The Theory of Conspiracy

Of course there’s been only one news story this week and one which will keep running for the foreseeable future. Already the conspiracy theorists are doing what they do best; constructing imaginary pasts to support their fictitious forecast futures. I gather plagues of boils and worldwide financial meltdowns are still on the cards, as are the invisible hands of the Illuminati, the Rothschilds and George Soros. Oh what a tangled web and all that. How many conspiracy theorists does it take to screw in a light bulb? We may never know the truth...

Weird theories abound. Did you hear, for instance, that rocks are actually soft and squishy, but they tense up when we touch them? Or that The Rapture actually happened as foretold, but there were so few good people that no one noticed when they’d gone? Or maybe the world really did end at the millennium, but we haven't realized it yet because of some sneaky government cover up. I heard that the Village People were a covert operation by the US government to cheer everyone up during the recessions and oil crises of the 1970s. So what if you lost your job and have to stay at the YMCA? It's fun to stay at the YMCA!

Of course, when it comes to the history of the EU, conspiracy theories abound and Occam’s marvellous razor is tossed side as one after another competing explanation for every decision is ushered to centre stage, minutely examined, dissected then reassembled in a patchwork quilt of underhand deals, shady doings and downright madness. The Coudenhove-Kalergi Plan makes regular appearances, as do frequent references to the New World Order and the Bilderberg Group.

It’s enough to turn the heads of the impressionable and who doesn’t love a good, juicy plot to entertain the crowds? It’s as if a sizeable chunk of the population, eschewing religion – itself, distinctly dodgy under cross-examination – would rather live in a nationwide soap opera than admit to the dull mundanity that characterises most people’s lives and most real events. But, if you live by the sword there’s a chance you’ll die by the sword and same applies to conspiracy theorists. There’s always going to be a reckoning and one day, they say, you will have to meet your maker.

Two conspiracy theorists died and went to heaven. As they wait at the Pearly Gates they discuss the big conspiracies of their days on Earth. God beckons them to enter and bids them sit at his feet whereupon he explains: “Yes, Lee Harvey Oswald really did shoot Jack Kennedy, acting alone. And yes, in 1969 Neil Armstrong became the first human to walk on the moon. And it’s true; the World Trade Center’s twin towers were destroyed by a small group of muslim terrorists.” The conspiracy theorists looked at each other. One tapped his nose and said “I told you it goes all the way to the top.”

Cliff!

Well, I trust you all had a happy Brexit Day: 'Joyeux Brexite', as I like to say, full irony intended. Of course the day was never going to pass peacefully, a tactic that may have had more impact than the twitterwauling I came home to; sometimes it’s best to keep schtum. If you were attending a noisy street party in Brexit’s honour, or loudly toasting Good ol’ Nige down the pub then you did well to avoid the emergency water cannon action of the eternal party poopers of Remain.

But it would not be fair to let yesterday’s celebrations recede into folklore without taking a moment to thank all the people who brought it about and who are still doing their level best to make sure we don’t backtrack on the deal. The dedicated souls who have put themselves up for scrutiny with scarcely a thought for their safety or sanity. The brave soldiers for justice who openly declared their position in spite of the constant sniping from the opposition; who stood and continue to stand up for what they genuinely believe, despite the constant ridicule.

Yes, I’m talking about the bitter remoaners and their selfless dedication to reminding us just what it was we were really voting against. I’d like to say it was nothing personal but you know that isn’t true; as far as you lot are concerned it was highly personal – you made it that way: Telling me I was too stupid to vote. Saying I had insufficient information to cast a meaningful ballot. Insisting that to vote to leave, as I did, was unpatriotic, in direct defiance of the definition of patriotism.

But that wasn’t enough, was it? You wished me harm. You promised me harm. Daily, you spat threats in the direction of me and my family and every last person who has spent 40+ years under the yoke of your rabid devotion to the ‘progressive’ politics of Euroland. All dissent was quashed by the use of Newspeak, whereby the mildest objection to any imposition was met with accusations of racism and xenophobia. You claimed the minds of the young and moulded them to mimic your warped ideology and turned them against their parents and grandparents.

Not content with impugning our ability to come to sane conclusions you upped the threat level with your cliff edges and your abysses and your hyperbolic prophecies of doom. Look you said, look what you’re doing. Stop hitting yourselves, you bullied. And we stood there and took it all. But with every last blast of vituperation we hardened our resolve. Despite all that the massed, indoctrinated armies of the pro-EU camp still lost. So, thanks, remoaners, for daily reminding us exactly what it was that we voted against. Thanks for that, suckers.

Bye-eee!

If you think we Brexiteers are going to gloat for the rest of the week then rest assured, your wish is our command. But only that one wish, mind. Once we’ve got our breath back from laughing so hard we will be back on our guard, ready to resist as you mount yet more failed campaigns to subvert the process, until the scales fall from the eyes of even those who voted to remain. Was there any other news yesterday? *thinks* Nope. I can’t think of a single thing as broad as that 17.4 million-man grin. As for that cliff edge – look at all the Remain lemmings hurtling towards it.

Noodle Soup

It’s here! Happy Article 50 Day! So many days to celebrate: June 23^rd, June 24^th when we woke up to smell a distant scent of freedom on the breeze and now March 29^th, oh happy days! But wait, it’s only the start. Every day of the next couple of years, every step of the way, is going to be fought by the logical absurdity, the alphabet noodle soup, which is the left wing of politics.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, studying the history, taking odd – very odd – detours down various conspiracy streets and I’ve come to the conclusion, not surprisingly, that I’m right. Not just about everything, which is taken as read, but on the nominal right of that nominal dividing line... where the best of us live. Everybody knows what a lefty is, pretty much – we’ll get to that – but it gets rather difficult to define the right except insofar as you know one when you see one. With few exceptions ‘the right’ doesn’t really have factions as such but more atomises towards individual rights and responsibilities, with clusters based on the family molecule.

You pretty much know where you are when you are in the company of people who generally advocate a live and let live approach, tempered with a bit of common sense when it comes to how people live their lives. Don’t hurt others, don’t expect a free ride and if you fuck up, don’t expect others to always be there to dig you out, especially when it comes to money. The right is the broth, the clear uncomplicated matrix which supports all the elements of the soup. Which makes the left the noodles, the pearl barley, the lentils; all the diverse bits which don’t easily blend in but nevertheless provide texture and intrigue.

