You all have something

So there you are, you have reached the age of majority and now you have to decide which path you will take. Actually, it is highly likely that your future road has already been determined and the first steps already taken. Did you have a paper round, or a Saturday job; or did you have both? Are you destined for the world of work and all the promises it holds? Are you eager to work hard, learn, progress and grow and seek success? We all know what kind of insufferable know-it-all you are, then.

Or have you already embarked on the ship of state, set sail for destinations predetermined and ready for others to decide your future course? Are you already inured to the tedium of daily life punctuated by bouts of hedonistic frenzy, fuelled on cheap booze, smuggled fags and the recreational drugs of your choice and pocket? Do you dream of being on a reality TV show, or winning X-Factor... or, preferably the National Lottery, which takes far less effort?

Obviously, if you are on the great work treadmill you are busily rationing your pleasures, squirrelling away as much as you can for a deposit on a home of your own. Of course, once you get that mortgage you will have to stay in work forever repaying it and all the advances you will need to take on in order to improve the shithole you bought in a shitty part of town. There will be plenty of times it doesn’t seem worth it, especially when you look at people around you who are still in social housing.

Oh yes, you sneer at the mugs, working for a living, as they disturb your mornings with their engines idling as they clear their windscreens of ice. Idiots, going out in the cold to work ungodly hours. They probably have to put into a pension pot, too, unlike you, sitting pretty atop a small treasure hoard of benefits for life. They even have to take time off from work, possibly unpaid, to go to the doctors, whereas all you have to do is pause daytime TV while you hop in a taxi to the surgery a few hundred yards away. And as for having kids...

You have to plan, you have to choose – which one of you packs in work, which one of you stays at home? How many children can you even afford? Decisions, decisions; what about schools? No more expensive holidays. Make the car last another few years. Graft and grind, graft and grind. Taxes going up? You’ll just have to work harder. Get that promotion, climb that greasy pole. Buy a bigger house nearer a better school and knuckle down to investing heavily in your new family.

What do you mean, my kids have been in trouble? It’s the teachers’ job to keep them in line, although good luck to ya; the little bastards run us ragged at home. And anyway it’s no wonder they’re like that. Have you seen the conditions we have to live in? Not fit for animals. Had the Housing Association out ten times in the last month to fix stuff we broke. Sometimes we had to wait days an’ all. Be glad when the bloody kids are off our hands and in their own council houses, although they give ‘em all to immigrants now. Bloody government should do something.

And you both end up the same. Both of you have somewhere to live, both of you have a pension enough to get by on. One through a lifetime of entitlement, the other through a lifetime of effort; which was most satisfying? The worker may not appear any more well off than the other guy; he may even have foregone some of the pleasures the other guy enjoyed. But, as they say, think of the children. One has nothing to pass on; his kids start at square one. The other has at least a tangible asset to hand down, along with a lifetime of observed work ethic.

Depending on others for your living makes you a serf (although at least serfs worked). You have no means to improve your lot. As a way of life this is somewhat beneath the standards of human dignity for those in the west, who have opportunity at their feet. Besides others genuinely need the state largesse which you consume. You want to improve welfare? Start by taking yourself out of it; if not completely, then a bit at a time. You may not make it in a generation, but give your next generation the chance. Forget about the haves and the have-nots; you all have something to pass on - make it count.

To have and to have not – the politics of desire

There is a constant background whine of discontent that has been around as long as we have had language; before that even, given that is driven by one of the most basic of all our instincts – survival. In times of scarcity, those who outcompete the others will prevail where the rest perish. It’s what makes humankind the undisputed success that it is, notwithstanding those who blame man for every bad thing that befalls the home planet. But, goes a certain narrative, why can’t we be equally successful? Why can’t I have what he has?

There is an inaccurate but soothing platitude that all men are created equal. Seriously, if you want to believe this then Go You, I guess. But even if you take that at face value and assume that every baby is an equally blank slate, the process of differentiation begins almost immediately. Even if you strip out inherited advantages – money, circumstance, family attitudes, country of origin, etc., the  supposed balance begins to tip right from the off. Some will walk, talk, understand, far quicker than others. Some will be overcome by childhood illness or accidents... or suffer trauma at the hands of those who should care from them.

