the brilliantly leaping gazelle

June 8, 2025

34:63 presents “Greta Thunberg.”

The best kind of virtue signalling is, of course, the kind that has minimal adverse consequences for you, but a multitude of positive ones. The most audaciously successful example of this is Greta Thunberg’s ‘school strike’, which somehow transformed her bunking off into some sort of noble act of protest. Quite why no-one called ‘bullshit’ on her little stunt, I can’t explain, but fair play to her, by her constantly banging on about how something has been exacerbated by political inertia, and that because of that, the action needed to combat it is as drastic as it is urgent, she has managed to get away with it.

Because if I’d have tried to get justify me bunking off school as something other than a test of how far I could push my luck with my parents, I’d have gotten more than a stern talking to. If I’d then constantly been on at them to change their lifestyles, to the extent that my mother had to give up on her career as an international opera singer because I’d been incessantly haranguing her about her flying to concerts, I doubt if I’d be eventually invited to address the United Nations or nominated three times for the Nobel peace prize, 

But because of the world we now live, one that places a disturbingly worrying amount of importance on positive media coverage, her bunking off has been rewarded with her being lauded as a something about that something. And because of this, she is given platforms upon which to berate pretty much everyone for not doing what she wants. And in an almost masochistic way, one that seems to have the bizarrely religious need for flagellation to it, the more she lambasts people, the more they seem to want it, She’s like a virtue signalling dominatrix.

And no virtue is more worthy to be signalled these days than support for the Palestinian people. Despite their plight being having as many complicated causes as the something she gained ‘celebrity for, that is the only similarity. Yes, people are starving, but so too are people in Yemen and the Sudan caught up in the middle of civil wars fought between disparate factions as only civil wars can be, but then again, their humanitarian crisis’ don’t lend themselves the kind of performative display of virtue that is so beloved by the media. She is on a boat, sailing towards Gaza, in an attempt to bring food and medical supplies to the people of Gaza, as I write this. She is also live-streaming the whole thing. Of course she is. After all, what’s the point of virtue signalling something, if no-one knows that your virtue signalling something?

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May 23, 2025

34:63 presents “Mr. Kobayashi.”

All of the chatter last week about the assisted dying bill was concerned with MP’s voting for an amendment to give health workers an ‘opt out’, and a slew of measures that had been added ostensibly as ‘safeguarding’ vulnerable persons, to protect them from coercion. 

Because of this, one might be forgiven for thinking that this was a fine example of MP’s putting ‘country before party’ and voting on principle, that the grubby business of party politics had been temporarily suspended in pursuit of some notion of a  higher moral obligation. 

You’d be wrong though.  

To understand why, first of all you need to question who exactly it is those MP’s were so keen to safeguard and then to ask yourself who are the vulnerable people at risk from coercion? It is never fully explained what safeguarding is, or what a vulnerable person is, is it? Not really. ‘Safeguarding’ and ‘vulnerable people’ have, in regard to having any meaning within the whole assisted dying debate are as meaningful as calling a trans-woman a woman.

Where is any there notion of safeguarding the public purse in all this, of putting economic probity first, of safeguarding all the other public services that would face ever more drastic cuts to help pay for an increasingly ageing population? According to the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR), whereas today 18% of the population is over the age of 65, by 2065 they predict it will be 26%. It gets worse because whilst 26% of people will be over 65, an additional 15% of them will be under 16. Thats nearly half of all the UK’s population not paying tax, but still expecting the state to provide for them. Granted, eventually the young might become taxpayers, but by then quite a lot of them them will be working in the kind of low-wage job that requires government bailouts – working tax credits, housing benefit and the like – to avoid even more government help.

It’s all a vicious circle, and part of the blame lies with the NHS. Yes the NHS, so beloved by, well everyone, being as it is an institution that occupies such a unique place in our collective psyche that a segment extolling it was included in the London 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony. Because all of its various health initiatives – to help people to stop smoking, improved detection leading to better survival rates for heart disease, cancers and other previously life ending conditions for example – have been too successful. 

So successful in fact, that of the 26% of the population that will be aged over 65 by 2065, the that the Office for National Statistics estimates that by 2045 there will be 3.1 million of them or 4.3% of the population will be older than 85. 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.

