the brilliantly leaping gazelle

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.  

There’s always something a bit disappointing when someone that you’d previously thought of as a good egg, turns out to be a bit of a git. 

My opinion David Tennant was based on nothing than him being really good in one thing that I briefly liked – Doctor Who – and also never learning anything about him to that might counter that good opinion.

So his widely reported comments made a few days ago when receiving an award for being a ‘celebrity ally’ at the British LGBT awards caused me to rethink that previous opinion.

He said in his acceptance speech: “If I’m honest I’m a little depressed by the fact that acknowledging that everyone has the right to be who they want to be and live their life how they want to live it as long as they’re not hurting anyone else should merit any kind of special award or special mention because it’s common sense, isn’t it?

However, until we wake up and Kemi Badenoch doesn’t exist any more – I don’t wish ill of her, I just wish her to shut up – whilst we do live in this world, I am honoured to receive this.’

His idea of ‘acknowledging that everyone has the right to be who they want to be and live their life how they want to live it’ involves denying biological reality and massively curtailing the rights and freedoms of the majority of the UK population at the expense of a minority of a minority.

According to the 2021 census, women – the ones with vagina’s and not delusions – made up 51% of the UK population, whereas all transgender people – both trans-men and trans-women – and people who identify as non-binary made up 0.5% of it.

Of course Tennant was making these statements in front of an audience who would’ve agreed with the views he was espousing.  Is his wishing that Kemi Badenock didn’t exist and to shut up any different really to Alan Baker, or Sarah Jane Baker as he wants to be known, who last year told a crowd of trans activists, ‘’if you see a terf, punch them in the face‘?

Leaving aside the absolute bastardisation of language that even allows a word like ‘terf’ to have entered the lexicon – an acronym that stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist – the idea that anyone standing up for women’s rights is in anyway a either a radical or a feminist is laughably absurd, really what is the difference between the two statements.

Tennant’s comments are to me on the same spectrum as Baker’s comments were. Different ends of it granted, but the same spectrum nonetheless  They come from the same place, a place of ideological inversion, deluded reality and intolerant tolerance. Tennant knew he wasn’t jeopardising anything by saying those things, to those people at that event.  He knew that wasn’t doing a Lawrence Fox on his career.

That right that Tennant seems so keen on, that ’everyone has the right to be who they want to be and live their life how they want to live it’, isn’t a universal one it seems. ’ 

Does this remind anyone else of that line in ‘Animal Farm’?

“All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.”

If, as Keyser Soze observered in ‘The Usual Suspects’, “the greatest trick devil he ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn’t exist.”, then what was true for the devil is true for welfare.

We have been so successfully conditioned to think of welfare spending as some kind of state sponsored paternalism, and thus the people who receive it as needing this kind of paternalism, existing as they do at the lower ends of the social spectrum, we think that’s all it is. All of the political debate and thus all of the the discussions concerning it are fixated exclusively upon this conception of welfare as existing only in this way.

Therefore those claiming those benefits are much easier to demonise in the media, and because of this, this makes it much easier for politicians to promote the idea of them being ‘scroungers’ and ‘cheats’ when cutting or withdrawing those benefits. This of course is nothing more than one big elaborate distraction – the scantily clad young female assistant to the old balding magician, whom you look at while he does the trick.

Corporate welfare (CW) can best be described as  governments financial assistance for business. Sounds innocuous?

Until, that is, one reads ‘The British Corporate Welfare State: Public Provision for Private Businesses.’, a by turns both excellent and shocking piece of academic literature by Professor Kevin Farnsworth, which lays bare the sheer scale and cost of the whole scam.

And this scam isn’t new. As early as 1776, Adam Smith, he who has an institute named after him so as to promote the ideologies he was expounding in his book  ‘The Wealth of Nations’. These can summed up as the notion that it was a governments duty to create the necessary conditions under which business could flourish.

So when Beveridge created the blueprint for the modern British welfare state in 1942, most of the focus was directed on his plans for combating the ‘five great evils’ that blighted the lives of the working classes – want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. But less commented on was his conviction that in order to have the money needed to do this, the needs of business would have to supported by government.

In 2015, when Farnsworth’s report was published, he estimated CW to cost upward of£93 billions and includes a great many expenditures which we think of as properly the duty of a government to pay for.

And an article in yesterday’s Guardian underlined both how blind we are to see CW for what it is, but also how it can be easily be mistaken as a public good.