I’m not playing the tired old racist, sexist, ageist, homoislamophobic bigot, etc when I ponder the make-up of the anti-Brexit crowd. If we were to examine the represented interests among the visible remain campaigners I’m betting there would be a far greater than ‘normal’ representation of the following groups of strange bedfellows:

·         ‘Humanists’

·         The homeless

·         Superannuated hippies

·         The mentally challenged

·         Pissed-up students

·         NHS Party apparatchiks

·         NUT-affiliated teachers

·         ‘Philosophers’

·         The workshy (see above)

·         White people with dreadlocks...

Plus, of course, the assorted flotsam and jetsam of the LGBTQI++double-plus-plus-double-good  community; a minority actually made up of minorities. Clumps of coagulating oddness occasionally coalescing into sticky masses of less than flavoursome clag, refusing to meld into the whole soup and ruining the dish.

They talk of division, but the division is of their own making; splitting society into ever more nuanced special-interest groups; slicing the community cake thinner and thinner. And the thing that separates the world of standards and order and mutual respect and actual equal rights from the world of the left? They want the world they despise to pay for the world they imagine they want; a world of free-for-all and damn the expense, somebody else will pick up the tab.

Really? You're not helping...

But you know, from today they have the perfect opportunity to make amends for all the trouble they have caused, all the hurt they have engendered. If they want to participate in a world fit to bring their children into they could, instead of trying to sabotage Brexit, get behind it. Instead of being the gritty irritants that lodge between your teeth to irritate, they could do their bit to try and mix with the rest of the UK house soup. Think of Brexit as the dental floss that clears away all the crap.

Madness

Well the male feminists in EU-blue pussy hats were out in what they saw as a show of force in a pointless march on the capital at the weekend. And a lovely weekend it was for it. What were they marching for and did they achieve it? Don’t know and nope are the obvious answers, but one thing is for sure, it’s the same tired old turnout they get for anti-war marches, save the NHS marches and don’t you go blaming islam marches. While some are genuinely moved enough to demonstrate their opposition to the issue of the day, the hard-left core is made up of a resolute bunch of malcontents who could find fault with oxygen.

The natural age for pratting about with placards is late teens through to early twenties – the students are revolting we’d josh - and although there are some crusties out there, singing the slogans and re-living their similarly pointless CND heydays the thing that ties them all together is another preserve of youthful folly; trusting gullibility. Trusting in a narrative being fed to them by that same hard core of activists who are so convinced of their own righteousness they can actually ignore outright the self-evident realities of the world.

Realities such as who pays for all this freedom you enjoy? Who protects you when the exercise of your free speech forces on society pressures it didn’t ask for? And when it all comes down to it, what, really, are you protesting about? How many of the marchers were super-informed, high-intellect voters, in contrast to the ignorant racists you insist were the only people to vote to leave? I ask because from odd snippets of reportage I saw and heard, the arguments to remain in the EU seem to revolve around unrealistic (and unrealised) bounty within and hyped-up fears of what lies beyond.

Without irony the same old platitudes were trotted out about better together and how the EU, not NATO and national military expertise has kept peace. (Oh, except for Bosnia and now the skirmishes breaking out all over the battle-unready union.) For over forty years we have been a thorn in the side of the EU due to our uneasy aversion to being ruled over from afar; touché you may well reply. But on that basis the marchers ought to welcome Brexit; it will let the EU get on with arriving at its end goal all the sooner. Oh, except with one major net contributor down and an ever accelerating immigration-centred population crisis to fund that is unlikely to happen. So, what, they want to keep us shackled to the doomed hulk?

The truth is they don’t know what they want. And ironically, having accused we merry band of Brexiteers of being in thrall to a global conspiracy to lessen the significance of this island that they deem to be so insignificant already as to have no influence anyway it is nevertheless our departure that is causing the remainers on both sides of the Channel to lose their collective minds. As well as Juncker, Tusk, Verhofstadt and co doing their best pre-fight trash talk we had the unedifying spectacle of Alastair Campbell close to a full on breakdown on air on Good Morning Britain yesterday. It was joyous to behold.

You talkin' to me? I'm the only one here...

And Gina Miller’s veil has slipped as she revealed, as we all really knew, that blocking Brexit is her true motive. Add to this the collective wailings of Tim Farron, Anna Soubry, Michael Heseltine and the demented A C Grayling and it’s hard not to class them all as swivel-eyed loons. Not since the Tony Blackburn/Tessa Wyatt debacle have I witnessed such a public display of self-harm. But look out for tomorrow. We are in the throes of a mental health crisis according to, well, everybody on the radio this morning. Expect that crisis to deepen; if anything is going over a cliff it is the sanity of the Remoaners.

The Old Ones

Well, as expected, yesterday’s social media was a full-on anti-nazi fest with apologists shouting down the natural fears expressed by non-muslims everywhere. Celebrate the glories of multiculturalism, why, even the victims were diverse! Yes, get used to female genital mutilation, sharia, shitting in curries, slaughtering animals the Stone Age way and talking of stones... While we’re about it, say hi to the Notting Hill Stabbing Festival and end outmoded practices which identify as being English, such as rubbing along and making do and not randomly killing innocent bystanders. Welcome diversity and fuck you, the English.

We must come together, goes the rallying cry, apparently utterly unaware that the thin skin of ‘vibrancy’ hides a seething mass of incompatibility. But where do we start; is this the slippery slope to a, monocultural uniformity? You’d think the socialists would love all that though, wouldn’t you? Identical economic units in Mao suits with an even, grey pallor to match, breeding from an extra shallow gene pool. But we couldn’t turn the clock back even if we tried. We won’t rise up and expel the ‘other’ because, well, it just wouldn’t be British, would it.

Mind you, the concept of nationhood, despite its recent resurgence, is firmly in the cross hairs of the global socialist project and the flock of frisky spring lambs know that those flying the flags have only limited years left. Memories of former glories fade with each passing year and soon enough those horrible old people will die out and take their 'divisive' beliefs in fair play, winners and losers and accountability for their actions with them. But while there’s still breath in the body, we old gits struggle on.

To that end, it’s important to keep fit and two old fellas I know were out in the park the other day. The eighty-year old was resting on a bench, half way through his morning stroll when his 87-year old friend sat beside him. He’d just finished a two-mile run. The younger man said “How do you do that? I’m out of breath just tying my shoelaces these days. It makes me tired just watching you!” The 87-year old said, "Well, I start out with stretches and breathing exercise, but I also have a secret weapon... I eat Jewish rye bread every day.”

