victory.

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What certainly hasn’t hurt is how, just like in 1997, the UK media have divined the mood of the nation and judging it to be deeply discontented, have ceaselessly told us that we’re deeply discontented, have run stories and news items telling us why we’re so discontented we are and then report on opinion polls which confirm this.

This isn’t some kind of tin-foil-hat-wearing conspiracy theory, one that is full of shadowy cabals, rich old white men, dimly lit rooms thick with cigar smoke and brandy fumes. Just like everyone else, the media wants to be on the winning side, borne out of a sense that this is the right thing to do. 

For their business, nothing else. Why else do you think that, just like in 1997, ‘The Sun’ is supporting Labour, as it is exhorting its readers to do today? If anyone seriously imagines that Rupert Murdock gives two fucks about anything other than his bottom line, then I’ll put you in touch with this prince in Nigeria who keeps emailing me wanting my bank account details so he can transfer his fortune out of there.

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Today is election day and it is incumbent for as many people as possible to vote even if in the vast majority of cases that vote would be wasted.

This flaw in our voting system is one that none of the two main parties seem willing to address and why would they? It works perfectly well for them, as the 2019 general election result illustrates only too well.

First off, there was only a turnout of 67.3%. You might think that quite good, but what is good about a democracy in which just under a third of the electorate don’t even bother. But okay, lets go with it being a good thing, and so that 67.3% now becomes 100% of all the votes cast. 

The Conservatives, who got 43.6% of the vote and got 365 seats. Labour got 32.2 % of the vote but only 203 seats, but the system has worked much better for them in the past, but this time it didn’t. Slightly less than 10% of the vote difference but over 150 seats less.

Am I missing something?

Even more absurd is the idea that the Liberal Democrats got 11. 5% of the vote and 11 seats, but the SNP got 3.9% but 48 seats.

Don’t get me wrong the first past the post system has a lot to recommend it.  

In horse racing. 

But in the context of a fully functioning democracy, one that aspires to involve every citizen in it, this method of voting is as outdated as the quill is to writing.  

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As is my custom, I’ll be watching the BBC’s election night coverage with my usual cheeky snackers, champagne and pickled onion Monster Munch crisps. 

Very possibly, I’ll be pickled by the end of it.

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Writing about how 1997 finally ended 18 years of Conservative tyranny, brought me up short as I realised that all of the 1980’s, and most of the 1990’s, were lived in Conservative Britain is  bad enough. Reflecting that this was my adolescence, all teenage acne, wet look hair gel and Paco Rabane, raving and choons makes it embarrassingly so.

But what tops the lot was the fact that Mrs Thatcher was our MP and that my mum wouldn’t hear a bad word said against her.

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I know that I bang on about this a lot but to me it represents the very worst kind of politicing.  The kind that ignores the very real problems we face and instead chooses to focus on matters that are ultimately trivial by comparison.  

I refer of course to my long held belief that the state should be engaged in state sponsored euthanasia. I don’t mean compulsory state sponsored euthanasia,  I mean a voluntary state sponsored one, as I discussed here.

And just because it might be unpalatable to some, is that enough of a reason not to discuss it? Because it might upset people? Are we spending Christmas with our in-laws or our we seriously contemplating what the long term spending implications of an ageing population are for the government.

 According to the Institute of Fiscal Studies, government spending on social security payments – the state pension, pension credits, the winter fuel payment and other entitlements – is expected to be £152 billion (5.9% of national income) in 2023–24. 

This amount is only going to become even more burdensome for the state, as not only are people living longer and less people are being born, this therefore means that number of working age people to pay those taxes is dwindling. 

So if the various political parties can’t be honest about this then what else are they not being straight with us about?  They’re all say that they’re prepared for taking tough decisions and making tough choices but are they?  

Poncing about with tinkering here and there with things will only have any real effect if society limits the numbers possible to claim those things. Otherwise, such tinkering is about as much use trying to put out a raging fire with a water pistol.

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With wonderful timing this appeared in yesterdays Daily Mirror,  

‘EXCLUSIVE: Tory ministers in line for £1million in taxpayer-funded payouts if they lose General Election

Ousted Tory ministers will be in line for more than £1million in taxpayer-funded payouts if the party loses the General Election.

Under the current rules, every Government minister under the age of 65 is entitled to a quarter of their annual salary in severance when they lose their jobs. Analysis shows taxpayers would be left with a whopping £1.03million bill for pay-offs for the 103 Tory ministers who are eligible.’

This perfectly exemplified what I have been banging on about all during this election campaign regarding the media’s obsession with the election betting nonsense and the search of Jay Slater. The wilful complicity of the media to allow itself to be so distracted when there are far more important matters to be addressed.  