To misquote Mr Kobayashi in ‘The Usual Suspects’, the fact that they were unaware that they were committing fraud is no excuse.  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. Wasn’t that the deal with state pensions, that when they were of working age, the they tax paid then paid for pensioners pensions then?

The pension bill is only going to increase, whilst at the same time the umber of people paying that bill is decreasing. It is a state of affairs that is as unaffordable as it is unconscionable. Adult social care alone cost £26.9 billion in 2021/22, up 3.8% from 2020/21 and according to the OBR, pensions will account for 42% of the welfare budget this year, that’s £124 billion, the largest single expenditure – more than we spend on defence, transport and education combined. And those numbers are only going to get bigger.

Thats why the Assisted Dying Bill is hopefully a much needed first step towards state sponsored euthanasia. And just because people find something distasteful to even to contemplate, doesn’t make any the less urgent. If anything, the fact that people do find the subject of euthanasia, or assisted dying a topic they’d much rather avoid altogether is precisely the reason why it has become so urgent.

The government could offer pensioners upon retirement a deal, a lump sum equal to the value of their pension for 15 years – that’s the state sponsored bit – in return for a guaranteed undertaking for voluntary euthanasia on their part. 15 years seems about enough time for people to pit 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 corse they could, but that would mean an immediate termination of any governmental – local or central – responsibility for them. 

And of course the financial benefits to society would be worth it. In addition to the savings garnered from a reduced welfare budget, the savings to the NHS, and local authorities, if people knew what the deal was, then the money invested in private pensions – estimated to be £112 billion in 2021 by the Institute for Fiscal Studies – quite a bit of that might be ploughed back into the economy. It would also help the NHS. There’d also be a societal benefit. In the housing sector, as more stock became available, house prices and rents would fall. Employment too. There’d be a huge swathe of jobs that were no longer needed, thereby creating new employment opportunities

We urgently need our politicians to do the leading part of leadership, as opposed to them being constantly fixated on what the media or the public think and constantly aware of their ow career. Of course MP’s have a idea of themselves as being all kinds of wonderful to everyone – after all being an MP means they have to take part in a popularity contest every five years – but unfortunately for them, economic reality makes their ideals unaffordable. Its those ideals that are actually coercing millions into hardship, creating the vulnerable they seem so concerned with protecting and plunging the country state ever closer to civil unrest. Generational inequality is not something that can be ignored for much longer.

Tough choices should mean exactly that, because otherwise they’ll only get tougher.

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May 21, 2025

34:63 presents “The principal principle.”

The best kind of virtue signalling is of course the kind that has minimal adverse consequences for you, but a multitude of positive ones. The announcement of more sanctions against Israel, is but one example of this.

According to a report in ‘The Independent’ “Britain has issued fresh sanctions against Israel over its “morally unjustifiable” escalation of violence in Gaza, and demanded an end to its “cruel and indefensible” 11-week block on humanitarian aid.”

And what, exactly, do these sanctions consist of? Suspending trade talks with Israel, basically. Which of course leads one to ask exactly how much trade Britain does with Israel and then, how does this compare with other countries?

According to the governments own figures, ‘Total trade in goods and services (exports plus imports) between the UK and Israel was £5.8 billion in the four quarters to the end of Q4 2024.’ This made Israel our 44th largest trading partner. The 1st was of course the US, with a total value of over £314 billion.

So suspending trade talks, not the trade itself mind, might sound as if Britain plc is taking a stand, but it is nothing more than essentially an empty gesture. It might appear that Britain is taking a principled stance, because that is precisely what it is meant to do, to give the appearance of principle being enforced. Although if that principle boils down to nothing more minimising the threat of yet more candidates winning largely Muslim populated constituencies by standing on a pro-Gaza platform, appeasing disgruntled Labour MP’s, Owen Jones and assorted keyboard warriors and garnering positive media coverage into the bargain, then that principle isn’t that all that principled, is it?

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May 20, 2025

34:63 presents “Judas Iscariot.”

Much as it pains me to write this, I suspect that Farrago might be only honest politician in Britain. This bold assertion comes with add a few important caveats. The foremost one of these is that the usual standard of honesty as most people understand it, does’t seem to apply to to the world of politics. Boris’s Johnson’s entire political career bears this out. As his former Home Secretary Amber Rudd once put it “Boris well he’s the life and soul of the party, but he’s not the man you want driving you home at the end of the evening.”