The younger man was intrigued and listened intently as his friend carried on. “It keeps your energy levels high and you'll have great stamina with the ladies, if you see know what I mean. I’m telling you, you'll feel like 40 again!” So, on the way home the 80-year-old stopped at the bakery. As he was looking around, the assistant asked if he needed any help. "Do you have any Jewish rye bread?” he enquired.

She indicated below the counter and said “Yes, we have a new batch in, freshly baked. Would you like some?” He smiled and said, “Could I have five loaves, please.” The shop assistant looked surprised and replied “My goodness, five loaves! By the time you get to the third one, it will be hard.” The old man looked at her and blinked in astonishment. He exclaimed, “I can't believe it. Everybody knows about this shit but me!”

London Falls?

What do you say about yesterday? Plenty of people, while the events were being headlined around the world - islamic style, out-of-the-blue vehicle attacks on innocent people and the stabbing of a policeman by a man with an islamic beard in the pattern of all the other recent atrocities perpetrated in the name of islam - were urging us not to jump to conclusions.

Then the usual concerns were voiced that islamic communities needed to be protected against reprisal attacks, or worse, harsh words. Lots of whining comments were raised in support of 'British muslims' and no doubt we will see victim support going out to those same communities while commentators take to the airwaves to explain how this is nothing to do with islam.

I have said it repeatedly, prompted by seeing the progressive, self-created ghettoisation of islamic communities from many decades ago. Then seeing the government-inflicted acceleration of utterly unwanted segregation caused by unchecked immigration from worthless countries; immigrants who come only to take and then to breed and impose their own culture above that of those they displace.

Parts of Britain are no longer British. Millions of the population have no love of this country and play no part in it. The longer it goes on the more secure they feel, the more entrenched. And as muslims gain ever more influence in public office there is a genuine sense of retreat in those who are supposed to protect us from harm. Even when their hate-preachers openly declare death to the west and the supremacy of islam by violent means, our governments stand helpless.

It is not enough to react to events we were powerless to prevent. It is time our leaders were grown up enough to question the fairy-tale invention of multiculturalism and realise that while some of you shining examples of human evolution are capable of denying the truth, the rest of us are too stupid to believe that lie. Diversity is not strength, it is weakness, the fracture lines running along cultural divides. And not everybody can hold two allegiances or more as equally important.

London, yesterday. This is islam.

So, once again, I conclude there really is no such thing as a 'British muslim'. You are a national of the country which houses, feeds and protects you and with which you identify, or you are a muslim who denounces all of that in favour of a primitive superstition which tells you to treat all others as dirt. It's time for some hard decisions to be made; are you with us, or against us? And if you don't speak out and leave your cult you make it absolutely clear which one it is.

Last blast

To hear the eulogies echoing through the chamber of righteousness where the lefties go to hear the correct, party-approved and handily sloganised opinions, Martin McGuinness was a saint. When news of his death was broadcast yesterday it came with a soothing blanket of platitudes about a ‘man of peace’, as if stopping being directly involved in violence was the same as renouncing it, expressing remorse and confessing his sins. Being dead does not balance the account, it just erases the slate.

From an English perspective, having grown up during some of the worst atrocities, the solution was always simple – let Ireland have the north and be done with it. But as always, things are never as simple as they ought to be. We say two wrongs don’t make a right but, tediously often, tit-for-tat attrition is the only way humans can ever really ‘negotiate’. Keep up the terror, wear each other out until eventually only extinction or a handshake is left as an option. Both sides losing is somehow more palatable than either side being able to claim victory.

It has to be the same in the Middle East for the non-combatants. As with all sectarian conflicts – sunni versus shia, catholic against protestant, Arabs and Jews, communist against capitalist and on and on; goodies versus baddies with external onlookers unable to distinguish which is which. Occasional events my prompt a short-lived sympathy for the apparently wronged side but soon the retaliatory action turns sympathy into a helpless shrug and both sides are damned. Martyrs to one cause are murderers to the other and all the while the circus is both fascinating and repulsive at the same time.

These age-old conflicts don’t get resolved, they just get older. IRA activity affected much of Britain, with nowhere safe from, at times, almost daily bomb threats. For those of us who saw it all happening from the comfort of our television screens it was with a feeling of helplessness; we were never part of the fight and could never really understand it. But the violence hasn’t gone away; across Europe and the Middle East there is another sectarian war being waged and we have already become accustomed to daily reports of atrocities in the name of another set of beliefs we don’t understand and want nothing to do with. McGuinness was nothing new.

Northern Ireland... or Aleppo?

I don’t wish his family anguish or grief. I certainly don’t wish them the agonies he caused others. I don’t have a black, hate-filled hole where a heart should be. I just have a normal, biological heart, which patiently pumps life through my body and is a metaphor for nothing. I feel no joy that he has died, no satisfaction that he was relatively young. I feel nothing except a tiny sadness that he existed at all. But if it hadn’t been him it would likely have been somebody else; he was nobody special. He’s gone. Let his passing be marked appropriately; bury the body and forget he ever existed.

Happy Birthday!

Theresa May names the day and what a day. John Major has of late resurrected himself – well nobody else was going to do it - as a contender for Remoaner-in-Chief, so it is apt that in recognition of the contribution he made to the momentous referendum decision, Article 50 is to be invoked and the intention to leave the EU made official on his 74^th birthday. Perfect. This could become a recurring theme: On July the 25^th, to coincide with Tim Farron’s 47^th, in a neat bit of age-mirroring, we could maybe enact some far-reaching anti-EU legislation. And perhaps to celebrate Matthew Parris’ 68^th the 7^th of August could be the day we decide to send everybody packing?

After nine months of sniping it will be a blessed relief to finally get the wheels in motion. Precisely three weeks later, on the 19^th of April, Gina Miller could raise a glass to celebrate her 52^nd and wish the process well; after all, it is completely in line with the parliamentary democratic process via which she tried so hard to derail it. I can see a whole year of deliciously ironic anniversaries ahead. On December the 9^th, two days after Anna Soubry Day, on which we could inaugurate the first annual EU flag burning ceremony, we could collectively bare our bottoms in the direction of Jean-Claude Juncker to remind him of his statement that no other countries would follow us out of the union.

