the brilliantly leaping gazelle

The main problem I have with this whole ‘virtue’ signalling epidemic is the basic foundational assumption upon which all ‘virtue’ signalling is built on. Namely, is whatever is being portrayed as the ‘virtue’ actually a ‘virtue’ and if it isn’t, then how virtuous are the people who keep on telling us that it is?

Few things in recent months have better illustrated this than the than the ongoing brouhaha that passes for reasoned debate surrounding the two child benefit cap (TCBC). I know that it may appear that I’m inordinately fixated upon this topic, but to me it is a perfect embodiment of what can happen when groupthink, social media and ambition all conspire to elevate one issue above all others.  

Not that I’m suggesting that there’s a conspiracy, but there do seem to a lot of happy accidents that surround the TCBC, its supposed unfairness and calls for its repeal. By groupthink I mean the existence of a gradually evolving consensus around one particular issue, a consensus which is only arrived at only by allowing certain opinions and views to be expressed.

The various charities, think-thanks and activist groups who all demand that something be done. Who publish ‘important’ policy documents, all ‘shocking’ facts and ‘alarming’ statistics and who bolster the unassailable righteousness of their very existence by calling upon a legion of academics to provide some scholarly heft to their claims. Which are then turned into press releases, and because of a prevalent groupthink that the charities and academics have helped create, are massively amplified by a predisposed press.   

And if done well, this can lead to a slew of stories all appearing on the same day, all quoting the same headline grabbing facts, all featuring the same supposed ‘heart-wrenching’ testimonies and all quoting various politicians all saying the same thing. This happened only the other day, in yet another attempt of the British version of the Gaste e Eshrad to propagate the idea that scrapping the TCBC is a ‘virtue’. 

But is it a ‘virtue’? Or is indicating abhorrence of the TCBC merely one of many ways that newspapers and charities, academics and politicians, and people on social media and at dinner parties can all impress each other?  Is it an easy way for a politician to hitch their wagon to, a no-cost move that can enhance their career because of wilful mis-representation of the facts which if repeated loudly and often enough, quickly become the truth.?

This headline, typical of many that have appeared over recent months, and doubtless will continue to do so until a new virtue. needs to be signalled, graced  ‘Daily Mirror’ a few days ago.

’Mum-of-five surviving on leftovers due to devastating Tory child benefit rule

Rachel, from Sheffield, has five children with her partner aged from nine months old to nine years old.

She gets more than £3,400 a year in universal credit for each of her first two children. But due to the cap, she gets no financial benefits for her three younger children.

The cap – introduced by the Conservative Party in 2017 – prevents parents from claiming universal credit or child tax credit for a third child.’ 

This is true enough, it was introduced in April 2017, but it was announced in July 2015, so sorry Rachel, but if you and your partner can’t practice proper birth control, then how is that anyone else’s fault? 

This idea that having children is somehow such an inalienable right that any government should provide financial various supports for, is socially, politically and morally unaffordable. 

It is socially unaffordable because in believing that such a ‘virtue’ exists – which in this case it doesn’t – it transfers power away from our elected representatives and into the hands of a small coterie of unelected individuals and organisations. All of whom share an increasingly prescriptive notion of the way things should be done and this article is proof of this.

It gets its statistics from the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG), which is an example of this press releasing activist charity and think-thank sector I mentioned earlier. This narrative, so assiduously finessed by CPAG and others for dissemination to the wider public, is further bolstered by Professor Sir Michael Marmot, Director at the Institute of Health Equity University College London, who says the cap is “aimed at poor people” and “I don’t want public policy punishing people for having children,”.

It’s a strange equity that elevates the needs of the minority above the needs of the society in which they live. If people can’t do simple maths – announced 2015, implemented 2017 so no conception after July 2016 – again, whose fault is that? And what about the third child.? Why does their right to be born to parents who can offer them the best possible life chances somehow matter less than the imagined right to have children no matter what? Where’s the ‘virtue’ in that?

That’s what I mean when I suggest that its socially unaffordable. A groupthink made up of academia, the press, the charity sector and other actors within the social and cultural commentariat that only acts as an echo-chamber of itself, drives the ‘debate’ – such as it is – in one direction only.

It is morally unaffordable for those on benefits to have an expectation that the state will subsidise their reckless parenting and morally opportunist for others to suggest that it is. To present opposition to the TCBC as a virtue is as staggeringly obtuse as it is unforgivably self-serving. Because the corrollory of opposition to the TCBC is that the idea that such a measure should never be and essentially commits the state to an ever increasing spend in pursuit of misguided tolerance.Is that really what any society should be encouraging? I think not.

