November 2017 – All Things Considered

28 Nov

Theresa’s Romantic Fantasy

Theresa May is very angry with Prince Harry. There was the great lady – Theresa, I mean, not Harry’s intended – with more press releases than she has pairs of shoes. For yesterday was to mark the launch of the government’s Grand Industrial Strategy: to give it its full title, The Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund. Acres of newsprint had been set aside for the publication of details of this great national plan. I nearly wrote Five Year Plan, after the manner of the former Soviet Union. But Theresa is far more ambitious than Joseph Stalin and her strategy looks forward as far as 2040. Television and radio schedules were cleared in advance for exciting ministerial appearances. Then, wouldn’t you just know it: the Prince and his Yankee girlfriend – “I’m just wild about Harry” – are the only news in town. Surely Theresa must be our unluckiest prime minister: first she loses a general election which even a pussycat would have won; then she cocks up the Tory conference with a coughing fit; and now her big strategic launch lies smothered under a pile of royal fluff.

Theresa did actually say something yesterday but, since nobody was listening, I’ll give you the gist of it here:

“Our modern Industrial Strategy will shape a stronger and fairer economy for decades to come. It will help create the conditions where successful businesses can emerge and grow, and support these businesses in seizing the big opportunities of our time, such as artificial intelligence and big data, whilst also making sure our young people have the skills to take on the high-paid, high-skilled jobs this creates.

“As we leave the European Union and forge a new path for ourselves, we need to focus on building a better future for our country and all the people who live in it. With the Budget last week, and our Industrial Strategy in the years ahead, we will build a Britain fit for the future.”

So you see, whatever the deficit in its other capabilities, our government can still be relied upon to produce shoals of jargon.

In the strategy, the government has identified Four Grand Challenges. (Have you noticed how, whenever the country is in the middle of some irretrievable mess, it’s always referred to as a “challenge”?)

Brace yourself for another fusillade of gobbledegook: “…global trends that will shape our rapidly changing future and which the UK must embrace to ensure we harness all the opportunities they bring. The Four are:

Artificial intelligence – we will put the UK at the forefront of the artificial intelligence and data revolution

Clean growth – we will maximise the advantages for UK industry from the global shift to clean growth.

Ageing society – we will harness the power of innovation to help meet the needs of an ageing society

Future of mobility – we will become a world leader in the way people, goods and services move.”

You will be wanting to know how much it will cost you – not Harry’s wedding but the Grand Industrial Strategy (GIS). It will, of course, cost as much as it takes – but £725million for starters.

To be honest, there were a few paragraphs about the GIS in today’s papers, but these were most depressing. All the newspapers assumed that industrial strategy has something to do with the business of government. Then, after much head-scratching, I twigged what’s going on here: Theresa May is doing a Tony Benn and reinventing the National Enterprise Board which – as the GIS will be – was doomed from the start. For the government doesn’t know anything about industrial strategy and there’s no reason why it should. The government’s job is to defend us from foreign enemies and keep the peace at home. So why are we spending more on the GIS than on our armed forces? And why has expenditure on the police forces fallen steadily for the last five years?

There are plenty of people in our country who know loads of stuff about industrial strategy, inventiveness and entrepreneurialism. Government intervention is the last thing they need. All they require is for the government not to get in the way, but to step back and let the hands-on people get on with the job. They would best do this by creating the conditions which will allow industry and enterprise to flourish: that is make huge cuts in taxation and scrap business regulations.

But Theresa and the corporatist gang of left-wing ideologues who surround her won’t do this one thing needful.

Britain today is unique among the nations: we have a socialist opposition and a socialist government.

As for the GIS, it’s a bigger romantic fantasy than any royal wedding

22 Nov

Let’s hear it for the nasty party!

Theresa May’s brand of conservatism has been called “socialism lite.” This is unfair to her. Perhaps it used to be socialism lite, but it now shows every sign of turning into socialism ‘evvy.

The latest wheeze takes the form of a bribe as the Tories hope to grab the young voters by offering cheaper rail travel. But this is only a gimmick, a sideshow. Across the whole range of economic policies, the government looks increasingly left wing: not far off Miliband’s 2015 election manifesto and certainly well to the left of anything produced by Harold Wilson or Jim Callaghan in the 1960s and 1970s.

It gets worse. The Tories have not merely slipped half-forgetfully into socialism, they have seized on it with relish.