Even if none of those things happened – or if they happened equally – once attaining the age of responsibility, some will work harder, smarter, faster, longer than others and begin to open up a lead. By their mid-twenties most people have set the groundwork for what follows. Of course, some fall by the wayside, but the mindset is pretty much established and it takes a mighty effort to shift it. Some plough all their energy into the next generation, some – selfishly, you might decide – continue to invest in themselves.

Either way, the world roughly splits into the haves and the have-nots and only the boundary is blurred; at what point do you have ‘enough’? At what point do you decide you don’t? And then, whichever camp you sit in, how do you account for it? The ‘winners’ continue to slap each other’s backs and congratulate each other for their hard work (even those who have inherited every penny) while berating the ‘losers’ for their indolence. The ‘losers’ can do no such thing, so construct a narrative of privilege and class from which they are excluded by some unfair process.

Both narratives have a certain basis in actualité, but one side has no desire to redress the balance; they must be compelled to do so. Thus, the class struggle is the attempt by the have-nots to loosen the grip of the haves on the keys to wealth and power. And replace it with what? An egalitarian, ‘equal’ society? Don’t make me laugh. Those who agitate for the left have their eyes on the prize of power for themselves and this manifests every time a socialist administration is ushered in on the tide of votes of the have-nots, hoping for a ‘kinder, gentler’ politics.

Even if you nominally divided fiscal wealth equally – that which you could seize before it was squirreled away – there is still the issue of influence and favour and pretty soon a hierarchy will be established in which it is secretive alliances which convey power, not the open acquisition of material things. When rich people screw up they become poorer people and suffer the ignominy of public ridicule. When nominally equal party apparatchiks screw up they either get given even more power or they disappear.

Maybe you prefer that version of society – conform or be removed – where your success depends not on your individual efforts but on how much you further the aims of the ruling committees; on how closely you resemble everybody else and how uniform your actions, speech and thought. Because, if you want an ‘equal’ society, this is where it it is inevitably headed, with all differentiators removed. But regardless of how far down the communist road you with to travel, your imagined fair society has to begin with answering one question: How much of what other people have produced do you believe you are entitled to?

To be continued...

Home Alone

I’m a bit of a feminist, me. Oh yes, I've always been up for a bit of equality – as far as I can see we should all be able to turn our hands to whatever takes our fancy. Not for me the traditional division of labour between the sexes. As an independent master of my own destiny I stand as free as any woman!

I can do the cooking, cleaning, mending, shopping and spread the gossip with the best. I apportion the budget and pay all the bills. I can bake a cake, rustle up a roast and my banana bread is to die for. On top of all that I keep a clean and tiny abode and if needed I darn a bloody good sock. 

Plumbing, electrics and shelves are no mystery to me. I can assemble a flat pack in seconds flat - fact. I can take a piece of seasoned wood and lovingly cut it, shape it, smooth it, stain it, put the bits together with glue and dowels and turn it into furniture. I've built walls, made windows and put a roof above both. 

More manly credentials still - I've taken engines out of stuff, dismantled them, replaced bits and put them back together AND they worked. I've both flown aircraft and jumped out of them. I've sailed yachts, dived under oceans and driven a warship. I can rough it too; I've camped and caravanned and slept under the stars and skinny-dipped on New Year’s Eve from the longest beach in Brazil… and I once push-biked around America. (blatant plug there) 

I've lived in a desert and in a jungle and sailed the South Atlantic. I've seen Ernest Shackleton’s grave on South Georgia and Napoleon’s prison house in St Helena and I was once presented to Princess Anne. Not as a gift, you understand - I didn't wear a bow or anything - but I was carrying a sword at the time. Oh yes, I've been around a bit. I've served my country, I've climbed its hills and seen its dark satanic mills. I've trod the boards, won awards and more and more and more. 