And it is also politically unaffordable because not only does it give undue influence to those members of the groupthink I mentioned previously – dissenting voices expressing contrary opinions are excluded from the groupthink – it also calls into question who exactly is deciding policy. If a government is so easily swayed into doing something because a tiny handful of charities and think tanks can adeptly use the press, academics and social media to demand that something be done, how is that democracy? 

Just because some people feel strongly about something, doesn’t make them right. It feeds into this bizarre idea that now permeates our culture of conformist absolutism. That there is only one correct way to see any issue and that any differing view is not just wrong, but believers of that wrongness should be publicly denounced and shamed.

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Mind you, the one ‘virtue’ that towers above all the other virtues is one that signifies support for the Palestinians in their war against Israel.

It is the single most defining ’virtue’ of the age, and by signalling that this is a ’virtue’ that one believes in, one also signals belief in other things that permit that this ‘virtue’ to be so considered. As numerous as they are contradictory, these are properly the subjects of other blog. But for now I want to draw your attention to one example of how this supposed ‘virtue’ is can be used to confer a diluted version of the same ‘virtue’ onto an opportunistic politician of no regard,  

‘Bournemouth Green councillor demands town drops twin link with Israeli city’ was a headline in ‘The Daily Telegraph’ last week.

‘Bournemouth should “de-twin” from an Israeli city in a bid to protect its “reputation” amid the ongoing war in Gaza, a Green Party councillor has said.

Joe Salmon put forward a motion for the seaside resort in Dorset to end its association with its sister Netanya in west central Israel, which has been twinned with Bournemouth since 1995.’

I was curious to discover what reputation it was he thought Bournemouth had that was worth protecting, so I had a quick shufti at the Bournemouth Daily Echo yesterday. 

‘Huge group descends into ‘fight’ by pier’, ‘Teen girl ‘sexually assaulted’ at seafront’ and ‘Bournemouth and Poole among worst 50 seaside towns for 2024 

The ‘Telegraph’ article added, ’ A spokesman for the Bournemouth Palestine Solidarity Movement said they will continue to campaign for Bournemouth to end its association with Israel.

Racism, anti-Semitism, apartheid, and genocide are not the principles on which the people of BCP stand.’ 

The self-important, self-righteous and self-serving attitude that this represents is indicative of a mindset that allows people who believe that there’s ‘virtue’ in being opposed to the right for Isreal to defend itself. And that being convinced by the certainty that this ‘virtue’ exists, one is also convinced that anyone holding a contrary opinion must be morally deficient.  Not only that, but the more that you manage to make this ‘virtue’ the reductive prism through which all things are judged and so loudly and so frequently declare this to be that it becomes almost a kind of situationist prank, the more of this kind of nonsense you’ll produce.

That of people of no consequence saying something of no consequence that will have no consequence. 

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There appeared a slew of stories in a number of newspapers recently, all on the same day,  all on the same subject and all, curiously enough, having the same opinion on it. 

If one were cynical, one might imagine that an enterprising charity might have drafted a press release written is such a way that when it came across an editors desk, all they had to was grab the nearest journalist, thrust the press release at them and bellow ‘Give me 800 words now!’

A press release that urged Plonker to do something, which in this case would involve him reversing a reversal. In July last year he said the wouldn’t scrap the two child benefit cap introduced by the Tories in 2017, but now that Labour is in power there are renewed calls upon on him to do so.

As the ‘Guardian’ put it ‘Pressure grows on Labour to scrap two-child benefit cap with 1.6m youngsters affected’, which omitted to point out that the pressure is coming from other newspapers. Newspapers which in turn seemed to have strongly influenced by the same press release.

Probably a press release from the Resolution Foundation and the Child Poverty Action Group, as they both feature prominently in stories that appeared in ‘The Daily Telegraph’, ‘The Guardian’, ‘The Independent’, ’The Daily Mirror’, and both the ‘Sky News’ and ‘BBC News’ websites. They all quote the same statistics, all of them either copy and paste passages of the press release into their article wholesale or change bits here and there and most quote one or more of the same politicians saying the same thing.

Here’s the new work and pensions secretary, Mint-Cake, “We will work to give every child the best start in life by delivering our manifesto commitment to implement an ambitious strategy to reduce child poverty.” Really? How ‘ambitious’ can any ‘strategy’ to reduce child poverty actually be if that ‘strategy’ lacks the ‘ambition’ to tackle the systemic and cultural forces that have created it. Namely, feckless parents and decades of successive governments subsidising the low wages paid to some of them by their employers.