Let me offer you a sign or a symbol of this radical shift. Last Tuesday George Freeman MP resigned from the Downing Street Policy Board, the internal party think tank cum PR agency which dreams up policy and then tries to sell it first to the party and then to the people.

Mr Freeman thinks that Mrs May’s economic policies are still not far enough to the left. He spoke of “a lack of vision at the top of government.” Well, he’s right there! But his own vision looks rather blurred to me. He wants to see – among other things on his spendthrift wish list – housing subsidies, reduction or abolition of tuition fees and increases in public sector pay.

He says “Intergenerational unfairness is the biggest issue of our times.”

Mr Freeman’s vision is at least clear enough for him to notice the one thing we have all been noticing for a long time: the kids have turned to Corbyn in big numbers. Corbyn has created, through his 300,000 storm-troopers in Momentum and his skilful use of social media, a revolution in British politics. It amounts to this: he is talking to the 18-30 year-olds in the language they speak every day and tweet and post and twitter on their electronic gadgets. The Tories have failed to connect in this way. In fact, they have never really tried.

Jeremy has understood what Theresa has failed to understand: the gospel according to Marshall MacLuhan: “The medium is the message.”

So, says Mr Freeman, we need to capture the young voters by offering them bribes. He doesn’t put it quite like that – not in public anyway. But that’s what he means. He said this week: “Unaddressed, we risk loosing an entire generation under forty rejecting not just conservatism but capitalism too.”

In other words, he wants May and her “compassionate Conservatives” to go into competition with Corbyn and his revolutionary socialists.

It would be hard to conjecture a more stupendous error than that.

The Tories cannot possibly compete with Corbyn. They might promise people – especially these darling millennials – the moon. But Corbyn will reply – indeed, he has already replied – by promising them the whole galaxy.

How utterly barmy to try to out-left the left!

Barmier still to encourage voters to turn to the Tories by transforming conservatism into socialism.

There is only one sane strategy, one strategy alone that will work. That is to preach and practise conservative political and economic values and to demonstrate that these work: that they are the only sort of policies and values that have ever delivered the goods.

Cut taxes and business regulation. Reduce public spending. Use every political and fiscal measure in the book to encourage industry, commerce and entrepreneurialism.

So we’re doomed to a Corbyn government red in tooth and claw.

And why are we doomed? Because there is more chance of my winning the men’s singles at Wimbledon than of Theresa May acting like a Tory.

A long time ago – remember – Mrs May rejected the Conservatives as “the nasty party.”

19 Nov

Women and Wimmin

There are only two sorts of women in this world: those who come on Woman’s Hour; and then there are all the others

I regularly meet some of these others in my family, among my friends, in casual conversation in shops, on buses and trains, in church, in the pub and very occasionally at the betting shop. I like this sort very much.

For a start, you can learn things from these women and I once sat all afternoon beside an old lady in the pavilion at Hove who taught me nuances in the game of cricket which I’d never properly sensed in the sixty-odd years of my love affair with the game. Decades ago, a girl showed me the best way to break in a new pair of walking boots and another taught me to cheat at knockout whist. At theological college an elocutionist jumped up and down on my chest and squeezed my stomach vigorously in an attempt to get me to project my voice from the pulpit. Dr Aggie Crawford in the Psychology Department at the University of Liverpool proved to me that behaviourism is crap. When I was five, Alexandra Atkinson showed me how to make “Spanish wine” by shaking your stick of liquorice in a jam jar of water for several hours. A few years later, Corinne Kendal taught me something called “cork wool” but failed to teach me to knit. I learned from my grandmother how to make a creamy rice pudding using sterilised milk.

None of these interesting, chummy and delightfully helpful women and girls taught me anything at all about the phenomenology of gender-orientated consciousness. But on Woman’s Hour they talk of nothing else. They do talk about about interesting subjects such as snooker and bitter beer – but it will always be “snooker from the woman’s perspective” and “the implications of beer-drinking for feminism.” Every item on Woman’s Hour – and I am a devotee of many years’ perseverance – is delivered from this peculiar angle.

It’s not like this at all with my male mates. Even the sweatiest masculine topics – such as motor-bikes and pipe-smoking – are not discussed according to a self-conscious masculine agenda. When Stan Gillimore told me he once gave up smoking Erinmore Flake and took to St Bruno instead, it wasn’t to explain “…what smoking St Bruno means in terms of my masculinity.” – but because he preferred the stronger tobacco.