So you can imagine the grave disappointment I suffered when I belatedly discovered that all men are not so self-reliant. That, more and more in this day and age, men seem to conform to the scornful representation of their gender in the media. The hapless immature man-boy, utterly incapable in comparison with his vivacious, intelligent, multi-tasking, multi-skilled mother-substitute and all her friends. 

And then, all of a sudden, a rash of new excitement in the media about the various ways and legalities of reproduction without the nasty, messy conjoining of man and wife. Why, it’s as if we are dispensable, fellas… virtually extinct. Well I, for one, have had enough...

The time has come, men, to fight back from the brink. Wrest from their delicate, girlie grasp the keys to the tool shed and regain command of our rightful domain. Follow me fellas, to the sunlit uplands of our ascendancy and we will take back our proud place in society once more! 

Just as soon as I've cleared it with the missus.

To be fair...

Let me state first of all (and for the umpteenth time) that humans are simply not made equal. Bloody hell, if you can't feel superior to somebody else, what's the point of it all? We come in large or small, short or tall, attractive or pug-ugly and in all manner of shapes and colours. We have adapted to live in savannas, jungles, up trees, in caves and even in space. We have histories involving conquest, discovery, opulence, poverty, great endeavour, enormous industry or just sitting about on our arses.

Art, science, architecture, literature, agriculture... manufacturing, organising, debating... building dynasties, waging wars, forging alliances. Getting it wrong, then starting over and getting it right; these are the things that produce mature, rounded, wide-horizoned civilisations and they all take time. Lots of time.

Look what instant wealth did to the Arab nations. See how African despots plunder and pillage and murder their own people. Witness what a violent disaster Islam's access to the modern world is. Why do you think everybody is shitting themselves over Iran and Syria and nuclear weapons? Holy lands? Who knows what further ungodly hells those nations that cleave to superstition have yet to wreak?

But even then, within a single supposedly advanced culture, equality is impossible and attempts to impose it have brought nothing but misery and death to millions via the disastrous failed social experiments of the Soviet Union, China, Laos, North Korea. Cuba... and Tooting. There are no fast fixes, no instant righting of wrongs.

Which is of course why ruling power in one of the most civilised countries on earth is not in the hands of first generation neophtyes, but vested mainly in a small number of privileged families who breed to lead, balanced by the background chatter of an envious proletariat. It's how it is and in the main it works very well indeed; the appearance of a democracy but with a firm-ish continuous hand on the tiller.

All of which makes yesterdays student protest amusing in the extreme. Bleating about making the rich pay so that they in turn can become rich (they imagine) through a superior education. Bunking off from their studies to stand around in the rain and growl trite slogans at the very police they will expect to protect them when the nasty uneducated people ransack their grubby bedsits while they're out at play.

Offered the option, who do you want running the country?

Yeah! Fuck off, rich boy!

If history teaches us anything, gradual change is always better and more permanent than violent swings. Put a toddler in charge of the ship and who knows where we'll end up. And when it comes down to it, few people want to lead in any case; it's far too much like hard work. So, let the children have their day, let them feel like they made a difference and then let them see the ferocious struggle to become more than equal that they will invest in their own children.

There are only so many silver spoons to go around and soon enough they'll be stabbing each other in the back trying to get their hands on one. Sounds fair to me.

Reet Elite

It's school sports day once again and in the last race of the day - the whole school hundred metre dash - all the children are neck and neck. Parents watch with baited breath as they near the finish line. Then, one child starts to edge ahead. The crowd lean forward in their seats and, as one, urge "Slow down! Slow down!" But it is too late and Johnny's mother hangs her head in shame as Fast Johnny breasts the tape ahead of the field.

She'd brought him up to  be equal. She'd been fierce in her determination for him not to excel in any endeavour. What mattered to her most in life was bringing up the perfect, equal child. After all her efforts, she just knew he had to be the ultimate - more equal than all the rest put together. But, despite her best efforts he'd shown himself up to be - she spat the word - elite!

