How Britain Disgraced Herself When Princess Diana Died

Mexico is six hours behind the UK and pretty much exactly twenty years ago to this very minute I was sitting at a table outside a Veracruz coffee shop drinking cafe con leche and preparing to drive the 300 miles home to Mexico City. My wife bought a copy of el Dictamen, the local newspaper from one of the urchins who hawk in on the street, and the only child I had at the time was three years old and tucking into a plate of chips which he had liberally sprinkled with sugar. I suspect the wife bought the paper to avoid having to watch him munch sugared chips. 

I remember that I had just lit a cigarette when the wife told me that Princess Diana was dead. I grabbed the paper and there was the news agency report, from AP if memory serves me right, reprinted seemingly verbatim in the paper on one of the inside pages. It was an important story, but not so important that el Dictamen felt the need to rejig the front page. Much easier, you can almost hear the editor thinking, to drop something from the foreign news section and then slot the Diana story in to save everyone a lot of trouble.

We drove home and the following day I switched on the TV and tuned into what is today called BBC World, but which back then was the far better sounding BBC World Service Television. Why did I not drive like a bat out of Hell to get home quickly to get the latest updates? For the simple reason that I did not regard it as a very important story. Diana was the ex-wife of the Prince of Wales and had no constitutional role to play in British affairs. Her death was sad for her family, but no concern of the people at large, at least that was my view.

How wrong I was! Over the next few days, I was stunned to see on my TV screen the way in which the people of Britain seemed to be turning the death of that not very bright youngish woman into a Mexican-style soap opera, complete with emoting and lots of wailing.

It must have been worse for the people in London as a friend who lives in Putney reported that the heavy, pungent odour of millions of flowers hung over the city as people seemed to be competing with one another to show how much they cared about a woman that they had never met and never would have done even had she lived.

In those days the British embassy had a club for British and Commonwealth people and the next time I was in there the conversation was dominated by the way in which British people were letting the side down by behaving like a bunch of hysterical natives. 

I do not recall many people from the British diaspora in Mexico going along to the embassy to sign the book of condolences that someone decided had better be put out eventually. Three years later when HM Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother died we all dutifully trooped along to put our signatures down in the book and then went to a bar to raise a loyal toast to her memory, but Diana? I am sorry, but who cared, really?

It is hard to say why the nation decided to go in for such an embarrassing display of national breast-beating, but it did and as someone remarked to me that is what mob-hysteria looks like and it isn't a pretty sight.

Let us hope that we never see it again.

EU Free Movement for the British Is a Federast Fantasy

The EU referendum was well over a year ago and still the defeated Federasts trot out the same pathetic whines as they did the day after their defeat. Time for the gloating Brexiteers to give the same answers as we always have, so let's start with one of the biggest and most entertaining whines, which is the one that says that by voting to leave the EU the Brexiteers have somehow deprived the poor ickle snowflakes of their chance to work abroad.

Speaking as someone who is now over sixty and who has managed to spend more than a third of those sixty-odd years abroad, I can say quite clearly that the EU does not help British people to move in any way shape or form. Quite the reverse, in fact, since most of the countries that make it up are either very poor or have a rentier system that prevents British people from taking advantage of the mythical freedom of movement.

It is unlikely that any British person would want to chance his arm in Poland, as the economy can't provide jobs for its own people, hence the numbers of Poles who have blessed Great Britain with their presence over the past couple of decades. Besides, the rentier nature of the economy means that what jobs there are available are handed out on the basis of knowing someone with the political or economic clout needed to slot a candidate into a cushy number.

Even in Germany, a country that cannot be called rentier, regulations ensure that the tasty jobs go to German nationals. For instance, a friend of mine is married to a Chinese woman who practised traditional medicine in China, having graduated in that from a Chinese university.  When that couple lived in Germany, the wife was not allowed to practice her craft because German laws have it that she had to obtain a degree in it from a German university. Here in Britain, by way of contrast, all she had to do was rent a shop and then open it for business.

This is why British people tend to avoid the EU countries, apart from Spain where the elderly go to die and look to the rest of the world, 'cos that's where the tasty numbers are to be found.

A good drinking mate of mine was deputy director of maintenance at Veracruz port. He had left school at the age of 15 to join the Royal Navy back in the 1950s. The skills he acquired stood him in good stead when he left the navy as he ended up working in West Africa and the Arabian Gulf, before fetching up in Mexico.

Obviously, the port's director was a Mexican and equally obviously he was a political appointee who knew little about the work and cared even less, but  my mate was on hand to ensure that the port ran smoothly in return for a whacking great reward that included two first class flights back to the UK every year.