Obviously a headline that read ‘Employer to fulfil legal obligations to staff facing redundancies’ isn’t much of a story but then its only MP’s so who cares?!  And if the Mirror thinks that £1 millions is ‘whopping’, what on earth would they call the £120 millions a day that the UK pays as interest on the national debt? 

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If Russia really did want to cause serious disruption to our democracy and want us all doubt the integrity of the general election result, there exists a wonderfully simple way to do it. They may in fact be doing even now, as you read this. Indeed they may have interfered with the last three of our elections. 

They could’ve stopped all that twatting about with setting up fake social media accounts and having a small army of people constantly posting fake news on them. Instead of going to to all that time and trouble, they could simply have created a slew of fake online identities, each with a different political outlook and have got them signed up with online polling companies. The kind of polling company that every media outlet now uses, the kind that has for weeks predicting a Labour landslide, the ones that base their predictions on the opinions of rarely more than a few thousand people, and which the media will then report on, and then report on that report.

This creates the ‘bandwagon effect’, which as one might imagine, describes the effect of people wanting to back a winner, especially if that winner is confidently predicted to be winning by everyone. Essentially opinion polls create a self-fulfilling prophecy, and one that by reporting on these polls, the media helps inflate out of all proportion.

My opinion of opinion polls has been low since their disastrous misreading of the 2015 election, one that was only eclipsed by the failure to call the 2016 referendum. Mind you, that was only eclipsed by their utter failure to in any way predict clearly the 2017 election. So, improvements were urgently needed, as every newspaper and media outlet said in 2015, again in 2016, and er, in 2017 and yes finally some things changed and they got it  a bit right in 2019.

But remember the the ‘horse-meat’ scandal back in the olden times of 2013? When inexplicably, and to much public outrage, it turned out that one wasn’t able to buy a £3 lasagna ready meal and for it not contain the best cuts of meat? How consumer wanted everything but the blame. They instead directed their anger at the food manufacturers and the way that they advertised their products, supermarkets who sold themselves to shoppers on the basis of price, of how every little helped, of being able to eat well for less and of not being little on quality

Remember all that? 

And maybe then you recall the speed with which it was all forgotten as Christmas 2013 approached. The speed with which a collective amnesia about the scandal which seemed to possess people was matched only for their hunger for ‘bogof’ deals.

That’s why opinion polls are much like ready meals, people remember what they want to remember!

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Speaking of foreign interference in elections one of course immediately thinks of the Guardian.  

Back in 2004 the Guardian embarked on a campaign that sought to influence the voters of Clarke County, Ohio to vote for Democrat presidential candidate John Kerry and not for George W Bush.  Yes you read that right.  ‘The Guardian’, having bought the electoral roll of Clarke County, then invited its readers to get the  address of a voter from its website and then write to them urging them to vote for Kerry

Yes, Clarke County was a swing state and therefore liable to go either way in the presidential election, but why none of staff high up there on Mount Virtue didn’t put a stop this before it left the editorial meeting is anyone’s guess.  My guess is that ‘The Guardian’ and its readership are so convinced of the moral superiority of the opinions of which they believe in that it’s inconceivable to them that another, just as valid, opinion might exist. 

Bizarrely the residents of Clarke County were not best pleased by this!  And whether it had any tangible effect other than annoying the people of Clarke County, I don’t know, but I do know that there was never a President Kerry.  Of course ‘The Guardian’ would much rather that this whole thing was forgotten about and never mentioned because foreign interference in elections is a bad thing.

So probably best that forget that you’ve ever heard of it.

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Throughout these posts about the election campaign, I have been scathing about the honesty of politicians who claim that that cutting taxes are somehow compatible with better public services. Or else that government borrowing to pay for all their promises can be offset against the massive amounts of tax revenue the UK will have after tax avoidance by corporations is more vigorously clamped down on.

The question that I’ve posed before still stands. Who is worse? The person who bullshits, knowing full well that they’re bullshitting even as they’re bullshitting – the bullshitter? Or the people on the end of that bullshit, who know deep down that it’s bullshit, but pretend to go along with it because of self-interest – the bullshat?

Who in their right mind could possibly believe that cutting tax is anything other than a coded message that more public service budget cuts are on the way? That with the demands an ageing population will put on those public services, public services we’ll all someday need, that this is good thing?

And who seriously thinks that getting corporations, like Amazon, or eBay to pay the proper amount of tax will be anything other than impossible? Do politicians imagine that we’ve not heard about the lengths these shysters will go to not to pay tax?

I’d like a body like the one Brad Pitt had in ‘Fight Club’ but that too isn’t going to happen either.

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Did anyone else see this in yesterday’s ‘Independent’?