Gillian Reynolds writes a consistently decent page of TV criticism without needing to set it in a context of – a phrase I heard for the first time the other day – and hope it’s the last – “the iconic tropes of feminism.”

Even the sanctimonious old bore Attenborough, well into Blue Planet Series Seventy-three, doesn’t offer us “Whales and plankton: the manly view.”

Woman’s Hour never – ever – presents a single item unless it comes in the parentheses of the feminist ideology. Don’t they get sick of their monomania? It’s like playing every tune in the same key.

If this were referred to a psychiatrist, he would conclude they were suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Or pathological self-reference. Idee fixe. Narcissism.

May I offer a suggestion, ladies? If you want to be interesting, talk about something else.

13 Nov

Many Big Brothers are Watching You!

Relentlessly, day by day, the surveillance society is becoming more total – the word I am looking for is totalitarian

Last Saturday I was invited by the Church of England authorities to attend what is called a Safeguarding Course. If I had declined this “invitation,” I would have no longer possessed my work permit: the Bishop’s permission for me to officiate as a priest. So, along with thirty other priests and laypeople, I endured a couple of hours brainwashing session in which I was told to look out for incidences of “physical, mental, sexual or emotional abuse of children or adults.” Suggestions were offered as to how I might go about this. I should, for example, listen to children’s conversation from which I might glean some insight into their home life.

I was so uneasy about this that I mentioned it to my taxi driver on the way home in order to discover what he thought about these Safeguarding techniques. “Oh don’t talk to me about Safeguarding. I’m full up to here with it. We taxi drivers were told by the Safeguarders that we should look closely at our women passengers for signs of physical abuse. It’s sick, I tell you”

The Safeguarding industry is a nationalised industry and it has its branches everywhere. Clergy, teachers, doctors, nurses, members of the police and those in many other professions have to receive this education.

Everyone is under scrutiny

Safeguarding must be one of the most flourishing industries in the country and I wouldn’t know where to start to try to calculate just how many hundreds of thousands are involved in it. In the Diocese of Chichester alone, there is a full time Safeguarding supremo with his own office and machinery for the production and dissemination of propaganda on a huge scale. The supremo has many part time assistants who all report to him. And every parish church must appoint its own Safeguarding officer. If I suspect that someone I come across in the course of my work is being abused in any of the four ways mentioned above, I must on no account use my own judgement and, perhaps, intervene to find out what’s going on. No, though I am a priest with a lifetime’s experience, I must regard myself as incapable of any qualities of discernment and of any moral authority and, in the words of our safeguarding tutor, “Simply report your suspicions to your Safeguarding officer. And that’s your job done.”

Now, what does the “job done” look like? It might involve a child being removed from the family home by social workers. Or, in a recent case a teacher sent an email to an underage pupil which was suspected of ambiguity. Did it contain a sexual reference? Not according to the girl who received it. But others saw it and thought it did contain a sexual element and reported it to their Safeguarding officer who in turn reported it to the police. The police interviewed the teacher but no charges were made. But, because an allegation had been made – albeit by people to whom the original message had not been addressed – the teacher was put on the sex offenders’ register. No trial. No charges. So the teacher was innocent – but he was being treated as if he were guilty.

Big Brother is no longer just a nasty character in a novel by George Orwell. He is alive and sitting in his office in charge of surveillance. In fact he is sitting in thousands upon thousands of offices nationwide.

I returned home to Eastbourne from that Safeguarding Course and opened the newspaper where I read:

“The headmaster of Eastbourne College, Mr Tom Lawson, was having to vet the sermons of visiting preachers – including bishops – in case there might be a complaint about extremism. Mr Lawson claimed that stifling rules and red tape had forced him to do this.”

So we have universal Safeguarding, we have safe spaces in our universities where students are hermetically sealed in case they come up against some ideas which they might find uncongenial. In alleged cases of abuse, we see many thousands of those accused treated as if they are guilty and punished accordingly without there having been any public examination of the allegations; and in some cases where the accused himself is not even made aware of the substance of the allegations.

We have complete freedom of speech. It’s just that we’re not allowed to say anything. Surveillance is endemic. The truth is being set at naught. Our liberties are everywhere traduced.