‘Low wages under Tories have pushed 900,000 UK children into poverty, report finds’

Essentially implying that somehow because this had happened under 14 years of Conservative rule, that this was somehow all their fault, . And that only a change of government might improve things, it quoted Paul Nowak, the general secretary of the TUC, saying as much

“No child in Britain should be growing up below the breadline. But under the Conservatives we have seen a huge rise in working households being pushed into poverty. We urgently need an economic reset and a government that will make work pay.”

Earlier this month, the TUC published a report showing the number of people in insecure, low-paid work had increased by nearly 1 million during the Conservatives’ time in office, to a record 4.1 million.’

It also cited various statistical comparisons with other countries workers and their wage increases to bolster the claim that child poverty in is largely due to low wages. 

It doesn’t, curiously enough, apportion any blame whatsoever upon the employers that pay those low wages in the first place. They know that they can get away with paying low wages because they know government will step in to help boost workers incomes with additional financial support.

Working Tax Credits (WTC) are a device by which the government effectively subsidises employers who pay low wages and so rather than being cast as the villain in this false narrative that the Guardian endlessly promotes, they are at best accomplices. 

The WTC replaced the Working Families Tax Credit (WFTC), which operated from April 1999 until March 2003. The WFTC was itself a transitional system from the earlier benefit for working families known as Family Credit (FC), which had been in operation since 1986. In addition, people may also be entitled to Child Tax Credit (CTC) if they are responsible for any children.

So since 1986 we’ve been subsiding low wages and this is but one example of the state channelling funds to support the private sector, making a mockery of the notion of a free market. 

Consider housing benefit (HB). This is a benefit that helps defray the housing costs of those who live in private rented accommodation. Had the market been truly free – and HB wasn’t a thing – then those rents charged by those landlords would soon fall, as no-one could afford to rent them. But it is a thing and has been one since 1982. The cost of HB is staggering, £23.4 billions in 2022 -23, the fourth highest single expenditure by government.

Then consider that HB is but one component of Universal Credit, a benefit designed to combine six benefits to people on low or no income and which this year the government expects to cost £78 billions.

And then consider the ‘gig’ economy, workers on zero-hour contracts, part-time workers, those employed in either casual or seasonal work and ask yourself for whose benefit is that £78 billions ultimately benefiting?  

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I really thought that we’d be done with it by now, but the media is still promoting the idea that the whole betting irrelevance is somehow something about something, and that because of this, it matters.

To my mind, the sums involved are so trivial as to be laughable. Had there been a concerted effort by a gang who’d all placed bets at various locations all over the South East, with each bet in the region of £10,000 or so, then fair enough. But bets totalling £2,700 in one day.? 

But I must confess to being somewhat amused by this development, ‘Labour suspends candidate who bet on Tories to win his seat.’

After all, at the last election, the Tories did win his seat with of majority of over 23,000!  So if any bet can be considered a safe one…

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It’s baffling, it really is, the way in which the press seem to be inordinately preoccupied with an utterly trivial aspect of the general election, at the expense of doing what the press is supposed to do. I mentioned this yesterday, in relation to the betting nonsense that has so gripped the press as compared to absence of any discussion of the national debt. 

I mean, yes sure, there may well have been the odd mention of it here and there over the years, but there hasn’t, to my recollection at least been the same outrage, the same demands for drastic improvements or the setting up of a public inquiry similar to that which emerged after the Post Office Horizon scandal.

That scandal had the massively good fortune to be so complicated as to provide the media with an excuse not to have reported on it for years, but not so complicated however that when the story finally broke, it could easily explained.

That is, after all, what the press is meant to do, ferret away at a story, reveal the truth and present it in a readily comprehensible way? That’s what Private Eye did for years. 

They’d run a story every few issues about either the latest attempt by Post Office executives to cover it up, to insist that the Horizon software was totally reliable and so it must’ve been the sub-postoffice managers hat were responsible for the missing monies. Or else to highlight he fact that Post Office could launch its own investigations and despite knowing full well that the Horizon system was at fault, prosecute sub-postoffice managers.

Now we know otherwise. Now we know that it represents the biggest single series of wrongful convictions in British legal history. Now the press can do can do a full Fred Goodwin on Paula Vennells, the boss of the Post Office during part of this whole sorry affair, and can therefore be the scapegoat upon which the public’s righteous anger can incorrectly directed.

Like ex -Sir Fred, she has been stripped of her gong and no longer has her C.B.E to keep her company, but much  more importantly, her successor and predecessors, some of whom have arguably more culpabity than her, have somehow remained largely out of the spotlight.

Like Adam Crozier, her immediate predecessor from 2003 -2010. During that time, the Post Office secured more than 400 convictions in England and Wales using what they knew to be flawed evidence. Despite this, and despite having trousered over £9.7m in pay and bonuses, there haven’t been the same calls for him to return any of it, like their have been for her.