Thrill seekers can now travel to the edge of space space in a giant hot air balloon for £100k

Space Perspective is offering panoramic views of the Earth from a luxury capsule featuring an open bar and a toilet after completing its first, successful test flight. ‘

My only thought was about another place humans are not supposed to go – really, really, really deep in the oceans – like the Titan submarine sightseeing trip. 

That ended well, didn’t it?

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Waz proposed a novel way in which Plonkers plans for an extra 40,000 NHS appointments might be funded. By the very simple means of not paying doctors proper overtime rates to do them.

As the ‘Telegraph’ reported yesterday,

The majority of the extra slots are expected to be at evenings and weekends, but paying doctors to work the extra hours at premium rates could mean that costs spiral.

But Mr Streeting would only give hospital trusts the funding to pay staff 1.5 times their usual rate. The final rates will continue to be agreed locally between hospitals and consultants, who could refuse to take on the work, but the proposed figures would undercut what doctors have typically been paid for extra work.’

Wonderful! I mean if you ignore the fact that Plonker repeatedly took Prada to task for not sorting out the ongoing junior doctors pay dispute that is, and consider the likely calming effect these plans might have to help with negotiations to resolve that, that is.

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Some people really need to be protected from themselves. 

This was proven once again by this story in todays ‘Guardian’

’Woman who died at slapping therapy retreat viewed healer as ‘sent by God’, court told’

No, that can’t be right, we all know that doctors recommend at least five slaps a day, with preferably a couple of hard punches as well, for the maintenance of good bodily health

‘Danielle Carr-Gomm, 71, wrote glowing testimonials about Hongchi Xiao saying she believed he was starting a revolution in healthcare, Winchester crown court was told.’

That would be the revolution in healthcare such that you no longer need it being as how you’re dead?

‘Xiao allegedly congratulated Carr-Gomm when she announced she had stopped taking insulin at the start of the four-day workshop, attended by “keen disciples” of his methods, at Cleeve House, a country manor in Wiltshire.’

Stopping taking one’s insulin. Perfectly sensible thing for a diabetic to do. What could possibly go wrong?

‘When Carr-Gomm fell seriously ill Xiao allegedly told other participants that she was experiencing the “darkness before dawn breaks” and did not call for medical help.’

Carr-Gomm is said to have stopped taking insulin on Monday 17 October. Over the coming days she became unwell and was heard crying and howling in pain.

The jury was told that in a book Xiao has written he suggests someone may appear to be ill but this is in fact toxins leaving the body during a “healing crisis”.’ Healing crisis? Is that a ‘healing crisis’ in the same way that war is a ‘peace crisis’?

Paramedics were called at 2.54am on 20 October and Carr-Gomm was found lying on a mattress on the floor of her room and was confirmed dead at 3.11am.’

Had she not died, she could’ve crowd-funded the money needed to buy a ticket on that Space Perspectives balloon!

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And to fully understand why I call Plonker – middle name Rodney – Plonker, think I’ll leave one for Del Boy to explain…

There is one fundamental problem with the UK media’s reaction to National Rally’s (RN) success in the first round of French parliamentary elections yesterday, a problem that which has two interconnected elements and which may yet prove to be Plonkers’ undoing.

I’ve mentioned them both before on this blog, the first element as recently few days ago when I wrote that ’Democracy is a like cocaine. When the right sort of people are doing it, it’s fine. When the wrong sort of people start to do it, then it becomes a problem.’

I suggested that what I called ‘problematic democracy’ could be best described as the sudden involvement of a segment of the population who never normally vote and who are mobilised into doing so by a long standing perception that their concerns have been largely ignored by the established political order. And because of this disengagement by a significant minority of the electorate, this allows the established political order to create for themselves a wholly self-serving political spectrum.

One in which there existed a perfect set of political opinions and that these beliefs existed right in the middle of. And self-serving because their views just happened to be in, or very close, to the centre of this spectrum, which allowed them to imagine themselves ‘moderates’. Meaning that any views that fall outside of this ideal can can be called ‘far right’, ‘far left’ or ‘extreme’, which is technically true. But only if one first accepts the flawed assumption upon which those views are seen and presented in the first place.

And if one does accept that such a spectrum does indeed exist, one can easily accept the notion of the French finance minister Bruno le Maire who said the ‘hard-Left are as dangerous for France as the hard-Right.’ 

What he actually means is that the supposed ‘hard-Right’ threaten the cosy consensus that has existed not just in French, but European polictics, by tapping into a feeling that some of the electorate have, of either having their concerns dismissed by the established political order as some form of ‘anti’, ‘ism’ or ‘phobia’ 

I don’t know what the policies of the RN are, because in one important respect they don’t matter. Yes, I’m sure that if I examined them in any great detail there’d some things I’d broadly support and a lot more that I didn’t. But quite a few French people thought otherwise and whatever their reasons may have been, dismissing them as dangerous to France is arrant nonsense.