But at least Boris tried to implement the will of the British people  after they voted for Brexit. This was despite the entire cultural and media elite being fervently opposed any expression of democracy that didn’t advance their interests, the judicial and parliamentary attempts to thwart it, and the relentless besmirching of those who’d dared to do make the elites nightmare a reality. The deal he got wasn’t perhaps the best deal he could’ve got, but it wasn’t as if the EU were minded to offer him one. They wanted to signal to other EU member states – the ones who had a high degree of Euro-scepticism among their electorate and were closely looking at how Britain fared – France, Italy  Austria, and The Netherlands – exactly how steep the price for leaving would be.

Fast forward two elections and five PM’s to yesterday and Plonkers so called ‘reset’ deal  with the EU. I’m not going to discuss it in any great detail and not just because I’m holiday as I write this, looking out at the sea and luxuriating in the good weather, but more importantly because it was’t a surprise, him never exactly being a massive supporter of Brexit.

After all, he campaigned for a second referendum, happy to ignore the democratic wishes of the majority of UK citizens when it suited him and his increasingly metropolitan outlook. By that I mean an outlook that wasn’t predicated upon prioritising the needs of the many, but instead the minority of people unhappy about the whole Brexit enterprise, people who thought of themselves as Europeans and not British.The ‘Youth Mobility Scheme’ bit of the deal amply demonstrates this.

Ostensibly a scheme to allow UK youth to work and study in Europe, in reality it serves as an encapsulation of his betrayal  of Brexit. Firstly, it is because only those children that have not just the necessary skills and qualifications needed to make that even a possibility, but also parents rich enough to make that possibility a reality. Parents who not only have encouraged their children learn a European language, but have inculcated in them a sense that this is but the restoration of an entitlement. So not the kind of parents who work in care homes, as mechanics or teaching assistants. 

Secondly, we have a population of around 60 millions, as compared to Europes total of nearer 450 millions. Can anyone see the problem here? In Britain we have a welfare system, one that’s struggling cope as it is, without even more demands placed upon it from EU citizens with a legal rights to it.

All this at a time when net migration is at historic highs, when the public is palpably crying out for control, when Reform UK gave Plonker fair warning as to the levels of discontent brewing in the country at the recent mayoral and council elections and he responded by seeming to take heed of their concerns, when in reality all he has done is make it worse. 

Thats why, much as I am am loathe to, I think that Farrago might be the most honest politician in Britain today. Don’t be thinking I’m in any way a fan of Farrago. I think he’s nothing more than a snake oil salesman, all smarm and the kind of bluster that most people mistake as plain speaking. But if you were to ask any British voter at anytime within the last 15 years or so what two things sprang to mind when they thought of him, those two things would be the EU and immigration (although to be fair, that’s because they were the only things he ever seemed to talk about.) So he hasn’t shifted so much as the electorate have moved closer to him, in part because the other political parties have have moved further away from them. 

So with that in mind, I’m going to rename Plonker ‘Stymied’ because that’s what he’s done to Brexit and as always, when I write about Brexit, I feel the need that to point out that I voted to remain

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May 18, 2025

34:63 presents “Yuval Raphael.”

If there’s one act that perfectly encapsulates the moral obscenity of the pro-palestinian ideology, then yesterdays attempt by two protesters to storm the stage during Israels performance in the Eurovision Song Contest is going to take some beating.

Yuval Raphael survived the 7 October 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas gunmen at the Nova music festival. She hid under a pile of dead bodies for eight hours until she was rescued. But apparently her trauma wasn’t sufficiently traumatic. So despite having survived one act of unimaginable horror by having to commit another, her ordeal continues.

The two protesters will ever know how that day changed her life, and how much bravery it takes for a Jew to stand on a stage outside of Israel and represent Israel. Because they don’t care, their warped ideology doesn’t allow for there being any Jewish victims. In their world, the only victims are the Palestinian ones and the only ‘genocide’ being committed is the one by Israel. The fact that Hamas’ founding charter explicitly and repeatedly calls for the killing of all Jews, with the ultimate aim being the eradification of Israel itself, is something else.