But don’t blame it on the privatisation of the Post Office that allowed this happen or on the ‘light-touch’ regulation of the financial sector that facilitated the Northern Rock disaster. Blame Paula, blame Fred, blame it the boogie if it makes you happy, because the system works perfectly and the last thing anyone needs are too many people questioning in whose interest does the system actually work. 

And can a system that pays £120 millions a day on the interest of a national debt of nearly £2,660 billions really be said to be working? 

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As any readers of this blog will no doubt be aware, I am a deeply cynical person and getting mores all the time. In fact I don’t think that I’ve ever met a more cynical person than me. Although newspaper editors are currently having a good go.

Witness the ongoing media obsession with finding Jay Slater. I must confess to not being as especially interested in him so much as I am with why the media wants to tell us about him, how it was his first time abroad, when and where he went missing, the search…

Has everybody forgotten what happened mere days ago with Michael Mosley? In essentially the same circumstances? With probably the same outcome. 

To me, the main reason for their detailed coverage, however much they might bang on about bringing it to the publics attention, is so that when the inevitable bad news is finally revealed, they can then feed off the attention they created and sell more papers.

Is no-one else thinking about ‘Ace in the hole’? Another Billy Wilder classic from 1951 starring Kirk Douglas which has that as its central premise?

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If the media are not presently engaged in a dastardly plot to distract the electorate from the more serious concerns that this country faces, then their fixation on the supposed betting scandal is not to helping to dispel that notion.

The newspapers seemed to be positively obsessed with it and they imagined that the more they reported on it, the more the public would want know. And because they believe this to be so, they are able to convince themselves that they are acting in the public interest. All part of of the usual self-serving justifications that were trotted out by newspaper reporters and editors during the Leveson Inquiry into press standards, in fact

About how a free press, one that was unfettered by any concerns of legislative restrictions, regulatory oversight or some other form of governmental interference was an essential part of a functioning democracy. That only such a press would be to hold the powerful to account, be fearless in its pursuit of the truth and have the resources needed to mount a lengthy and expensive investigation to uncover it.

To listen to them you’d be forgiven for thinking that the press exposed a scandal comparable to the Watergate every few months. As opposed the inquiry having been set up in the wake of the revelation that a newspaper had hacked of the ‘phone of a dead girl, when everyone else, including the police, thought that she was just a missing one. It soon emerged that most newspapers were so fearless in their pursuit of the truth, that they were willing break the law to do it. Even Guardian, which broke the story, had hacked ‘phones.

Anyway, this betting nonsense. Is this really what the media thinks the public want to know about less than two weeks before a general election? Granted, the sums involved were indeed truly staggering. Staggeringly small. As the Daily Telegraph reported, suspicions were first raised when £2,700 was bet on the date of the election prior to it being announced.

Maybe there exists another scandal, hiding in plain sight so successfully that its hardly ever mentioned, that exposes that £2,700 bet as the utter irrelevance it is. One that I can’t remember any politician talking about during the last few years. 

The National debt is currently about £2,690 billions. How and why we’ve accrued this sum is a discussion to be argued about by others better qualified to do so. According to The Office for Budget Responsibility, the interest on the debt will cost some £89 billions this financial year alone.

But what does mean, in the real world where money is spent on paying bills, having a cheeky Nando’s  or going to the cinema? We are forever being assailed by claims that something might cost £x billions to do, or else that savings of £x billions are there to be made, but a billion is just a word to most people and as such, has no functional meaning.

So you’d think therefore that the press might just have an interest in trying to explain not just how and why the debt was accrued. But to also question the affordability of the various spending commitments, promised tax cuts and the other assorted financial unicorns, that all of the political party’s are making, when set against the backdrop in which last year saw 10% of all government spending on national debt interest payments – not the debt itself mind – the interest on it. Which is more than the combined government spending last year on defence, housing and the environment. Or more than the combined spend on law, order and transport.

To at least have a go, to try and live up to the grand claims they made about themselves at Leveson, to make a complicated subject less so. To act in the real public interest, and not the pantomime version of it that the betting irrelevance is. To hold both Plonker and Daddy Bear to account. How the former is going to fund an extra 40,000 NHS appointments a week as he claimed he would on the leaders debate on Thursday night, or for the latter give details about how his plans to clamp down on corporate tax avoidance to pay for better social care will generate anything other than hot air? To fucking well do their jobs and to do them well, not to confuse an embarrassing mistake with with a bona-fide scandal or to peddle tittle-tattle about nonentities.

And even if the national debt stopped growing, we’d still be handing over £120 millions a day in interest payments.