Boring bit of statistics now. 33% of the electorate voted for RN, 28% voted for a left wing alliance that somehow included both the Greens and the Communists whilst President Macrons Together coalition came third with 21%. What happened to the remaining 18% isn’t clear, although probably that was divided up between the smaller parties, independents candidates and spoiled ballots.

‘No’, you’re no doubt thinking,’that can’t be right. No way could there have been that many spoiled ballots.’

As CNN reported, 9% of voters spoiled their ballot papers by leaving them blank, which means that they’re valid and included counted in the total, in the Presidential election of 2017, with an additional 23% of registered voters not even bothering to vote in the first place. It was even worse in the 2022 Presidential election, when 28% of registered voters were similarly not bothered. 

In that light, the RN’s 33% of a vote that was cast by only 59% of the electorate has to be seen within that context. This is exactly my issue with a low voter turnout and is the second element of that fundamental problem that I mentioned earlier. How exactly is a 59% voter turnout indicative of anything other than both a failure and a success of democracy. Yes, RN got 33% and if some of that 33% them had previously never voted well that’s a success right there, but the 41% of people who didn’t vote represent an unmitigated disaster.

The media, as is usual with politics, focuses on the wrong thing. Those missing 41% of the French electorate are missing for possibly some of the same reasons that over 32% of the UK electorate didn’t vote in 2019. I’ve no idea what those reasons might be, how universally shared they are by our 32% or indeed what the solutions to them might be. That’s for the media and politicians to work out, but a starting point would not to immediately dismiss any point of view that you don’t wholeheartedly agree with as ‘far right’.

Just a thought.

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It struck me last night that the Italian football teams ignominious exit form the Euros, after failing to progress to beyond the Group stage, was a perfect illustration of the globalisation.

If the 2024 me had been able to tell the 1980 – 2000 me that this had happened, I’d have begged him to get me some of what he was taking, because clearly he would’ve been on some kind of mind-altering drug. Italy were a great footballing nation with one of the best leagues in the world from which most of their national team was chosen. And what a team it was.

Even if they didn’t win every World Cup, one could safely rely on them to be at least quarter-finalists and for them to play football in an exciting way as they did it.

Now the proportion of foreign players in Serie A – the Italian equivalent of the Premier League – is over 61%, with the result that the pool of top tier Italian players is therefore smaller. And as television rights, sponsorship deals and image licensing, have created a world of unimaginable riches, so too are the players seeing themselves increasingly as financial entities. 

And because they only have a limited timespan within which earn the big bucks – normally no more than 10 -15 years at best – this in turn encourages the kind of thinking that sees players nearing the end of their careers increasingly choose the money in Saudi Arabia.

For example, Jordan Henderson 33, by no metric a superstar of football, still signed a contract with a Saudi club worth a reported £700,000 a week in July 2023. To put that in context Christian Ronaldo, who at 38 has no right to be playing club football, let alone still be playing for Portugal in the Euro’s, who is very much a an extra-superstar recently signed with a Saudi club for £3.3 millions a week.

Where the money is, that’s where the players go. And that’s why Italy, despite having one the best – and richest – leagues in the world, now have a national team that football team that drew against Croatia and were beaten by Switzerland.

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In todays ‘Telegraph’ there is an article that touches upon one of the great unmentionables in our society. And because it has remained so unmentionable for so long, it has gotten much worse leading me to think that only a drastic solution will remedy it

‘Old, rich and living on benefits: welcome to the state pension capital of Britain  

East Preston and the eastern half of the neighbouring parish of Rustington together make up a geographic unit that the Office for National Statistics (ONS) calls an MSOA, or middle-layer super output area. It is an exceptional one.

Telegraph analysis shows that East Preston and Rustington East is the only such neighbourhood, out of the 7,264 across England and Wales, where the over-66s constitute more than half of the population, at 51pc. 

It also has the largest proportion of people receiving state pension, at 49pc.’ 

It goes on to quote all manner of various facts and figures, projections and forecasts, scenarios and imagining’s which all point to one inescapable conclusion. That our ever increasing ageing population is no longer either financially viable for the state to support, or desirable if our society wishes to remain equitable. It also is full of the usual guff from the usual think-tanks about how reducing the state pension, rationing health care or any other similar proposal will become necessary to curb the costs that this ageing population impose.

Last year, 2023-24, the combined cost of the state pension, pension credit and the winter fuel payment was, according to the Office of Budget Responsibility, £142 billions. That’s 5.1% of national income or over 48% of the welfare budget, with absolute the certainty that this number is only getting higher.