 I mean, I understand how blaming the Tories for everything will be the default setting for Labour for the entirety of their time in government. All incoming governments do this, and whilst it might have some plausibility in other cases, a brief reminder of the facts of this one suggest otherwise.

Basically, introduced in April 2017 the cap prevents parents from claiming child tax credit or universal credit for any third or subsequent child born after that date. It wasn’t suddenly announced in the March of that year, but instead as part of the 2015 budget, with the implications made abundantly clear and with advance waring given. So as I see it, it isn’t really the government that is pushing children into poverty. If parents on benefits conceived a third child after July 2016 and choose not to abort it or put it up for adoption, well they’re to blame. Or am I missing something?

One of the most quoted statistics quoted in most of the articles was this one. ‘A total of 1.6 million children – equivalent to one in nine of all UK children – were affected by the policy last year, an increase of 100,000, the latest statistics show, while 59% of the 450,000 households hit had at least one parent in work.’

This underlines one of my points, how exactly is it the governments fault if the feckless feckers keep on being feckless? How is there an increase? How exactly can any of this be fairly held to be the governments fault? Well, in one way it kinda can. Employers know that they can get away with paying low wages to their employees because they know that government subsidies allow them to do this. 

What else are ‘Working Tax Credits’ other than a massive bung to employers? One way or another, the British state has been doing this since 1971, and whilst the names of the bung might change, a bung is still a bung. And because this bung is bunged in with other bungs and called Universal Credit, the exact cost of this bung is hard to work out. But last year, Universal Credit bung cost us is £80.9 billions.

So if Mint-Cake had said something along the lines of ‘Yes, I know it initially looks like a simple problem to solve, but it isn’t. We need a cross party consensus and long term commitment to ending the age of government bailouts to employers who pay low wages. The work on agreeing that consensus starts now. It won’t be easy. But the sooner we start, the sooner we get it finished.’ Then yes, she’d have a ‘strategy’ and yes, it’d have ambition.

But simply blaming the the Tories? Nah!

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Football is one of the greatest games in the world. It is. Any game that can be played at its simplest level by three players, two jumpers and one ball has a simplicity that transcends the current carnival of capitalism it has now become. The latest show ends tonight in Germany, but where there’s money there’ll always be people wanting to make it. Women’s football is either another advance for equality or just a cynical attempt to make even more money from the expiration of a previously untapped revenue steam.

I was in my school football team, not the 1st XI but the 2nd XI and the sheer joy of playing is something mere words can’t express. But soon after I stopped playing it, I realised that I could never be just a spectator, watching other people having the fun I wasn’t. It’d be like watching two people having sex,. Young, handsome and incredibly lithe people, not two wrinkles, obviously.

Hearing people discuss it is even worse. The detail that the television pundits go into is alarming. The analysis, the competing opinions and forensic discussion of the frankly irrelevant becomes mind numbing after a while. And where was a similar level of expertise to help make sense of the recent general election? 

Plonker got a largely free ride from the media about what exactly his plans were. There was no sustained examination about any of the promises he made, no proper scrutiny of what life under a Labour government would mean for the average Briton and no challenging him about the impact of pursuing a transition to Net Zero might have on the cost of living crisis.

Because watching 22 grown men kicking a ball about was more important, and in the first two weeks at least, over 10 hours of this irrelevance was broadcast a day.

I’m not sure which makes me angrier; the fact that broadcasters do this or the fact that the public doesn’t have any problem with them doing it

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Because if there had have been decades of proper scrutiny and analysis of the various political choices this country had been offered, then we’d possibly have a more politically aware public than we do now. 

One that has the both the skills and willingness to critically evaluate what they’re told. Not to be the bullshat. Certainly not a public that is easily distracted by television game-shows, cookery contests, property porn and anything with the word ‘celebrity’ in it. This creates a culture wherein politics is much rather left to politicians and all the public does is occasionally complain when things turn to shit. 

I mean a public that didn’t believe that simply lifting the two child benefit cap would do any good whatsoever. Apart from allowing Plonker and Mint-Cake to appear to be doing something to alleviate child poverty. Had we such a public, one used to knowing that everything is interconnected, one that is aware that not not only do the dots exist, the wherewithal to join them up and to be aware of the fact that some dots will always remain invisible, then this travesty could not happen.

Low paid jobs, zero hour contracts and the ‘gig’ economy can only happen when a system of government subsidies that allows employers to do this. The irony is that as the workers earn less, so the less tax they pay, which means that out of that reduced tax revenue the government picks up the tab. Meanwhile the very companies and corporations that benefit from these subsidies also benefits from a shockingly malleable tax system. So we’re fucked at both ends.