But hey that £2,700!  That’s shocking! And what about Taylor Swift and that selfie of hers with Son of Baldie and the young parasites?  Look over here, don’t look there…

The one abiding thought that I was left with after watching the ‘Question Time Leaders Special’ last night was that there was nothing even remotely special about it. 

No, tell a lie – which seems highly appropriate – not for the first time it made me realise that politicians hate having to answer questions from the public. Despite them all giving it large about how they welcome the chance to it, the truth is that they’d rather being doing something else, something that they at least have some control over.

The benefits of having a studio based interview with a journalist are many. Everyone involved is aware not only of their role in the proceedings, but also the role of everyone else too The politician knows that the journalist will ask them some difficult questions, but not too many, possibly because the broad range of topics to be discussed – and not discussed – will have been arranged in advance, but mainly because the journalist knows that their career prospects are at stake. 

Too combative, too adversarial and their once bright future will be dimmed, as requests for interviews will be denied and access to political events and contacts will dry up. By contrast, if their not combative enough, they’ll be seen as a soft touch, someone who politicians can ride roughshod over precisely because of them being such a soft touch and because of that, be happily interviewed by.

Why am I thinking about Julia Etch-a-sketch?

Anyway, last night we Fiona the Bruce hosting, doing quite good a job actually. Keeping all the politicians to answering the questions they’d been asked, and the not ones that they wished they’d been asked. Paraphrasing audience members sometimes rambling questions into concise English and demonstrating an impressive command of detail to both inform us and to challenge them

First off, we had Daddy Bear from the Goldilocks party. To me, the Goldilocks party being involved in this election are the equivalent of Scotland being at the Euro’s. Everyone is glad that they made the effort to get there, not least because their supporters always enliven proceedings, but no-one seriously rates their chances. But at least they had a go and that’s the main thing! 

At one point Daddy Bear claimed that he would build 300,000 homes were each year in government to help with the housing crisis and ease the pressures faced by first time buyers attempting to get on the property ladder.  Fantastic. 

Although less fantastic was any sense of him being aware of the problems those 300,000 homes bring with them. No allusion to where they’d built or changes to planning legislation to allow them to be built. And I know that I already mentioned this in relation to rape cases not going to trial but where is the capacity? Where are the necessary tradespeople needed to build going to come from? Are we as a country even providing enough apprenticeships and vocational training to achieve that ambition.

And even if all that were to be magically resolved overnight, in a not so Grimm fairy tale, what about the necessary infrastructure that those 600,000 would need, assuming 2 person occupancy of these houses And what happens when they have children?? What about the hospitals where those children are to be born, the schools they might go to, the roads upon which their parents will drive to get to access them?

He didn’t need to go into any great detail, not least because he didn’t have the time to explain how interconnected everything was and how one solution revealed more problems to be solved but regardless of that, the audience wasn’t buying it.

Much like they’re not buying affordable homes, not just because they’re unaffordable, but also because last year they made up less than quarter of all homes built. According to the government, 212,000 houses were built last year, of which 45,000 were supposedly affordable.

And, to no-ones surprise he was repeatedly challenged as to why anyone should trust the Goldilocks, given their craven abandonment of a manifesto commitment to abolish student tuition fees in 2010, after entering into a coalition with The Status Quo  Not only did he claim that the political realities of  government finances had rendered that pledge impractical – which means that he could easily do the same thing again with everything with everything he promises this time – he also refused to answer repeated questions from Fiona the Bruce as to whether or not he’d enter into another coalition. 

He was swerving so much that had he been driving, the police would’ve arrested him for drunk driving.

Although the best swerve of the night for me came when John Swindle, leader of the Tartan party was challenged over the waiting times in Scottish NHS hospitals, something that as part of the devolution agreement, he has responsibility for.  Wonderfully, he claimed that as many of those on the waiting list had complex problems, that that was reason for the waiting list problem and so essentially, it was their fault!

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Just a quick observation about this whole betting irrelevance 

I can’t understand why its become such a thing. A few people made bets on the date of the general election before it was announced. Using information only someone privy to Pravda’s innermost thoughts might have. Is that it?

Were they putting on large bets, maybe £5 or £10.000? Had they told their friends to rush out a put on multiple bets of £1,000 all over the South East? 

No. According to The Daily Telegraph, suspicions were raised when £2,7000 of bets were placed on one day, when previously the daily total was usually for £500.

The only people who think its a big deal are the media, who seem compelled to report endless guff about it, and then have the temerity to claim that its news because everyone is talking about it. Only because they fucking go on about it!

This is an election campaign. There are serious issues that need to be discussed. This is so not one of them.