When the current crop of pensioners – those over 80 I’m talking about here – were adults of working age and paid tax, successive governments had a realistic expectation that their time as a pensioner might last for maybe 15 years or so. However, the Office for National Statistics estimates that by 2045 there will be 3.1 million of them or 4.3% of the population. So to my way of thinking, anyone over the age of 85 who is claiming a state pension is guilty of benefit fraud. It may well be through no fault of their own, but they’re still claiming a benefit to which they’re not entitled.

Now, remember how early on in the election campaign Prada announced his vision for a new version of National Service? How this was roundly derided on all quarters as an indication of just how out of touch with reality, so utterly bereft of new ideas he was and how utterly irrelevant to combating anything than an impending Conservative defeat it was?

But that the country needed to be “open and honest” about the long-term challenges it is facing and that National Service would give young people had “the opportunities they deserve” was bang on.

The proposals would, he said, see a “bold new model of national service. Only by nurturing our shared culture and fostering a sense of duty can we preserve our nation and values for decades to come. This is an investment in both the character of young people and our security.’

If one considers what might really be a ‘bold new model of national service’, one that gives young people ‘the people the opportunities they deserve’ and one that truly is ‘ an investment in both the character of our young people and our security, then that ‘bold new model’ is state sponsored euthanasia. 

However unpalatable one might find the prospect of state sponsored euthanasia, it doesn’t make it any the less logical. The government could offer pensioners upon retirement a deal, a lump sum equal to the value of their pension and pensioner benefits for 15 years – that’s the state sponsored bit – in return for a guaranteed undertaking for voluntary euthanasia on their part when they turn 80.  If they had a house, the government would buy it at current market value and allow them to live out the remainder of their lives rent free. It could also predict the likely cost to the NHS of caring for them and add that to the pot.

15 years seems about enough time for people to put all their affairs in order, take all the holidays they’d never had and generally depart with dignity. Of course, when the 15 years had elapsed they could renege on their part of the deal, of course they could, but that would mean an immediate termination of any governmental – local or central – responsibility for them. They’d be homeless.

And of course the benefits to society would be worth it. If pensioners knew what the deal was in advance, then the money that they currently invest in private pensions – estimated to be £112 billion in by the Institute for Fiscal Studies – then quite a bit of that might be ploughed back into the economy instead. It would also help the NHS. It’d help reduce its budget for a start, cut waiting lists, the whole bed blocking crisis would soon disappear and it would also alleviate its staffing crisis.

There’d also be a benefit to the housing sector, inasmuch as the government could then offload the properties it had bought at properly affordable prices. This would additionally have a beneficially corrective on the housing market, as prices would fall because there’d be a guaranteed amount of new stock every year. Employment too. There’d be a huge swathe of jobs that’d be no longer needed, thereby freeing up more the workforce to retrain.

And what the over 85’s miss out on? The adult nappy wearing, dementia suffering, lonely and friendless years? If one hasn’t written that book, climbed Everest or achieved some other ambition by then, then lets face it, they never will.

It will happen. How soon it happens and exactly what form it’ll take, is a question of when exactly the unthinkable becomes thinkable.

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Oh, the search for Jay Slater was abandoned earlier today. Why? I mean even though he went missing nearly two weeks ago, had no water on him, and was in a part of Spain where daytime temperatures can reach more than 27C – or 80F in old money – why stop?

As we know, the rule of 3 doesn’t apply to missing English teenagers. The one that suggests humans can only survive for 3 minutes without oxygen, 3 days without water and 3 weeks without food.

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Democracy is a like cocaine. When the right sort of people are doing it, it’s fine. When the wrong sort of people start to do it, then it becomes a problem.

This notion of what I’ll call ‘problematic democracy’ can be best described as the sudden involvement of a segment of the population who never normally vote and who are mobilised into doing so by a long standing perception that their concerns have been largely ignored by the established political order. This has the wholly unsurprising effect that when new parties start to to take those views seriously, or articulate views people never knew that they had, votes will pour in and the established way of doing things will be disrupted.

And being a disruptor, a vibrant newcomer elbowing their way into a place at the table is seen as a good thing. As long as it stays firmly within the world of business that is. Think of AirBnb, of Netflix, and Facebook.  Of Amazon, Google and of Tesla. 

There is nothing new about this. Napster was was a disrupter. So to was MySpace. Even McDonalds was a disruptor back in day. Even further back still, so was Ford. The brash young upstarts will all too soon become part of the way of the established way things and will, in time, be disrupted themselves. Think TikTok. Of Instatgram. Of Nudle. As it is with business, so it is with politics, only much, much slower.