What that something else is, however, doesn’t much matter really. When one’s world-view is shaped by social media posts, reinforced by their friends groupthink and bolstered by dubious ‘facts’ and biased ‘news’, when the concept of ‘my truth’ becomes a thing, it does so at the expense of objective truth.

Of course, this means that the Chinese State Circus can perform around the world with impunity, despite widespread evidence of human rights abuses by the Chinese government and allegations of a genocide of the Uyghur population. Perish the thought that because Beijing has takes a hard line with protesters – even outside China – that this informs peoples thinking.

And as a result of which, we get two protesters thinking their deranged understanding of things trumps Yuval Raphael’s lived reality. Because of course, when it comes to Israel, it is only a Palestinians lived reality that has any value.

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May 16, 2025

34:63 presents “Count Arthur Strong.”

Why do some people imagine that just because their success in one field of human endeavour has afforded them some measure of celebrity, it somehow confers upon them some kind of greater a moral authority, one that the rest of us should take heed of? 

Gary Crisp, who looks uncannily like Count Arthur Strong without his hat, is a serial offender who it comes to this kind of thing and like Strong, he is a someone who thinks he’s more intelligent than he is and thus fits himself in hot water as a result. Unlike Strong however, this was all done for laughs and unlike Strong, he wasn’t cancelled by the BBC years ago. Resulting in a interview in yesterdays Daily Telegraph in which he gave his opinions on two of the most divisive issues of the day, Gaza and trans.

Quite why anyone care’s what he thinks about anything other than football, I’m not really too sure. It’d be like asking Orson Welles how to bake a cake. But we live in an age where people do and where ‘celebrities’ own ego and sense of self-importance convinces them that they do. We also live in an age in which the media love to give an opportunity for someone like Crisp to say something controversial, because that will ultimately generate more revenue for them. It’s such a mutually beneficial arrangement that its essentially a digital ‘reach around’ 

So Crisp can say, safe in the knowledge that he’s saying the right thing – right in the sense that it won’t harm his career – “I think if you’re silent on these issues, you’re almost complicit.” The problem for him though, is that by not staying silent on these issues he is complicit in revealing himself to be a mental pigmy.

“It’s beyond depraved, what they’re going through, unimaginable. I’ve got kids. They’re grown-up now, but every day people are losing their children, their brothers and sisters. I don’t know how the world thinks this is OK.” Does he not understand what happens in a war? Does  Does he not understand that Israel is surrounded by countries who wish it never existed, or that the founding charter of Hamas espouses jihad – holy war – until Israel is no more. 

“Obviously October 7 was awful, but it’s very important to know your history and to study the massacres that happened prior to this, many of them against the Palestinian people.” There it is, the but. The ‘but’ that somehow transforms anti-Semitism into a bastardized moral equivalence. Is Crisp an authority in Middle Eastern history or is he just a student at the University of Twitter?

The attack by Hamas wasn’t just ‘awful.  Being stuck in a traffic jam is awful. An undercooked meal is awful. Biting into a chocolate only to discover its coffee flavoured that’s awful.  To suggest that the massacre of 1,141 people, the worst single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, was ‘awful’ belies the sheer scale of its barbarity and his stupidity.

He is lives in a country where his stupidity has no cost, where his luxury beliefs are protected by democratic freedoms that the people of Gaza can only dream of. One where having different views won’t make you fearful of a knock on the door at dead of night, one where being gay isn’t seen as a crime, and in a time where one can earn an obscene amount of money by talking  about an irrelevance to adults with who have yet to fully grow up.

He is a highly distilled iteration of the same combination of presumed moral authority, self-importance and entitlement that saw a a load of people most people had never heard of write a letter to The Guardian last week expressing something with some others.

Crisp also has deep feelings for these others. “They’re some of the most persecuted on the planet, trans people. You’ve got to be very careful not to have bigoted views on that. I genuinely feel really badly for trans people. Imagine going through what they have to go through in life. Is there even any issue?”

Of course he thinks that. Once again, at no point in his life will he ever be be confronted with the reality of his luxury beliefs. No man will. No man will ever find women demanding access to mens toilets, no man will themselves losing against mediocre women in sporting competitions just as no man will ever see their identity turned into little more than performative wish fulfilment by deluded women.