This is, of course the same J C Juncker who in 2014 said, referring to the introduction of the Euro: “We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back.” He has never believed in trusting the people to decide, saying without any apparent shame that: “When it becomes serious, you have to lie.” Oh yes, Jean-Claude, we know. That’s why we know there will be others.

A date to remember!

In the white paper on Europe’s future, to be presented on the EU’s 60^th birthday at the Rome summit on Saturday, there is not on shred of doubt that the EU will persist and that the remaining 27 will somehow stay together, come hell or high Euro. In other words, when the facts don’t fit the narrative, carry on lying. If, as the people at Gatestone believe, there may not even be a union left worthy of the name in a decade all this is moot. As usual we’ll watch events unfold with interest. But get cracking on that bunting because soon it will be the 23^rd of June once more. An anniversary to really remember.

Two-minute Hate

After a week in which a long fought-for dream was reduced to rubble in just eighty minutes you would imagine England rugby followers would hate the Irish team for their outstanding performance. But that’s not how rugby fans roll. The Irish were roundly applauded and the losing side – for so long seemingly unbeatable, despite some very beatable starts – picked up their Calcutta Cup, their second Six Nations trophy in a row, their world-record-equalling eighteen straight wins – and went off for their bollocking from Eddie Jones. It may be more than a game, but in the end it really is just a game; no place for hate.

Hatred is such an extreme reaction to events, don’t you think? It’s an immature, teenage lashing-out, often against those who have only their best interests at heart. ‘Oh, I hate that!’ they say, when they really mean ‘that’s inconvenient’. True hate is a slow-cooked build-up of repressed animus, marinated for years and slowly brought to the simmer by repeated slights and prolonged ill-treatment. Hate is also personal, visceral. Countries don’t hate each other; one may fear the other nation, or even despise it, but hate is a tricky thing to control and has no place in civilised discourse.

Also, if your first recourse to show your disaffection is to use the word hate, where do you go after that? Don’t you hate exaggeration? Just as with all the ‘literally shaking right now’ tweets following the most insignificant of slights, it’s akin to putting all your cards on the table immediately following the deal. I ‘literally’ hate you, so there is literally no point in trying to discuss things with me; I am so far beyond reason and I hate you for putting me in that position. Hate is like slamming the door and stomping out... you look so much more foolish when you then have to go back and ask nicely for your car keys.

But I suppose hate does allow you to quickly segue into accusations of Nazism and thereby identify with the legions of brainwashed adolescents who believe anybody in a position of authority over them is, literally, Hitler. I find the best way to deal with being called a fascist is to smile sweetly and suggest I have to rush off to barbecue some babies, or gas some Jews. What’s sauce for the goose; at least it saves me getting into complex arguments where you have to find some bizarre middle ground before ‘agreeing to disagree’, which is, of course, mealy-mouthed code for ‘you are still wrong and I will go on believing I have won’.

A ready cleaving to the notion of hate also opens the door to the acceptance of more hyped-up hyperbole to further your incisive discourse. Instead of accepting that Trump and Brexit and Le Pen and Wilders are natural reactions to years and years of concerted left-wing attempts to browbeat people into behaving against their conservative instincts, idiots like Tim Farron have to leap to wild conspiracy theories about some New World Order to explain to themselves how they lost.

Bad losers, whose ‘progressive’ world view has been shown to fail, instead of accepting this and getting on with it are fomenting unrest. People like Farron, possibly in the sincere belief that they are right – which makes them dumb as well as dangerous – are going about, stirring up antipathy, encouraging others to believe themselves victims and take up cudgels against those who genuinely want a world for the many, not for the few. Don’t you just hate that?

A drop o' Scotch...

The Scottish press are having a field day around the prospect, or not, of holding a second referendum, so soon after the last one revealed the lengths the Scottish National Party will go to in order to alienate their fellow Jockanese. Theresa May has told Tsar Nicola to forget about petty politics and get on with managing her country’s public services which, by some accounts, fall well short of the milk and honey of the promised land of Caledonia. Having spat back the obligatory Braveheart-inspired soundbites, Nicola has decided she will not be found wanting, to which end she embarked on a tour of Scottish NHS hospitals.

At the Aberdeen Royal Infirmary she notices a sign on the outpatients’ clinic ‘The Great Escape’ and when she enquires is told “Ach, just a bit o’ fun. We name the departments after films. It brightens the place up and gives us a chuckle... and it helps to forget how underfunded we are, compared to the Sassenachs, ma’am.” Nicola is glad to hear a hint of animus towards their southern neighbours, Scotland, she informs the assembly of hangers-on, is tired of being the poor relation to England.

Next up, the Burns Unit (What Scottish hospital could be without one?) wittily named ‘Return of the Mummy’ where they tour the rows of heavily bandaged victims. It seems unusually crowded and Nicola asks why. “See, in England, where all the money is, they can afford central heating.” explains the nurse in charge. “Here, in poor wee Scotland, we have to rely more on open fires, so...” Further explanation is unnecessary; if Scotland only had the funding available to the English, went the argument, these dangerous practices could be avoided.

The tour continues: ‘Point Break’ where an elderly man is having a plaster cast applied to his arm. ‘True Grit’ where a young BMX rider is having his grazed leg carefully cleaned and dressed. ‘Gone with the Wind’, where gastric conditions are treated and the unsympathetically named ‘Cuckoo’s Nest’, the psychiatric unit. The doctor leading the entourage hurries on past the next ward without comment, but Nicola takes a peep inside. She is shocked; a male patient is masturbating furiously. "Oh my GOD!" she screams, “That's disgraceful! Why is he doing that?”

The doctor calmly explains: “I'm sorry you had to see that, but that man has a serious condition where his testicles rapidly fill with semen. If he doesn't do that at least five times a day, he would be in extreme pain and his testicles could easily rupture.” Mollified, she asks if there is any other, more seemly, way the condition could be treated. “Ah,” says the doctor, “if only we were in England, where they have all the money...” Nicola, purses her lips and allows the tour to continue.

Nurse!

As they pass quickly by the next room, they see a male patient lying back in bed while a nurse performs oral sex on him. Nicola gasps “Oh, my, GOD! D’y’see that?” she exclaims, “How in God’s name can THAT be justified?” The doctor, a little flustered, explains: “It’s the same condition as the last man you saw.” Nicola is undeterred and presses the point, “But how come he is getting.... THAT treatment?” The doctor points, sadly, to the sign above the door. ‘The English Patient’.