The Labour party was founded in 1900, having grown out of the trade union movement and socialist parties of the 19th century, to articulate and to implement the changes needed for the betterment of the working class who then, as now were overwhelming majority of the population  So successful were they in doing this, that in all of the general elections since 1922, Labour has either been the government or the opposition to it. They disrupted to two party system, that was Britain’s notion of democracy since about 1800 where only 7% of people could vote.

So it was inevitable that when 1981 when four senior Labour Party politicians left to form the Social Democratic Party, it was soon in a coalition with Liberals – who’d been part of that old two party cabal – until eventually the two parties became one in 1988. 

But even that, disruptive as it was proclaimed to be by the press at the time, was really nothing of the sort. As with all disruptors, they quickly became part of the system system they had previously wanted to disrupt.

Even more cynical were the Greens, or too be fair, the fate that awaited the Greens after their stunning success in the 1989 UK’s European elections. Winning over 2 million votes – 15% of the vote – the three other parties took note and soon nullified the threat the Greens posed by adopting greener policies. Solar energy, recycling and other environmental issues maybe political orthodoxy now, but back then they weren’t.

Then Farrago entered the fray. Exactly when I first became aware of him I can’t recall, but he wormed his way into my political awareness, initially on the fringes of the fringes and becoming increasingly more of political force or farce, depending on your thinking about British EU membership. This culminated the 2014 European Elections, where UKIP came 1st in the UK getting over 26% of the vote.

This was the catalyst for the Brexit referendum. And we all know what happened there.

One may not like his politics – I certainly don’t – but plenty of the those who make up the ‘problematic democracy’ do and that given that roughly a third of the electorate never vote, he could certainly disrupt this election.

The idea that Farrago and his mob play on, pander to and generally engage in far-right politics only makes sense if one accepts what I maintain is a flawed assumption. That there exists a perfect set of political opinions and that they exist right in the middle of an imagined political spectrum. Who and why that assumption is seen as a given, something so beyond questioning as to be eternal is another post. But  therefore any views that fall outside of this ideal can can be called ‘far right’, ‘far left or ‘extreme’, which is technically true. But only if one first accepts the flawed assumption upon which those views are seen and presented. Yes, some of the policies that Reform UK are espousing may break with the increasingly politically centrist orthodoxy of the last few decades, but that’s what disrupters do. 

And if some of that third who never vote do, is that such a bad thing? If the concerns, interests and priorities of those who feel excluded for political life are given voice, how is that not democratic? After all, that’s why and how the Labour Party started.

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In case anyone who read yesterdays post imagines that I’m anti-trans, I most definitely am not. What I am though is pro-women.

That being the case, I can’t fathom how it is possible for any sentient adult can genuinely believe in their heart of hearts that all a man has to do to become a woman is simply to proclaim that he is, to put on a bit of make up and pretend to be one. 

Yes, I believe that people genuinely feel that they were born into the wrong body because of that, feel that profound distress. But feelings don’t trump facts, and the fact is that if you are born with a penis you’re a man, and as with lots of things in life we don’t much care for, wishing things were otherwise doesn’t make them so. 

If that were indeed the case, I wouldn’t be brain damaged. I’d much rather be in a body that could walk, one that allowed me to speak clearly and intelligibly and one that had control over my fingers such that I could type these words with something approaching fluidity. But what has happened has happened, and whilst I am in in no way denigrating people who are transgender, I am saying that despite the fact that our respective situations being incomparably different, they do exist at opposite ends of a very long spectrum.  

The wishing-this-wasn’t-my-life spectrum. 

But here’s the thing. Pretty much everyone thinks that and some with more reason to think that than others. People with a terminal illness, people in hospices and victims who suffer life-changing injuries following all manner of terrible happenings, for example. Wishing for something one knows can never happen but still accepting the incontrovertible reality one finds oneself in, incredibly disagreeable though it may be, is both healthier and more pragmatic.

Well that’s what all my therapists and counsellors have told me over the years anyway. And if I ever reach accepting the reality of my brain injury then hopefully I’ll feel better too. Until that happy day however….

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A few minutes ago as I was about to post this, I must’ve pressed the wrong button. All my links vanished and I’ve been staring at a screen for to long for me to go back and put them all back. But they were there.

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If there’s one issue that neatly encapsulates the point I was trying to make in my post of a few days ago – that basically it isn’t Plonker or Labour MP’s who effectively wield the power in the Labour Party, it’s their grassroots activists who do – then its transgender rights.

Quite when this insidious strain of activist absolutism first started to manifest itself within the Labour Party I’m not sure of, but its certainly deeply embedded in it now.  I have neither the time nor the inclination to list the many ways in which this absurdity has been weaponised to silence critics of it within the Labour party. 