Its precisely because he’s so removed from the consequences of his luxury beliefs that he can afford to hold them.   

What a Count.

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May 13, 2025

34:63 presents “Harold Macmillan.”

The news that was reported recently that president Donald Tangoed has ordered the US authorities to reopen and expand Alcatraz, the notorious former prison on an island off San Francisco Bay that has been closed for more than 60 years is inspired.

Firstly, if it is all part of his wider strategy of ‘flooding the zone’ – a strategy that involves issuing a torrent of executive orders, controversial statements, and the like with the aim of overwhelming the opposition and the media and creating confusion – its working. The media in America are now totally unsure of what news coming out of the White House is fake, true, or worse fake that becomes true because the media endlessly bang on about it and thus it gains popular support.

It’s like when I was younger and I was caught shoplifting. Nothing serious. But my parents went mad. So I flooded the zone, except back then it wasn’t a political strategy with stupid name, it was swerve after swerve. I grassed up my brother for smoking – he was then twelve – then accused my parents of both being hypocrites because they smoked and for good measure also grassed him up for helping himself from the drinks cabinet. I really hit the jackpot when I complained that as I didn’t get any pocket money, it was really their fault.

They were so angry at this, that the shoplifting was forgotten and the discussion became instead on how lucky I was compared to their own experience of childhood in rural Ireland. All walking to school barefoot, working on the farm, yada-yada. In much the way, Tangoed has done the same, albeit on a far grander scale, so his critics constantly find themselves in a state of utter confusion and exhaustion. 

From his issuing of an unusually high number of executive orders – including basing transgender girls compete in female only sports at in schools to pardoning the rioters who stormed the Capitol building – as well as him making a number of controversial statements – taking control of the Panama Canal and Greenland, renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, and turning Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”, the media perpetually confused. 

So maybe it is part of that strategy, to get the media all worked up about Alcatraz. But then again, maybe it isn’t, and if it isn’t, I think it’s a great idea. Why prisons are built in or near to populated areas has always baffled me, especially the high security ones, the ones that house the really mad or bad prisoners. That’s a crime in waiting, putting them near the law abiding public. No, its my belief that if certain individuals have committed a crime that so heinous that it breaks the social contract that exists between citizens and the state, then the state no longer has any obligation toward them. Some murderer’s, serial rapists, terrorists and paedophiles fall into that category.

The French had the right idea with Devils Island, an essentially uninhabited island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean where hardened criminals were shipped off to. It was less three meals a day than a endless quest for survival.    We have our own Devils Island. Well nearly. Gruinard Island is a small, oval-shaped island just off the coast in North West Scotland. In 1942, because it was uninhabited, it was used by the military to experiment with anthrax. Theoretically decontaminated in 1990, it is remains uninhabited. 

Why not just put the worst in society there? With no prospect of leaving. Food drops once a month – basic rations -, minimal accommodation and let them make the best of it.  Boats patrolling the waters around the island, 24hrs a day, armed guards with orders to shoot to wound anyone attempting to escape. Yes, without proper medical treatment they’d die, but proper medical treatment is to be found in hospitals, and hospitals are part of the society whose norms of behaviour they flouted. 

As a deterrent it’d be remarkably effective. 

Anyway, Tangoed controls the narrative, in a way that our glorious leader can only dream about. Plonker seems to be perpetually in fire-fighting mode, responding to things, rather than making those things happen. Already the news cycle – theirs and ours -has been forced to move on, covering the more serious business of dealing with the trade deals with Britain and Saudi, proposals to drastically cut the price of prescription drugs alongside the piffle surrounding Air Farce One. There’s also the ongoing brouhaha’s surrounding tariffs, dealing with Russia in his ongoing struggle to affect peace in Ukraine. 

By tomorrow though, or certainly by next week, there’ll be more things for the media to fret about, because that’s what they do. It isn’t so much ‘flooding the zone’, as creating the borders that allow there to be such a zone in the first place.

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May 6, 2025

34:63 presents “Graham Linehan”

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I saw in ‘The Guardian’ the other day that ‘More than 400 actors and film industry professionals have signed an open letter pledging “solidarity” with the trans, non-binary and intersex communities who have been affected by the recent supreme court ruling.’

Of course they did.