 But we want cheap food, we want next day delivery, we want shiny, we want easy answers and we want more Gary Hamas.

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I know that I can be less than complimentary about politicians, often casting doubt on them personally, the motives, policies and priorities of parties they represent. And the failures of them both to properly act in the best interests of those who did – and didn’t – vote for them. 

Given the new name under which subsequent posts will be tiled, ’34; 63 presents’ – highlighting as it does what I discern to be the most fundamental flaw in our ‘democratic ‘system, namely how it is that  34% of the votes somehow means 63% of seats – suggests that this will be a constant theme of this blog.

Well one of them anyway. Politics doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Just as much as politics embodies the best and worst in our society, that society is also partly responsible for the politics and  politicians it creates. Politicians were once children too. They didn’t just materialise as fully formed venal narcissists with low morals. 

That whole era of aggressive Thatcherism, of privatising as many of the publicly owned utilities as she could and of her being able to declare ‘that was no such thing as society’, ironically, could only happen in a society where such a politician, espousing such divisive politics, was repeatedly given power.

Sorry, went off one there.

So before I start with all of the scathing cynicism and the withering scorn that this blog will soon be full of, I just want to take a moment to acknowledge that there is one politician who I genuinely admire.

Kemi Badenock.

Not for her staunch defence of the rights of women – proper ones, the ones with vaginas and ovaries,  not penises and delusions – although in this day and age, its an almost heretical belief and admirable enough as that is, though, it isn’t that. In fact it hasn’t got anything to do with politics whatsoever, and is something that I only discovered by accident, when searching the internet, trying to find a speech that she’d made. 

As the BBC puts it,

‘Born in Wimbledon, south London, to parents of Nigerian origin, the 44-year-old grew up in the US and Nigeria, where her psychology professor mother had lecturing jobs.

She returned to the UK at the age of 16, and studied for her A-levels at a college in south London while working at a branch of McDonald’s.

After completing a degree in computer systems engineering at Sussex University, she developed a career as a systems analyst while working part-time to gain a second degree in Law from Birkbeck University’

That to me is way beyond impressive. 

A’ Levels, McAncne, two degrees and one of them from Birkbeck? I know exactly how difficult that is, because I got my politics degree there in 2002. On the first day of the course in 1998 there were nearly 60 students. Only 14 of us graduated and politics is a piece of piss compared to law. To do that and hold down a full-time job, its hard to put into words just how difficult that is. How focused and single minded one needs to be. How ruthless, selfish and indefatigable.

That’s why she has my respect, because I’ve walked in shoes she has, and I know how uncomfortable they can be. That’s why she alone will called by her name on this blog, and not as every other politician is treated. They deserve me using some arcane cultural reference known only to me, a sly reference to a long forgotten misdeed of theirs or just some peculiar bit of devilment on my part that I think they’re deserving of, to mock them.

She doesn’t deserve that. But what she does deserve massive respect for is never mentioning it, especially how in this day and age where politicians are always searching  to have an emotional backstory. Something that humanises them, makes them seem just like one of us – like they were on the fucking ‘X Factor’ and they were doing it for their nan who had died of cancer – or else some other thing that makes them ‘relatable’. 

I bet that you never knew that about her, but I bet you could tell me what Plonkers dad did for a living, couldn’t you? 

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It just occurred to me that Plonker is just like Willy Clinton, inasmuch as he tells his own version of the truth, according to what he understands the truth to be.

When Willy Clinton denied that had had ‘sexual relations’ with Monica Lewinsky, he was sort of telling the truth. I mean to the average person, if you get a blowjob off someone, then that someone uses a cigar to masturbate with and then you smoke that cigar as you cover her dress in hundreds and thousands, that’s sex. 

But that definition of sex that had been agreed by his lawyers and those wanting to impeach him allowed him the necessary wriggle room to claim that sex had never actually happened.  

That’s what Plonker is doing, not the cigar thing – he doesn’t seem that imaginative for one thing – but over Brexit. I recall him  just as the election campaign was nearing its close, saying that under Labour government Britain wouldn’t rejoin the E.U.

What he didn’t say however, was that Labour had been conducting secret talks with the EU about closer co-operation on a wide range of issues. Or that one of the first things that the new Foreign Secretary, OnTheLam would do, was to hold face to face talks with EU leaders to signal a reset in relations.

So whilst he wasn’t lying, neither was he being completely honest. Not for the first, and certainly not the last time , he was practising the political variant of Schrodinger’s cat. He had to keep his own party happy and not lie to the British people which he has done, although the British people have suffered the same indignity that befell Monica Lewinsky’s dress.

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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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