But all one really needs to know about how effective has its influence been in corrupting biological reality in pursuit of ideological idiocy was perhaps best expressed in 2023, when Plonker spouted the nonsense ‘that 99.9% of women don’t have a penis.’.

This is a man who wants us to trust enough him enough that we would confidently put his finger on the nuclear trigger yet he thought, up until a few days ago, that 0.01% – or one in a thousand women – had penises. And it’s only because another man, a man whom he respects contracted him, only then did he backtrack?  That’s a good look!

But do I believe him, do I now trust that this is now his firm belief? That it isn’t just a very short term election strategy, one to designed to reassure proper women that single sex spaces and activities will be protected under a Labour government? That when he first closes the door in Downing Street, he won’t also be closing the the door on them?

No. I believe that Plonker only has only one principle and that is that he should be Prime Minister and to that end will say or do anything to achieve it. And then unsay it if needed.

Remember when the Labour Party was a staunch defender of women’s rights, even going so far as putting its principles into practice by imposing all-women short lists on safe Labour constituencies? So the only possible candidate they choose could be a woman, and being a safe Labour seat, a successfully elected one. Technically, it was a form of gerrymandering, but one that was considered essential if the male to female ratio of MPs in parliament was to be redressed.

If Plonker can be so easily can have thought, even if he now professes otherwise, that some women can have penises, does that mean that now all the Labour Party has to do to improve the ratio of female to male MP’s in parliament, is to persuade some their MP’s to put on a dress, some make up and a wig?  

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Back in 2015, I wrote a post in which I lambasted the Glastonbury Festival for, among other things the cost, the crowds, and the constant rip-offs. These things have all increased.

Then ticket would’ve set you back £220. Now it’s £355. Then around 150,00 people bought tickets. Try 210,00 now. Then the cost of a licence to run a food stall food would’ve cost about £10,00.  I don’t know much it is now, but it’s hardly likely to have down in price, is it?  I do know that there are more than 300 food stalls, that the average cut that festival organisers take is between 25 – 30% of sales.

To make their money back, stall-holders charge exorbitant amounts for incredibly mean portions which in normal circumstances would’ve put them out of business quick smart. But with a captive market of that size, and with all the stall-holders doing the same thing, its capitalism at its most naked

And being one of those 210,000 isn’t going to be fun either.  There’s a terrible trade off to be made about where to pitch ones’ tent that a first timer will be totally unaware of, given that they combine a number of conflicting priorities. 

One can opt to be near to where the stages are, where the main food area is, but that’s still half an hours walk away – at least – and the nearer you are, the nearer to the bottom of the basin that Worthy Farm is in you’ll be. So if it rains, you’re fucked and not in a good way either.

But if you decide to go with a slightly reduced chance of having your stuff nicked and set up in what I knew as the Green Fields, its the best part of an hours walk back every evening, and when it’s dark and one is chemically refreshed, all tents look the same and guy ropes are just waiting to sprain your ankle

And even if you arrive early on the Wednesday, pitch up somewhere quite nice, others will soon have that very same thought and become your neighbours. Not neighbours in the lets-leave-some-space-for-your-privacy kind of a way but neighbours in the sod-it-this-is-as-good-a-place-as-any cheek by jowl kind of way.

So that’s the ticket costing £355 + the £5 booking fee, the cost of eating and drinking, say easily upward of £100 – given how a pint costs nearly £7 and a taco more than a tenner – and that’s before you’ve added in the costs of getting there and all the camping gear needed.

So essentially, a minimum of at least £500 per person for the dubious pleasure of attending a festival for which the line-up isn’t confirmed when you buy the ticket, being ripped off any time you want to eat, drink or buy anything when you’re there and to bring your own accommodation situated in scenes more in keeping with a humanitarian crisis with sanitary conditions to match.

Two people could buy a weeks holiday in Greece for that.  Beds. Sunshine. Sea. Space. Decent food. Toilets. It isn’t only the cows that are getting milked at Worthy Farm  

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This is not going to sound good, but we are nearing the end of the election campaign, and according to the polls at least, Farrago is giving Prada a run for his money. So only a cynic would point out that Prada has been handed a golden opportunity to scupper Farrago’s mobs’ carefully orchestrated media image in the form of one of his lot making racist comments about Prada’s family, he’d be a fool not to make the most of it.  

Back luck too for Farrago. He finally gets a place on a BBC1 ‘Question Time Leaders Special’ tonight and this bombshell happens mere hours before it starts. 

But seeing as you’re already here and you know how cynical I am, you know I’m going  to question exactly when these remarks were made because the timing of this revelation is fortuitous for Prada. Seeing as how it will dominate the news agenda, in the same way that the betting nonsense has, and will totally overshadow anything he says tonight.