These things are not happening in some remote dystopia.

They are happening now and in England

10 Nov

It’s the Germans–stupid!

Jean Claude Juncker is fond of reminding us of how wonderfully the EU ensures peace in Europe. He was at it again yesterday and eulogised his beloved transnational bureaucratic dictatorship as “a benign fraternity.” His short memory allows him to overlook the breakdown in fraternity during the Bosnian-Serbian-Croatian wars of the 1990s. All the Eurocrats there have ever been repeat relentlessly that it is only the EU which prevents the rise of aggressive, expansionist factions and they often add the judgement that if only the EU had been around in the 1930s the Nazis would never have been allowed to tyrannise the continent.

There are more holes in this argument than there are on the golf course at St Andrew’s. But the chief flaw is the one that is always overlooked. The European wars of the last 150 years happened not because of upstart rogues such as Hitler and his gang: they were all the logical consequence of Prussian militarism.

I’s not the Nazis. It’s the Germans – stupid!

When Napoleon conquered Prussia In 1806 he issued an edict which limited any Prussian army to 42,000. The King of Prussia obediently recruited such an army. Then, after a year, he dismissed the whole lot – officers and men – and recruited a further 42.000. He did the same every year, so that after a decade he had a trained army on active service and a very substantial reserve of 420,000 highly trained soldiers led by an elite and aristocratic officer class.

It wasn’t the Nazis who instigated the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. It was the Germans under Otto von Bismarck – and specifically the North German Confederation of States – which aimed to extend German hegemony.

Similarly in the years before 1914 it was Kaiser Wilhelm who wanted to build a great trading empire and for Germany to have its “place in the sun.” He was well-equipped to achieve this with one of the largest standing armies in Europe to support him. Moreover, his political and popular support was assured because for a century the officer class had also formed the administrative class, thus unifying the interests of the military and the government.

This was the powerful tradition inherited by Hitler in 1933.

But what Bismarck failed to secure by force or arms in 1870-71, Kaiser Bill between 1914-18 and Adolf Hitler between 1939-45, Angela Merkel has achieved without firing a shot. Through the EU and monetary union via the Euro – the Deutschmark by any other name – Germany effectively controls the twenty-seven EU states and oppresses the unindustrialised southern states of Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal. If you want confirmation that there is a de facto German empire, just ask the impoverished Greeks or anyone among the 50% unemployed young people in Spain

This hegemony is operated more completely by Frau Merkel than dreamed of by Otto, Wilhelm or Adolf.

I am sure the delicious irony is not lost on Jean Claude Juncker.

06 Nov

Taxation: Institutionalised Theft Disguised as a Virtue

Anything to have a go at the Queen.

Her Majesty is accused of being among those who invest some of their money in countries and institutions where tax rates are lower.

The word used all over the press is precisely that one “accused.” But accusations are only in respect of actions deemed to be wrong. The Queen and others who seek to avoid tax have done nothing wrong: they are merely acting prudently.

Tax evasion is a crime but tax avoidance is not.

Naturally, all lefties, Guardianistas and the BBC endemic are appalled that people should – though it be within the law – decide to pay as little tax as possible. For example Dame Margaret Hodge adorned The Today Programme this morning with her efflorescent platitudes and excoriated all tax-avoiders. She said, “We have a social contract in which we all come together and, according to our means, contribute to the common pot.”

No we don’t. If that is anyone’s idea of how politics and economics works, then it’s bunkum. The whole notion of the social contract from Rousseau to John Rawls is the mythological framework, masquerading as moral rectitude, by which governments persuade, coerce and bully the people into paying…paying for what? For the government, of course. And for the institutionalised profligacy which spends our money on things we don’t want.

The government doesn’t know best. We know best how to spend our own money.

For example, I’m not at all happy that the government should use my money to provide, free of charge, homosexuals with prophylactic pills which enable them to go forth and fornicate profusely without the danger of catching AIDs

Among the other wastages I resent paying for is the state education system which is so dysfunctional that it should be described as child abuse. What other words are there to describe such a system which, according to the Education department’s own figures, leaves 43% of our children – after eleven years of full time, compulsory and hideously expensive schooling – unable to read, write and count efficiently?

We have lived a long time under Labour and Conservative governments based on a lie. This lie is the article of socialist faith which declares that what unreconstructed political reactionaries like me describe as “my money” really belongs to the government to control, disperse or with-hold according to its own whim.