If you are like me and find changing the oil in your car's engine difficult enough then a decent degree from a decent, Russell Group university should see you right. Often you will find that wealthy third worlders quite like having British people on their staff, not to do very much work - perish the thought - but so that they can boast to their cronies that they have an Oxford man or Edinburgh woman at their beck and call. Not that there is much becking or calling since you are there for prestige reasons, but I am sure that you get my drift.

Now then, given that none of this is exactly new information, why are the Federasts using Britain's withdrawal from the EU as an excuse to whinge about how it will mean that they cannot get an easy life abroad?

The answer could very well turn out to be that your average whining Federast is really nothing more than some bovine loser with a pathetic little poly degree and a puerile desire for status who really believes that one day he will leave his local-government non-job behind and wangle himself a top of the range number in the EU. As if even a third world place like Romania would take such people seriously...

In other words, they are like the bloke who plays for a Sunday League team and who tells everyone that one day he is going to turn out for Manchester United. Just as people smile at the Sunday player in the pub, so we should smile at the Federast who believes that any other country anywhere in the world is going to treat him with anything other than derision.

Why The Brexiteers Should Love Gina Miller

I have a confession to make - I quite like Gina Miller! I know that she is the South-American trophy wife of a multi-millionaire, but she has done more for the Brexit cause than most and when the histories of these times are finally written, Gina, Bob, Eddie and the Guardian's bedwetting finest below the line commentators will all receive their due rewards as the facilitators of Brexit.

In the case of the still just about beddable Gina, I like to think that soon after we finally leave the European Union, Nigel Farage will call a press conference in the garden of his favourite pub. There he will sit, with a pint at his elbow, a tab in his right hand, and Gina Miller sat on his left knee. He will hold her steady with his arm around her waist as he bounces her up and down to make her go all giggly, and then she will confess that actually she was working for us all along.

Think about it, her supposed aim was to subvert the democratic referendum result via tame judges and a subservient Parliament.  However, do you really think that the British people would have sat idly by and allowed that to happen? On the surface, Gina Miller is everything that the average Brexieer hates, so she just had to be a double agent, put forward to subvert the Federast cause.

The sheer anger that this woman created in British hearts ensured that Parliament did not do as she supposedly wished, which is why we are now heading for the exit at full throttle. Just consider what might have happened had a more credible, user-friendly Federast come forward to fight that case, instead of Gina Miller. The coup might very well have succeeded.

Before the vote we were helped immeasurably by Eddie Izzard and Bob Geldof, to name but two. Izzard likes to present himself as the metrosexual voice of the new generation, but to most British people he is just a weird bloke who wears women's clothes. As for Geldof, he is the millionaire scruff who could afford to hire a floating gin palace to mock hard-working British fishermen who want the waters around our country back under national control.

Surely those two had to be working for Brexit all along? I mean, who could believe that ordinary people would not be anything other than revolted by their personalities and their antics?

Finally, we have the hysteria that only the Guardian's diminishing gang of below the line commentators can produce. Let me give you just one example from October 2016 when the Guardian's finest decided to launch a hatefest against the City of Sunderland. The gist of it was that Mackems are thick, wickedly waycist and deserve to be unemployed forever.

 

In the unlikely event that the Federasts did manage to wangle another referendum, do they really think that we will not turn it into a vote about them, by reporting all their comments over the months since June 2016? They give the impression that they don't realise just how much contempt we have for them and how great is our determination to ensure that we will see Brexit through. We will not allow the Metropolitan wankerati to win the final victory, no matter what the cost.

So, are all those people secret agents for Brexit? It is incredible to think that thousands of Guardian commentators could be mobilised to pretend that they are all bovine members of the polyocracy who are afraid that once we get rid of the Brussels' bureaucracy their local government non-jobs may be next to come under our baleful gaze.

The problem is that if Gina, Bob, Eddie and the Guardianistas really are genuine, card-carrying Federasts then they are so utterly thick that they honestly do not realise just how much their antics help the cause that they want to destroy.

Scab Labour Is the Issue, Not Immigration

This piece has been cross-posted by Labour Leave.

Let's be honest, the left argument against the EU is not an anti-immigration one. Rather, it's about the wholesale importation of scab labour by management to cut British wages and put us in our place, both economically and socially. That is a fact that Jeremy Corbyn made clear when he said that people will still move around after we leave the European Union. However, he then went on to say: "What there wouldn't be is the wholesale importation of underpaid workers from central Europe in order to destroy conditions, particularly in the construction industry." 

Corbyn could not have made it clearer than he did with those words that Labour is once again the party that exists to keep the wages up and the management down. The Blairite interregnum is well and truly over, and by and large we have in Labour a party that at least tries to speak for us for the first time in almost a generation.

The owners of capital have always tried to keep the wages down as a matter of course, so historically they were quite happy to pay immigrants at a lower rate than native workers. However, in the past we also had strong unions and a Labour Party that answered to them, so post-war migrant workers could be signed up to union membership and a Labour government then prodded into bringing in the first Race Relations Act which made such practices illegal. Today, encouraged by the EU, we live in a world of hire and fire where management can arrange with an Eastern European gangmaster to bring an army of genuine scab labourers to Britain to keep the wages down.