The word 'elite' has recently gained new currency as the number one pejorative hate-label for anybody looking to lay blame for perceived injustice. Here it is levelled, probably correctly in this case, against bankers. But it is tossed around freely to refer to political and religious elitism whenever an argument needs to be won (or at least drawn!). In education, so corrosive a term has it become that we end up with today's story about 29-Resit-Boy and a pitiful indictment of the blind rejection of anything so repugnant as individual excellence - all must have prizes.

Conspiracy theories abound regarding shadowy groups like the Freemasons, Opus Dei and the sinister-sounding New World Order. Today's Lords reform debate originates from the same fear of the power of elites. The Left frequently conjoin the words to mint the phrase 'power-elite', making it sound all the scarier.

So, where where do you want to stop your elitism? Were you ever a Sixer in the cubs? Is a 'Team Leader' a symbol of an oppressive hierarchical society? How dare households have a head? How would 'first past the post' voting work? Or PR for that matter? And - this is crucial - who would lead the fluffy little ducklings all in a row to swim in the park pond?

We've just had Wimbledon. And footie's Euro 2012. Yesterday was the F1 British Grand Prix and this month London hosts the Olympics - the most blatant worship of elitism.in the world.

You want equality? Really?

Believe it or not...

It turns out I have super powers. Able to detect and deflect bullshit with a single withering glance, I have grown armour impervious to hoo-doo, voodoo and how do you do, Mr Huhne? (Wind farms, my arse, you big, daft, green eejit.)

Fortunate to have been educated, rather than indoctrinated, I laughed at the follies of Russia and America and their counter-cultural myths about each other. I knew then what all the commentators in the world didn’t. Both sides were lying. How did I know they were lying? They were politicians and ‘intellectuals’ and their mouths were moving.

At times I have doubted my powers but I have rarely been wrong because I employ simple logic to solve conundra. Will people with the ability and drive to grow rich use that power to feed poor people? Why would they? So any attempt at social reform will be met with resistance. Push them hard enough and they’ll take their money away. If I can see it, why can’t everybody else? The real question with the bankers et al, is why did the last government freely allow them to gamble?

Determination of right and wrong should be predicated on fact, rather than on faith or fiction, but all too often reaction to any sort of news appears to be based on which church you belong to. Worship at the altar of socialism and any attempt to generate wealth is seen as almost literally prying open the jaws of starving children to snatch out a morsel of nourishment. Pray to Mammon and the world appears to be teeming with undeserving masses ready to slit your throat for your iPhone.

So, the world according to Batsby is pretty much black and white, based not on belief, but on observable reality, with any shades of grey consigned to the margins under the heading Make Your Bloody Mind Up. Here, for your Sunday discussion group is a cornucopia of fact and fiction to get wound up about.

Fiction - all men are created equal.

Fact – the world is largely populated by gurning, jut-jawed imbeciles dependent on the endeavours of a tiny number of genuinely superior beings for any form of prosperity beyond grubbing for roots and skinning rabbits.

Fiction - this equality imbalance (which you don’t sign up to- all created equal, right?) can all be solved by yet more laws and controls, otherwise known as social engineering.

Fact - we, all of us, will try to avoid paying tax in any form whatsoever if we see it being used in ways we don't support. Those who pay the most tax are the most able to exercise the prerogative not to.

Fiction – there once were unicorns.

Fact - a unicorn is fiction. Grow up.

Fiction – The evil ‘Fatcher’ (Socialists can’t pronounce the ‘th’ sound) would creep into your homes at night to eat your babies and she single-handedly consigned poor people to the gutter forever.

Fact - Margaret Thatcher was instrumental in bringing economic success to Britain. Without her, the welfare state itself would have collapsed long ago as the unions drove investment away from Britain. This wasn’t achieved without casualties, but it was a long time ago and you can’t just blame her for everything, forever.

Fact - work hard, behave and learn your lessons and you will get a job.

Fiction - we just have to be nice to the kiddies and they'll become geniuses all by themselves

Fiction - we can redistribute our way to equality.

Fact –wealth will then immediately begin the migration back to where it came from..

Finally, for the greenies:

Fiction - we can be green and save the planet

Fact - we use lots of energy.

Who IS this masked man?

Have a lovely Sunday and if you are running in the London Marathon…. Are you mad?