Storms and Teacups

I made a mistake at work. I made a mistake and for three whole months nobody noticed. Yesterday, somebody sort of noticed; they were confused, because they didn’t understand what they were looking at but, called in to help, I found it and fixed it... and then happily admitted that it was my fuck-up. Had I been a politician... or Katie Hopkins, I would have been pilloried on social media, tarred and feathered in the national press and hounded from my livelihood, the snapping jaws of angry commentators at my heels.

Humans make mistakes. It’s what we do; it’s actually how we get good at stuff. Everything is simultaneously both more simple and far more complex than it seems from the outside and it’s only by prototyping, failing and trying again that we have ever achieved anything. If at first and all that... Pretty much every minister, in every administration, from any party in any given year has fucked up. Given that they rarely get the chance to stay in office for long, so demanding are public expectations and so destructive a force is politics, that it is a wonder anybody manages to get good enough to achieve anything satisfactory at all.

So, Spreadsheet Phil’s fiscal calculus turns out, on examination, to be not to everybody’s taste. But what a circus has surrounded what has now been concluded was a failure to check what the party to which he belongs had committed to at the last general election. If that’s true – and it seems highly unlikely on the face of it – it was a fuck up, but then 2015 is an entire political era ago. So what? He has cancelled what was genuinely a pretty insignificant policy in order to quell a potential revolt at a time when a low-majority government needs the support of its back benches. The ‘optics’ may have been clumsily managed but it’s hardly the major political nightmare some people so desperately want it to be.

Labour MP Angela Rayner tweeted “Philip Hammond announces full U-turn on National Insurance hike for self-employed workers, the Tory budget continues to fall apart.” Which is somewhat odd as she is on record as having been spitting mad on behalf of the self-employed in her constituency when he announced the policy. Is this really the job of opposition? To boo and jeer when absolutely anything is announced by government and then to boo and jeer when, on further reflection, a proposal is rejected or reversed? We hate you for suggesting it and now we hate you for acting on our hate?

Storm still comin'...

Meanwhile in Holland, the governing party losing a few seats, but not as many as expected and the Freedom Party gaining a third more, but not as many as hoped is being portrayed in all the media as some form of rout for Geert Wilders. The focus shifts from Phil Hammond’s so-last-week affair to – in the view of the more lefty press – the utter defeat of the ‘far right’. Is it any wonder we get the politicians we do? Has nobody been noticing all the attention given to misinformation and ‘fake news’ and sheer, unadulterated, hyped-up bullshit that spews from the partisan press on all sides? As one storm subsides another gathers and every now and then comes a storm big enough to change everything. Brace yourselves.

What we wish for

A couple of days ago Andy Murray became just Scottish again. Soon, if Nicola Sturgeon’s dream comes true he may get the opportunity to adopt that specific nationality on a more permanent and exclusive basis. La Sturgeon is, of course, back on the Indie Trail. I wonder if she and Alex Salmond are operating as a tag team, with Wee Eck jostling the ropes waiting his turn to bound back in and take back the reins again. Meh. Scottish independence is a pipe dream, a personal vanity project and the Scottish National Party is a flash in the pan now it is abundantly clear what a snarling, spiteful, ankle-bitey wee beastie it is.

A shame, really, that they have resorted to biting the hand that feeds, given that the British Isles existed millennia before Scotland was even dreamed of and the Walter Scott, Rabbie Burns, shortbread tin illustration version of the Highlands, where about one in every thousand Scots live, is an even more recent invention. If the English yearning for independence from the EU can be accused of harking back to a green and pleasant land that never was, that accusation can apply doubly, trebly to the Scottish. We’ll get along just fine though, whatever back-to-the-future we both end up in.

On the subject of alternate futures – something that absolutely nobody can predict – I find it odd that so much of the anti-Brexit rhetoric pivots on the doom and gloom that lies ahead. One of the latest ‘threats’ I heard was that we ‘could’ all be £2000 poorer following Brexit. So what, unless I win the lottery tonight I ‘could’ be £millions poorer by tomorrow. Of course, equally, I might actually win the lottery and still end up only a ‘free lucky dip’ to the good. The future is just a sea of ‘what-ifs’ but what it certainly isn’t is pre-ordained. The future is malleable; like a streetwalker it promises to be what you want it to be... as long as what you want is an expensive disappointment.

I may not know what lies ahead for me, but I do know that a lot of it is up to me. I could drop dead of a heart attack tomorrow, that’s true, but if I choose to make some sensible lifestyle decisions and live an actively I could be around for, oooh, months to come. Continuing that analogy, some remainers seem determined that the future is going to be bleak, as if they have chosen to give in and subsist from now on deep-fried brown food, cigarettes, booze and extreme indolence; they would be gutted if they survived into their eighties, but at least if they do there’s a fair chance they could cripple themselves into type 2 diabetes, blindness and gout... so that’ll learn yah, you ignorant Brexiteers.

But, while we’re predicting the unpredictable, a good rule of thumb is to extrapolate from the current direction of travel. And that extrapolation always takes us to a future of increasing costs with reducing benefits. It foretells a world in which only the best-educated work profitably, alongside state-subsidised, low paid, migrant armies, while the indigenous unemployed languish and become agitated. In the next few years the countries of the EU will elect more hard-line administrations, reintroduce border controls, pass new labour laws to favour nationals and increasingly defy the Polit-Euro.

More referenda, more net contributors opting to leave, more demands for bailouts from net recipients until eventually the only workable thing left of the European Union is a vague, sort-of free-trade area, mingled with unilateral protectionist policies... with an independent Scotland still begging to join. Excuse me for preferring to argue for an uncertain but optimistic unknown future, rather than hankering for more of what we know only too well.

On the Eve of A50?

Project Fear was defeated but, undeterred, its big brother Project Craven Cowardice is back and in full force as the weeping, garment-rending alliance gathers its troops and mounts its most pathetic attempts yet to continue the failed campaign to keep Britain as much in the EU as possible. Claiming to respect the vote whilst simultaneously insisting that those who voted were poor-quality, low-information ‘populists’ is a mealy mouthed hypocrisy that effectively states, “We didn’t really lose; we’re still better than you are, the UK needs the EU and we will bring this country to its knees to prove it.”

These oh-so-clever people believe there is such a thing as ‘EU funding’ which, to mere simpletons like me just looks like a re-labelling of the portion of our fees that we are graciously given back in the guise of largesse. And they get to tell us how to spend it, which, if you are stupid as I am, appears as if we are effectively paying for pro-EU propaganda; the propaganda that has worked so successfully... on the high-information voters. It doesn’t work on us because we are too unintelligent to ever be able to understand the fiscal genius by which 2 + 2 equals 5.