Why is it a such a uniquely actorly thing to do, to imagine that just because their success in one field of human endeavour has afforded them some measure of celebrity, it somehow confers upon them some kind of greater a moral authority, one that the rest of us should take heed of?  

The letter is quoted as saying,“We must now urgently work to ensure that our trans, non-binary, and intersex colleagues, collaborators and audiences are protected from discrimination and harassment in all areas of the industry – whether on set, in a production office, or at a cinema.”

A few things immediately spring to mind.

The first is that actors are by quite a wide margin the one group of people I’d expect to show solidarity with trans-women, for the simple reason that their entire working life is essentially pretending to be someone else. So the idea that by simply by saying they’re someone else, they they become that someone else, isn’t that outlandish to them as it might be to a say, a mechanic.

Additionally actors – pronounced as if John Gielgud was hamming up the word for all it was worth – are on a ceaseless quest for validation, and not just from themselves either. Those big awards ceremonies are nothing more than a giant narcissism circus with frocks and because the media fawn all over them – to be granted a red carpet interview or some other content clickbait – it perpetuates their sense of overblown entitlement.

Actors are forever banging on about the research they do before embarking on a role, often living the life of the character they are going to play, sometimes even undergoing bodily modification to better achieve ‘authenticity’. 

Robert de Niro is a good example of this – for his portrayal of Jake la Motta in ‘Raging Bull’, he trained for, and then fought in three professional matches. He then gained over 60 pounds – nearly 9 stones – to play the ageing La Motta. To better play Travis Bickle in ‘Taxi Driver’, he drove a taxi around New York for two weeks. We know this because de Niro himself told everyone. It’s become a benchmark for other actors to emulate.  Thankfully, he has ever played a serial killer.

Actors just love going all ‘method’, often staying in character for the duration of a films shoot, even when the cameras aren’t rolling, because of some ridiculous idea of ‘honesty’, ‘of needing to fully embrace the character’. How is this anything other than a very diluted version of a trans woman and his ‘lived reality’?    

So whilst the letter loftily proclaims ‘We believe the ruling undermines the lived reality and threatens the safety of trans, non-binary, and intersex people living in the UK.’, it ignores the ‘lived reality’ of actual women, their safety, their rights and freedoms. They can just shut up and quit their yapping about single-sex spaces. Female rights are all well and good, it seems, right up until men with delusions are adversely affected by women not wanting to share those rights. Then the rights of the majority of the UK population must be eroded to satisfy the nonsense of a minority of a minority. 

That is the key here. This isn’t some great civil rights movement, similar to the ones fought by African Americas in in 1960’s or by lesbians and gays in Britain in the 1980’s.Those battles were about gaining the rights enjoyed by everyone else, not about taking rights by reducing other peoples. 

But then actors enjoy a privileged position in an increasingly celebrity obsessed world. And just like the trans activists who expect their every whim to be unquestioningly granted, and get more than a bit stroppy when they’re not, so too actors imagine that their concerns should be everyone concerns.

Conversely, actors are only too happy to criticise others  who don’t share their same ‘moral’ worldview, feeling it not only their right but their duty to tell us how they feel and therefore, we should take heed of this and act accordingly. Robert de Niro was one of the many US actors who very vocally gushed glowing tributes to Mr Magoo when he retired from the 2024 presidential campaign and with nary a heartbeat transferred their support to Kabbalah Vibe.

Did her campaign the world of good did that. 

So frequently are actors given to this method of visible virtue are they that one can’t help but wonder if She Who Must Not Be Named has a point when she suggests that it is more to do with career prospects than anything else that motivates them to sign these sort of things.

Because I’ve yet to learn of a newsagent having her marriage collapse on her because of the constant harassment she was getting from other newsagents, the boycott of her shop by customers, refusal of suppliers to sell to her, for crisp, chocolate and sweet makers to publicly denounce her as someone they wanted no associate with, simply for expressing an opinion that others disagreed with.

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May 4, 2025

34:63 presets ” 1 Corinthians 13 : 11.”

Today is “Star Wars Day. 

Of course it is.

All because a load grown-ups who have’t fully adjusted to the fact their no longer children, think that when they says the date out loud, it reminds them of the line, ‘May the force be with you’. I know, I feel bad for even acknowledging it’s a thing. Don’t misunderstand me. ‘Star Wars ‘ was a great film. Was, not is, as Yoda might say.