I can describe them as genuine scab labourers because they come from countries which had the type of economic system that we want for ourselves. One that guaranteed full employment, a functioning health service that was free at the point of use, and two weeks holiday every year at a Black Sea resort. Most important of all was the fact that management were little more than errand boys, with the major economic decisions being taken by the government and the unions.

Sadly, because socialism was introduced courtesy of the Soviet army, it was seen as something imposed on those countries from outside, so we can fully understand why the peoples of Eastern Europe wanted the Soviet Union out of their countries. However, throwing out the socialist baby with the Soviet bathwater has never made any sense to me, nor I suspect would it to any of the British workers who now spend a lifetime doing a crap job for a crap wage for a crap employer.

It is not just about wages because the scab influx has allowed management to pick and choose workers, instead of taking what they can get and liking it. That is doubly important the further down the line you go until you reach the fairly loathsome ranks of the lower middle class, where the attitude of petty management has gone from one of minding their manners, knowing their place and keeping their mouths shut around working people, to one of insufferable insolence.

Many years ago as a young man back in the days when Ted Heath was Prime Minister I was employed as a cinema projectionist. As jobs go it was reasonably skilled, strongly unionised and came with the added bonus that not many men in those days of full employment wanted to work such unsociable hours in a tightly sealed box where temperatures reached oven levels at the end of the day.

Cinema management tended to be not very bright grammar school types with a clutch of not very good O-Levels and a seething resentment toward us. I remember one in particular who liked to talk loudly about the difference between management and workers, but funnily enough types like him were always very quiet if we had done some overtime and had a bulging wage packet that they had to put into our hot little hands. When that happened you could just sense the resentment in their little suburban minds, and oh how we mocked them to their faces. They sucked it up because they had no choice.

We had the skills, you see, and we kept the cinemas going. Managers were interchangeable suits, but the projectionists were the indispensable men without whom the cinemas did not open.

I do not know how cinemas run today, but I would bet that management can call the shots because that is the way it is with most skilled groups of workers. The EU allows management to bring in as many skilled workers as they please and the hit to wages amongst skilled workers is as high as it is amongst the unskilled. Perhaps for the first time ever, the skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled really are all in it together, which is why so many of us voted for Brexit.

So, when the Guardian reading bed-wetters accuse us of being anti immigration they have got it wrong. Our objection is not to immigrants, but to the free movement of labour. We object to the two-legged cockroaches known as management having too many options because we know that the more options they have the worse life is for us.

The Guardian's Diminishing Readership Still Loses the Plot

What follows is so funny that you might want to put your tea down before reading on...

The Guardian has one of it usual we hate Brexit pieces up as clickbait to try and boost its decreasing circulation. A Brexiteer went along and made the following comment:

The comment was simple, concise and to the point, and only an idiot could misread it. Luckily for the Brexit cause, the average Federast is just such an idiot as the replies to the comment will demonstrate:

You see? The Guardian's below the line bovine Federast commentators cannot even read a simple couple of sentences. They mistook the referendum vote for the much more overwhelming parliamentary one, and then responded to what they thought they had read instead of what was actually on the screen in front of them.

In vain did the original commentator try to correct their error, because they ignored his reply and carried on making tits of themselves:

They were still at it the last time I checked. Still voting up idiotic comments in reply to a post that only exists in their pathetic minds.

It may be that the average Federast has imaginary friends who live inside his head and talk to him. It could be that those voices said that something else was written in the original comment and they listened to the voices, instead of reading what was actually right there on the fucking screen in front of their noses.

A more likely explanation is that they do not have much in the way of reading comprehension. It may be that your average Federast really is a sad little fuckwit with a pathetic little poly degree and a local government non-job.

Either way, as we push forward towards the final Brexit, we can take comfort from the fact that our enemies really are so unutterably stupid that whatever they try will only end in failure for them and hilarity for us.

Update: The Guardian's Mrs Grundy has stepped in to delete the thread and save her ickle snowflakes from our mockery. Alas, it was all too late 'cos I had already grabbed the screenshots!

Guardian Censors Debate About the EU Demand for a Bribe From Britain

The Guardian has a gloating report yesterday about the £60-odd billion or so bung that the EU wishes to extort from the UK as the price for waving them a less than fond farewell. The following comment lasted less than thirty minutes before the Guardian's Mrs Grundy deleted it. Clearly the paper doesn't want obvious parallels being drawn with other payments made by other states:

The point is that in 1919 Germany had to pay an eye-watering sum for the simple reason that she had lost the Great War. The terms were presented by the victors, who had kept alive their blockade of the German ports to ensure that hunger back home concentrated the minds of the German delegation wonderfully.