We have not the wit to comprehend how giving somebody back ten times in benefits what they pay in direct taxation can be portrayed as a vital contribution to the economy. Nor how by depressing wages, increasing financial dependence on the state and flooding the country with uncontrolled, unrecorded and unwanted immigration and the social tensions it brings, we are somehow participating in a wonderful enrichment of our culture. We simply cannot process the received wisdom of our betters, by which diversity is an unalloyed good, against which no voice may be raised, even while throughout Europe capital cities burn as multiculturalism reaches critical mass and spontaneously combusts.

During original Project Fear the high-information minority, the informed elites, ostentatiously flaunted the greatest of their gifts – clairvoyance. Were we to vote to leave, even that simple decision would bring about the end of days in many forms.  It must be somewhat disappointing for those great and good seers, that we have not experienced the predicted plagues, emergency budgets, financial meltdowns and the breakdown of society as jackbooted brownshirts set lynch-mobs on the innocent victims of the vote.

Leaping off the cliff edge into the unknown...

For those who were gulled into voting Remain, rather than voting with their conscience, or with their heart; persuaded that by doing so they were securing the future of their country against the rise of the right and the penury of being a third rank nation, it must also be a big disappointment. Would they have succumbed to Project Fear if they had realised that in doing so they would be associated with peddlers of anti-patriotic sneering arrogance and disdain? Would they have voted to Remain if they had known how their pessimism would be used to fuel hatred of the majority who voted the other way? It’s almost as if they didn’t really know what they were voting for...

Are you being served?

Earlier this week it was International Women’s Day, or some such title. I don’t know really, I wasn’t paying much attention. But, apparently, some of the more ardent defenders of the supremacy of wimminkind were staging some sort of strike; a day without women. Again, I was only half listening, mea culpa. I find, as a lot of men do, that once the pretty young things start to tell you how their day went the sound goes all sort of fuzzy and... oh, look, squirrel!

Anyway, I do hope it all went well for them. And I hope they get all the things they desire because I know how acquisitive they can be. They say with men the race is won by the one who dies with the most toys, whereas women don’t stop at mere toys; they want other fripperies as well, for reasons we men have never been able to figure out. I say ‘never been able’ but really I’m not sure any of us have ever actually bothered. See, men have always been far too simple to understand the needs of womankind... or too lazy, I forget which.

Luckily, in an effort to solve the eternal problem of satisfying the fairer sex an enterprising businessman has seen a gap in the market and set up The Husband Store where the ladies can shop for their ideal mate without suffering the indignities of the dating game. Just off Piccadilly the gleaming storefront announces to all and sundry that it is open for business, women only. But there are some rules as to how the business operates. They read as follows.

‘You may visit this store ONLY ONCE! There are six floors and the value of the products on offer increases as the shopper ascends each storey. The shopper may choose any item from a particular floor, or may choose to go up to the next floor, but cannot go back down except to exit the building.’

Seems a bit of a kerfuffle to me, but anyway, intrigued I asked a female colleague to investigate. She reported back, thus. Each floor has a large sign advertising its wares. The sign on the ground floor reads:

Ground Floor – These men Have Jobs.

She carried on upwards...

First Floor - These men Have Jobs and Love Children.
“That was nice,” she said, “but I wanted more.” Next up:

Second Floor - These men Have Jobs, Love Children, and are Handsome.

More...

Third Floor - These men Have Jobs, Love Children, are Drop-dead Gorgeous and Help With the Housework

Fourth Floor - These men Have Jobs, Love Children, are Drop-dead Gorgeous,

Help with the Housework, and Have a Strong Romantic Streak.

She was almost overwhelmed at the thought and was sorely tempted, but in the interests of research - as she put it - she carried on up. The next sign said:

Fifth Floor - You are visitor 31,456,012 to this floor. There are no men on this floor. This floor exists solely as proof that women are impossible to please. Thank you for shopping at the Husband Store.

The best shopping centres have a creche

To avoid any charge of gender bias and in the interests of equality the store's owner opened a New Wives Emporium just across the street with exactly the same rules. The ground floor has wives who love sex. The first floor has wives who love sex, have money and like beer. The second, third, fourth and fifth floors have never been visited.

Strong enough for you?

“Tax cuts for the rich!” goes the familiar refrain. It is Labour’s only response to a budget that had to be. It has been their response to every budget that has not been their own. What would Labour do, then? Why, they would create a workers utopia where everybody wins. All of which makes it decidedly odd that they never thought to do this during their thirteen years in government. Possibly their last period of power for a generation because apart from a few diehards and a clutch of young fools, people aren’t buying it any more.

“But Labour cares!” they insist, not like those nasty Tories... who you voted for... again. (Isn’t it curious how, whenever the left loses the argument, the voters didn’t know what they were voting for?) Of course the caring answer is to take even more of people’s hard-earned cash and give it to others who haven’t worked as hard. When leftist governments are broke it’s the workers they come for, every time, despite their rhetoric in opposition. Capitalists are evil until the socialists want their money and the most accessible capitalists are ordinary people, trying to get on in life; the fat cats they like to demonise are usually well out of reach.

As for the ‘attack on working people’ portrayed in the popular press, the increase in National Insurance contributions for the self-employed to near-parity with the rest of us is practicably the embodiment of the very fairness principle which Labour claim to espouse. Anyway, given that a huge proportion of the self-employed – I’ve been there – ‘forget’ to declare every scrap of income and over-claim business expenses as a matter of course, any actual rise will be absorbed by the normal process of ‘adjusting’ accounts to suit how much tax they want to pay. To insist otherwise is wilful blindness to reality.

Throughout my life I have been bemused by the newspaper treatment of budgets. I have never known a gasp-inducing, life or death budget; most people shrug, assume it will make them slightly worse off, then carry on keeping their own treadmills turning. But see the press and the words ‘fury’ and ‘unleashed’ and ‘cruel’ and ‘heartless’ are liberally sprinkled throughout the tabloids with only slightly more sober reportage employed in the serious papers. Most of the people, most of the time, don’t run their lives on the basis of being a few quid – and it is a few - up or down over the course of a year. Cumulatively, yes, there may be a gradual increase in tax take from NI as more people go self-employed, but individually, meh... 