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Watching the final leaders debate on BBC1 last night, some of the things that I’ve mentioned on this blog throughout this election campaign made unwelcome appearances. It was nearly as a bad as me watching a hopeless yet earnest Pet Shop Boys tribute band doing a set comprised of all the songs of theirs that I least liked.

Plonker is still worrying incompetent as a debater, as unable to be concise as he is presents the facts, figures and other details which he hopes will provide the evidence to support his claims in anything less than pure technocracy. Which for me, is one of the most interesting things about him, his talent for removing any emotion from anything he says.

His career prior to becoming an MP would, one might have thought, have developed and then refined his debating skills to a higher level than he has thus far exhibited. That even as late on in the day and especially after his lacklustre performance during the first TV debate, his advisors would’ve coached him, or at the very least, tried to prepare him as best they could. But seemingly not. What he should have left viewers with was a sense that this was man who had a bright and golden vision for Britain, that under his and Labours leadership was a better future to be had for everyone. Instead of which however, he seemed to be offering a marginally less grim one than the one we have now.

Prada made repeated claims about cutting taxes, of how Labour couldn’t be trusted on tax, whilst ignoring the fire that was raging in his trousers. Its not that on his watch, there have been 25 rises on various taxes since 2019, which has created the largest tax burden on working people in 70 years or his exploiting of peoples own naked self-interest that bothers me, as much as his short term perspective does. I made this point before, that because the UK has an ageing population in order to meet the challenges upon the state that situation invariably brings, one of two things needs to happen. 

Either taxation will have to increase to match the funding our public services will need to cope with those demands, or drastic changes will need to be made to both the range of services the state provides and with that, strict enforcement of new rules surrounding what the eligibility for those services is.

But the brutal reality was not something either Plonker or Prada wanted to address. Plonker once again made his claim that he would create an extra 40,000 NHS appointments week to solve the waiting list crisis. As I pointed out with regard to his plans for 80 new courts to deal with rape cases, where is the capacity in the system to make his words anything more than that?  

For one thing, where are the staff going to come from, given that the NHS has over 100,000 vacancies?  And if that number could be magically reduced, this creates two new problems. Are those vacancies going to be filled by foreign workers – until such time as we have enough British born staff qualified to fill them – in which case we’re solving our problem by creating one elsewhere, and also where is the money going to come from to pay these mythical staff? 

Prada banged on continuously about the so called’ triple lock plus’ for pensioners, like it was a good thing. How can promising to increase the state pension – which last year totalled over £110 billions, or 42% of the welfare budget – be seen as anything other than astoundingly financially irresponsible? To effectively prioritise the needs of the one demographic that is known to consistently vote, for his own short term political gain. The ‘Triple lock plus’ is more like ‘triple threat guarantee’, as not only are they living longer, there are also an increasing number of them living longer and the cost to the state will only increase.

Now I’ve got that off my chest, I have to reluctantly admit that Prada was by far the better debater. A lot of what he said I either disagreed with or else were easily provable lies, but it was the way that he constantly hammered home the same points, avoided waffle and was occasionally tenaciously focused that impressed me. The way he carried on, you’d think Plonker was the one with a 14 year record to defend and that he was channelling his inner Goebells!

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Why this whole betting nonsense still continues to considered newsworthy is beyond me. So people betted on the outcome of a thing and suddenly the media profess to be aghast that such a thing has happened, that somehow this thing, being as how it is so egregious, is indicative of the lack of integrity of our politics.

Obviously not within the Labour Party. As the all-but elected next government, the media aren’t going to upset them too much, but misdeeds by Conservative MP’s? That’s a narrative that needs no selling, given as how their various scandals have kept both the tabloid and broadsheet reading public shocked, appalled and amused for decades

In an article published on the BBC’s website yesterday, their political correspondent attempted to explain why it mattered so much by the novel means of suggesting that basically there was not much of a story anyway.

‘In plenty of the alleged cases, we don’t know if there was indeed a bet, how much was bet, how many bets there were, precisely what was bet on, what the odds were, what the winnings were or, crucially, what the person placing the bet did or didn’t know about when the election would be.

Journalism can be long-winded and imperfect. We reporters rarely know as much as we would like to know, and we never stop asking questions.’

Except that there are some questions that they never stop asking because they never started asking them in the first place. Where has there been any discussion of the national debt? The implications for it of yet more borrowing, if Plonker has his way. A debt that stands at over £2,690 billions. Prada witters on about tax cuts, but no-one challenges him on how these can be afforded when the interest on the debt is £120 millions a day, or £1,388 a second.

Compared to those astronomical sums, the betting nonsense isn’t so much a storm in a teacup as not even the briefest of warm breezes across its surface.