We have not lost a war and have no legal contractual obligations to the EU after the end of March 2019. Funnily enough that is the centenary anniversary of the Treaty of Versailles, which is the treaty that the Guardian does not want people to refer back to.

The Guardian's writ does not run at this here blog, so we can draw obvious conclusion that Brussels sees itself as the victor and can present any terms it wishes to the defeated British. This is a very foolish attitude to take as all it will achieve is to harden the British national trait of bloody-mindedness and lead us to tell Merkel and her gang not to try and dictate to us until after their armies have finished having their victory parade down Whitehall - and even then we are unlikely to listen.

Uncle Ken's view is that we should pay something in the interests of peace, quiet and getting the fuck out quickly. That something should be presented to the European Union as a bung that we are paying in the same way and for the same reasons that we pay similar bungs to other dodgy types in Latin-America and Eastern Europe. It is all about helping "beezness," so after the amount of the bung has been agreed, there is only one question that we need to ask:

Do they want their bung paid into in Swiss or Panamanian bank accounts, or do they prefer suitcases stuffed full of used fivers?

The EU Has Poisoned British Politics for Too Long

British involvement in the European Union has now poisoned politics in this country for almost half a century and looks set to do so for many years to come. As I write, it is being reported that David Davis has claimed that Boris Johnson is a "failure" and "toxic to his own sister." Friends of Davis are saying that Philip May wants his wife to resign as Prime Minister, and allies of both Boris and Davis have threatened to kick each other in the balls on more than one occasion. Meanwhile, Philip Hammond is going around saying that he cannot remember claiming that public sector workers were overpaid, but an awful lot of his colleagues can.

Part of me is thoroughly enjoying the sight of the Tories fighting like rats in a sack over which one of them should replace Theresa May, even though they risk weakening Britain's negotiation position with Brussels. However, I then remember that Europe almost destroyed Labour in the 1970s and 80s, that Europe more than anything else led to the party splitting almost down the middle with the SDP schism helping to ensure that Labour stayed out of office from 1979 to 1997.

Europe poisons politics because it cannot be contained within the existing party system. There are just too many Federasts in both Tory and Labour ranks who are loyal to Brussels and not to Britain.

Labour Brexiteers have three glimmers of hope that put together should see us through to the other side when the European Union will be just a memory.

The first is the bloody-minded nature of the British people who have shown throughout history that they will see things through, no matter what the cost. It was that bloody-mindedness at Trafalgar that led the Royal Navy to send two columns of ships straight at the Franco-Spanish line with hardly any wind in their sails until eventually they broke that line and destroyed the enemy fleet. A decade later, at Waterloo, that same bloody-mindedness led a British army at Waterloo to stand with rock-like solidity on a hill and fire volley after volley of musket fire at Napoleon's advancing Old Guard until they broke and fled the field.  The Old Guard had never been defeated before. Many people believed that it was invincible, and it was until it ran up against the British infantry with their Brown Bess muskets and solid determination not to yield the field.

Say what you like about the British, we may not be the sharpest knives in the drawer, but we certainly make up for it with an almost wilful determination to see things through.

The second glimmer comes from today's Labour leadership, which is clearly determined to follow through with Brexit. Just recently, John McDonnell, the Shadow Chancellor said that he hoped that Britain can negotiate access to EU markets after Brexit. In other words, we are leaving the single market, just as Labour pledged in its election manifesto, but his words meant that Labour wants to negotiate an access deal that will cover post-Brexit trade, that's all.

That statement looks like a compromise to me or at least a bone that has been thrown to the frightened Federast dogs that Labour has in its parliamentary ranks. Given that only fifty Labour Federasts voted for a pro-Brussels amendment to the recent Queen's Speech, that bone may be enough to keep the bulk of the Parliamentary Labour Party supporting the leader.

Finally, Jeremy Corbyn has a secret weapon at his disposal in Tony Blair, of all people. Every time Blair opens his mouth to speak on behalf of Brussels he cannot resist trying to stick the boot into Corbyn as well. Corbyn can rally support for his soft-Brexit policies just by reminding people of the forces of darkness that sit in the wings and who want to stop not just Brexit, but all of Labour's social policies as well.

It may be true that many Labour voters also voted Remain in June 2016, but Labour is able to offer many of them social policies such as free university tuition in England and Wales that other parties reject. It is quite likely that those voters will put those other Labour policies first and shrug their shoulders at Brexit - certainly, that is what seems to have happened in the June 2017 General Election when Labour's manifesto made it quite clear that the party supports Brexit.

As far as Brexit is concerned, both major parties are now determined to follow this thing through and bind the suppurating wound to our body politic that our membership of the EU has created.

The question the country must ask is quite simple can the Tories put aside their civil war until around April 2019?