What is far more important it how the government approaches Brexit and beyond and there are far more serious issues than the pound in your pocket. If we can get past the negativity of the persistent talking down of our prospects by remainers-in-denial it should be possible to imagine a positive future which is entirely within our control. Trade will sort itself out – profit-seekers always find a way – what is more important is how we use the ability to govern ourselves again. Post-Brexit, we really can become stronger, in more ways than money.

Strong enough to care properly for our genuinely weak and sick and elderly. Strong enough to resist the mindless pull of ever greater diversity. Strong enough to tolerate the multiculturalism we already have, but also to tame it; turn it British and dial down the ‘vibrancy’. Strong enough to reform education by selecting and improving and giving youngsters the tools to flourish. Strong enough to properly punish crime but offer genuine redemption and rehabilitation.

Time to crack on with it...

Labour doesn’t want any of this, no matter what they say; without dissent they have no purpose. In a day or two the budget will be forgotten, as it always is, by the vast majority of the population. It’s really not that important; we have far greater challenges ahead and it is about time we got on with tackling them. 

You reckon?

There is something fundamental about humans and how they function. Competition. It’s how we became the dominant species that some of us belong to and why we continue to evolve along so much more than merely biological pathways. One troupe of chimps is pretty much like another, one ants’ nest near identical to all the rest. But humans, we practically speciate at will; we try things out, we adopt different solutions until some groups become convivially incompatible with others, making breeding practically impossible. Of course, some of these socio-evolutionary forks lead to dead ends and the extinction of the branch.

Take left and right, for example. Right generally means conservative, or sticking to tradition while left means ‘progressive', unhappy with the status quo and trying new ways of dividing society. But while new buds can look exciting and vibrant and fresh in the springtime, they can also wither and die. Conservatism remains, however, because it is the trunk of the tree, the super-highway responsible for fast-tracking us to our current supremacy. Conservatism is where we retreat to when the adventure sours, because it works.

For some years western societies have been experimenting with an oddly inhuman idea; equality. Under this doctrine it is dangerous heresy to suggest that any one person has status above another. Heaven forfend, sayeth The Left, that any man should consider his opinion to be weightier than the rest. One man, one vote and the combined mass of all these equal expressions of desire shall be evaluated and let the majority decision hold sway. And yea there was a great consultation among all these millions of equal people... after which it was decided that the few hundreds in the House of Lords should have the power to overrule the demos.

‘Parliamentary Democracy’ they repeat, as if they genuinely don’t understand why those of the conservative bloc no longer wish to support the cul-de-sac that the EU and so-called progressive thought represents. Having swamped our formerly successful nations with unsustainable difference and demanded preferential treatment for the waifs and strays and undesirables; having elevated criminals to special needs, victim status and denigrated the working backbone of society; in the face of the palpable failure of this dead branch of social experiment, still they demand to be suckled by the teat of the taxpayer.

Down the EU’s evolutionary expedition is a form of equality in which a Britain has sunk from first place – a long time ago – to 27^th in mathematics. Where attempts to bring back grammar schools is not greeted with an enthusiasm for improvement but derided as a throwback. Where the largest empire the world has ever seen has become a mere province of a sclerotic and failing administration. And all due to a misguided buying into an unsustainable ideal where all must win and none may fail. Even language has been conscripted to maintain this illusion.

A Lord contemplates his future...

But we don’t want equality, equality is neither normal nor desirable; we need to have both winners and losers, the way nature intended. We want the power and the right to invoke selection, competition and triumph, which necessarily means some will fail. This is the natural order. They messed with it and will now reap what they sowed; the clamour to abolish the House ofLords has never been greater and with last night’s vote they lost any respect they had as a reforming house by blatantly crippling the most straightforward of bills. When Britain leaves the EU – properly leaves it – there is going to be a reckoning.

It's Them Again

Obviously the Daily Express only reports fake news – a convenient dismissal of any inconvenient facts - but to those of us who have been baffled by how anybody taking benefits is contributing to the exchequer, this report makes complete sense. The story is a year old but it seems to have had little serious scrutiny and the mantra it exposes as false – that immigrants are a net benefit to the economy – has been heard again recently as part of the what-do-we-do-about-those-already-here debate. Yes, it ignores the productivity part of the equation, but if indigenous Brits are being undercut and displaced and not being trained, they become casualties of mass immigration, perpetually unemployable. How is that helping?

The woman in the BBC Question Time audience last week who pleaded “Who will serve our coffee at Pret?” (post-Brexit) was rightly derided for her naivety and narrow focus, but to her, those concerns were real. That smiling barista may be lovely and vibrant and diverse, with an exotic accent and a certain Italian charm; the ladies of a certain age no doubt thrill as they order their organic infusions from Antonio. But for every Latino lothario working for minimum wage in the service industry, there is a British youngster languishing in unemployment, denied the opportunity to develop life skills and a work ethos. This is not a problem that is going away.

Instead of playing ping-pong with policy, instead of simply pointing at the other side and blaming them we should leave aside the faux war between ideology and reality and we should be asking why is it that the British are not in those jobs? Pret a Manger are not alone in having a long standing policy of almost entirely recruiting foreigners – yes they are foreigners, no matter how much you want that word to mean something it doesn’t. East Anglian farm-labour gangs are often exclusively from Eastern Europe and many factories are staffed entirely by non-British workers.

Uncontrolled mass movement of labour, while being a delight to the coffee house set and the employers of au-pairs and cleaners is just one piece in the jigsaw of neglect for the British. Depressed wages push those in work into welfare dependency in a deliberately engineered move by the last Labour government. Tax credits are the CDOs of the benefit system – paying top-up wages from a reducing tax-take and forever chasing new Ponzi contributors in the form of more low-paid workers from abroad. Consumer demand up, average spending power down. Madness.

Free movement of capital allows large scale employers to site their operations, at a whim, wherever suits their short-term duties to their shareholders. Great for business, lousy for stability, job security, training and development. Many British youngsters, outside the genuinely university-worthy minority are growing up with little or no expectation of a stable wage and everybody knows what work the devil finds for idle hands.

Free movement of goods lets the UK car industry, for instance, import raw materials for production of basic parts, export them for assembly into more complex parts, re-import them for the manufacture of larger modules, re-export them for the production of vehicles which are then imported for sale. Does any of this strike you as efficient? And yet none of this kind of thing seems to come in for any real examination. Instead, when it is suggested we can contain and control these various economic supply chains nationally the abuse flows freely.