I was 10 when I saw it and it was like nothing I’d ever seen. But then I was 10, and at 10 it doesn’t take much to excite a boy. Well maybe not in 2024 but in 1977? The main thing I remember about it though – apart from the bit near the end where the rebel ships attack the Death Star, which was easily the best part – was queuing up around the block beforehand and having to keep our coats on in the cinema because there was a heating strike.  

But quite why it has become some kind of revered cultural artefact, as opposed to the entertaining yet ephemeral piece of tat it was, is a constant source of bemusement to me. It has spawned sequels and prequels, standalone films set within its own universe and television shows. In fact the only truly innovative thing that ‘Star Wars’ ever did was to create  a lucrative world of merchandising opportunities, where all manner of ways to induce pester power from children to divorce parents from their money were dreamt up. 

Some of these children have never quite recovered from their childhood and even though they look like adults, are desperate to recreate it. But just like an addict nothing searching to recreate the feeling of their first hit, nothing will ever be as good as the first time. So despite being powerful studio heads, movie executives or other equally valuable members of society, they keep on churning out more of the same  in the mistaken belief it is has deeper meaning beyond simply funding their coke habit.

So of course today is ‘Star Wars Day’. 

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May 3, 2025

34:63 presents “Asterix”

I must confess to feeling slightly disappointed upon waking this morning to discover that the sky hadn’t fallen in. Because yesterday, the media were full of either grim pronouncements or jubilant celebrations about exactly what Reforms UK’s performance in Thursdays elections meant for the future of British politics.

Brexit, as it is for most things nowadays, was involved, being the catalyst that lay behind this wholly predictable, and indeed, widely predicted drubbing. Indeed, in all the coverage I’ve read, what is striking is just how much opinions are shaped by Brexit. In a tangential yet unremarked way, Brexit was but a symptom of a greater, more fundamental problem confronting democracy, not just in the UK, but elsewhere. One that moreover, has the capacity to fatally undermine it by using its own inherent flaws to achieve this, voter turnout, or more accurately, voter absence.

In all of the mayoral elections contested on Thursday, not one of them had a voter turnout of more than 34% and neither of the ones that elected Reform UK mayors managed even 30%. Why no media attention is being given to this problem is beyond me, especially as a little over a year ago the dangers were revealed to exist. 

Remember George Galloway’s campaign in the Rochdale by-election last year? Where he made it clear from the outset that he was targeting the Muslim community in Rochdale – 30% of its population – and instead of focusing on local or even national issues, but rather on Israel/Gaza? It was an act of effectively strategic masterstroke, resulting him getting 40% of all the votes cast, which sounds impressive, until you realise only 39.7% of voters actually bothered to. And then suddenly that 40% seems even less impressive, especially when you realise that that once impressive 40% translates into 12,335 actual votes.

This trick – targeting a specific community and focusing on an issue not directly related to their daily lives – was repeated a few months later at the 2024 general election. Whilst George Galloway wasn’t re-elected, five candidates were, all pandering to concerns of a minority but crucially, a minority who turned out to vote. Together with Jeremy Corblimey, they formed the Independent  Alliance and their ranks could easily have been increased to nine, because three candidates,  standing on a similar platform were narrowly defeated.

It isn’t that surprising that Labour is so quiet on this issue – low voter turnout – because it suited them very well at the 2024 general election. Despite the fact there was a load of guff in some of the media about how constituency boundary changes and the need for voter I.D would work against Labour, like so much political speculation, that didn’t happen. Voter turnout  was about 60%, and despite Labour getting a lower share of that, 34%, somehow they got 412 seats or 63% of them. 

Some awfully clever people have worked out that the you take into account the number that did vote for them, the number that didn’t and the number of people who could have voted but chose not to, combine all of that and only 20% of the UK electorate did so. Of course the media are predicting all manner of things, because that’s what the media do. Political forecasting is as good at predicting the future as reading tea-leaves, checking ones horoscope or listening to a clairvoyant.

Its much easier than them questioning why this keeps happening, why political parties have consistently failed to engage with voters the way seem all to happy to do with lobbyists. And by not doing this, they’re not only perpetuating the problem, they’re failing to do their job. Nearly as much as the politicians.

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