Education, training, citizenship... national belief; all have been allowed to fail, sacrificed on the altar of multiculturalism which has only even been the dream of bien pensant elites and their unthinking acolytes who, quite frankly, feel they are better than the rest of us. A prime example of this is Matthew Parris who feels empowered to gloat derisively as he expresses a desire to witness self-inflicted Brexit misery for the masses who dared to hope.

It really is as simple as them against us and ‘them’ are not prepared to examine the flaws in the system that ‘we’ are affected by. So it’s little wonder that that all the simmering resentment has finally boiled over and yet, no matter the rhetoric flowing down from above, it’s not the immigrants we despise, but those who put the British worker in competition – some would say conflict - with them.  The British are as they always were – phlegmatic, pragmatic, stoic and true – it is the establishment who have painted us otherwise. 

Austerity is back

Some people are never satisfied – take the lords and their never ending bickering over whether Brexit means Brexit or not... And Gina Miller who, having subverted the whole process is now bitching because the House of Commons is unwilling to play her game. Meanwhile, over in Brussels, Jean-Claude Juncker is having his own moment of madness by trying to pretend he genuinely wants meaningful EU reform, as many millions wish, while insisting simultaneously that continuing on the same path toward further integration is the only way forward.

You’d think by now that somebody bigger might have come along to knock all their heads together, but over in USA-Land, the same kind of non-arguments are being pursued, with rumours that Barry Obama is heading up a stop-Trump coalition. And all the while the uncertainties are making the money men richer while raiding the prospects of everybody else. The world just isn’t rigged in favour of the honest little man, it never was. But the power is in the hands of all of us to make a difference.

After ten years of top-down imposed austerity (so-called) I see little evidence of belt-tightening by the Richard Bransons of this planet. But they aren’t the problem; were the wealth creators to pay no tax at all they would still be distributing billions in wages, which is what actually runs the entire economy. Labour’s ridiculous posturing over rich men’s tax affairs hides a simple truth; they have no answer and can’t face the naked truth that we have lived beyond our means for years.

Thrift, as a virtue is a concept from a world long gone, although it is still survives in a few pockets of consciousness and indeed, right here in the UK – what is left of it – is possibly the world’s foremost exemplar of the noble principle. Not for nothing has the interrogative “You’ll have had yer tea?” passed into folklore as a distillation of Scottish parsimony. Now, at a time when the Scots especially may need to consider going without, it’s a paradigm we might all do well to heed.

Al of which reminds me of an incident, not so very many years ago, when a soldier in the full ceremonial uniform of the Black Watch strode into a Glasgow chemist’s shop. He approached the counter, asked to see a male pharmacist then very carefully opened his sporran and took out a neatly folded cotton handkerchief. Inside this a smaller, silk handkerchief was revealed, which he then proceed to likewise unfold. In there lay a small square of tissue paper, inside which was a condom.

The soldier took out the condom and gently placed it for the pharmacist to inspect. The condom had a number of patches on it, which the chemist noticed immediately. He took out a magnifying glass and examined it more closely. The soldier cleared his throat and asked.

“How much to repair it?”

"Sixty pence," said the pharmacist.

“How much for a new one?”

“A poond.”

The soldier painstakingly folded the condom into the tissue, wrapped it in the silk square, then folded it carefully into the cotton handkerchief replaced it in his sporran, and marched out of the door, shoulders back, chin held high and kilt swinging. A moment or two later the pharmacist heard a great shout go up outside, followed by an even greater cheer. The soldier strode back into the shop marched up to the counter and saluted the pharmacist with a broad grin on his face.

“The regiment has taken a vote,” he said, “and we'll have a new one.”

House Call

Children are the future – I’ve been hearing this particularly trite aphorism since at least the eighties. It’s trotted out whenever the future is being discussed, regardless of whether or not the issues under discussion have any direct effect on children. But what utter, disingenuous tripe this all is. That crayon-covered child there, the one licking that window, is that the future? Or the one busily tying fireworks to a cat; is it him? How about the one who, at the age of three has been encouraged to self-identify as non-binary gender? Maybe that’s where we’re headed?

I heard this phrase yet again this morning and it made me think; it seems to stand for something, taken at face value, but it dissolves under analysis into a mushy, shapeless puffery of meaningless sounds. Who was the future when your grandparents were children? And to how much future are we referring; is it the future as in tomorrow, or the day after, or next week/month/year? Is it when these children are adults (in which case are they no longer ‘the future’) and if so, how old? Twenties? Forties? Eighties? It’s a moving goalpost whereby those who have built the world we live in are discounted as irrelevant in favour of an unknown hereafter.

To take a currently topical political figure, Hitler was once a child, as were Pol Pot and Mao, Stalin and Peter Sutcliffe. So, also, were Rembrandt and Shakespeare, Beethoven and Sir Clive Woodward. What does this any of this prove? The future will happen whether or not the upcoming generation are up to the challenge, but by constantly pandering to the culture of youth we seem to be determined to ensure they are not. Education, behavioural standards, entitlement, privilege, and an absurd set of unrealistic beliefs in spurious ‘equalities ‘which will never be realised; all the ‘investment’ in this future strikes me as counter-productive.

Anyway, I thought we had given away their future with the Brexit, so where does that leave us? Cue the superannuated, dribbling crybabies of the House of Lords as they struggle to grasp the concept of the European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill 2016-17 which has only one purpose. It is a bill ‘to confer power on the Prime Minister to notify, under Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, the United Kingdom’s intention to withdraw from the EU’.

The EU, in the form of once-was-the-future Angela Merkel, has already refused to offer reciprocal rights to UK citizens in the EU, or indeed discuss any future arrangements, until after Article 50 has been invoked. All the oh-so-noble Lords have done is foment further uncertainty, one can only presume to prolong the very uncertainties they accuse Brexit voters of causing. It’s been this way since 24^th June last year; having failed to vote the way they were told, the plebs must be punished.

Remember when this idiot child was the future?

The only way to secure any certainty for the future is to push ahead with the process of leaving the sclerotic European Union. That’s what grown-ups would do, that’s what most of us want to do, but the supposed senior chamber has concerned itself, as children do, with meaningless sloganizing about ‘bargaining chips’. All this action has done is to bring their status and privilege under scrutiny. Who knows what tomorrow will bring? But I know a certain unelected House of Cronies who may want to consider their future.