This sort of government – the only sort of government seen in Britain for decades – is not about good management of the nation’s resources: it is about political control.

Taxation is the government’s method by which it seeks – and in which it succeeds spectacularly – to control us.

All socialism is inherently unjust. And it has never worked anywhere. When it is practised moderately, it inhibits the people’s freedom. When it is practised thoroughly, it leads to Stalin and the gulag or presently in Venezuela – so admired by our leader-in-waiting Jeremy Corbyn – people rummaging in dustbins for food.

Down with the Exchequer! God save the Queen!

05 Nov

If thy ‘ead offend thee, cut it off

The country is terribly short of shrinks.

One in ten consultant psychiatrist posts in England are currently unfilled in the NHS,according to a report by the Royal College of Psychiatrists (RCP) and the number of unfilled posts has doubled in the past four years.

Wales is also struggling to fill posts, with vacancies of 9%, while Scotland and Northern Ireland have vacancy rates of 6% and 2% respectively.

The college called the vacancies “frankly alarming” Prof Wendy Burn of the RCP, said the shortage means patients might be waiting months to see a psychiatrist, during which time they could be getting worse.

Professor Burn did not consider the distinct possibility that sufferers might get worse if they did see a psychiatrist. If you want to be a plumber, it helps if you’re a practical sort. Priests need to be religious. By the same token, many psychiatrists are more than a little mad.

I read the snooker champion Ronnie O’ Sullivan’s account of how, some years ago, he turned to a Freudian psychiatrist to help him overcome his depressions. Ronnie’s father was doing time for murdering Charlie Kray’s driver. The psychiatrist, having noted that Ronnie sometimes cued left-handed, asked him if his father had stabbed his victim with his left hand. Ronnie’s comment on the psychiatrist’s question was: “It did me ‘ead in.”

There is a century old tradition of Freudian – or, as we say in English, Fraudian – psychiatry. And then between the wars there arose a fashion for Behaviourism. This is a science of the mind which does not think there is such a thing as a mind. So psychiatrists should study our behaviour which is defined exclusively in terms of stimulus and response – the famous S-R relation which the renowned Behaviourist B.F. Skinner (1904-1990) employed to teach rats the way out of mazes and pigeons to play table tennis.

(By the way, the “B.F.” stands for Burrhus Frederic – and not what you were thinking).

On this subject, Arthur Koestler commented: “Now that we have lost our souls, gone out of our minds and seem about to lose all consciousness, what is there left for psychologists to study? Professor Skinner’s answer is ‘Rats!’”

Similarly, the philosopher Peter Geach said, mockingly, “A Behaviourist knows he’s hungry when he observes himself running home for his lunch.”

From phenobarbitone – which I once heard mispronounced as “female baritone” – to Prozac, psychiatry has come up with a succession of wonder drugs. We were assured back in the 1960s that the new benzodiazepams such as Librium, Ativan and Valium – “mother’s little helpers” – so you see, it was the women who got to swallow the lion’s share – were without side effects and non-addictive. We now know that millions worldwide have been on these drugs for generations and can’t kick the habit.

Scientific psychiatry brought forth many blessings. There was electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) – very popular in the 1950s and 1960s – which works by giving patients electric shocks to produce seizures which, it was hoped, might relieve the conditions of depression and mania. The treatment was typically administered to a patient three times a week for several weeks, very commonly to pregnant women and those going through the menopause. 71% of all patients treated with ECT are women. It is still being administered in NHS hospitals. Rosemary, sister to JFK, received this treatment and was incapacitated for the rest of her life. The distinguished New Zealand novelist Janet Frame was among countless others who suffered greatly owing to this procedure.

I suppose the mother and father of all treatments for mental disturbances is the frontal lobe lobotomy, named from two Greek words meaning “brain” and “slice.” The ultimate method, as Ronnie might say, of doin’ yer ‘ead in. Surgeons cut out part of the cortex. Again this is more often performed on women. Its inventor Antonio Muniz was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1949 for coming up with this little beauty. There is a vigorous campaign to have his award annulled.

Jesus famously quipped, “if thy hand offend thee, cut it off. If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.” – Mark 9:43ff. The lobotomists have gone one better than the Lord: “If thy head offend thee, cut it off.”

You know, I’m only an uninstructed layman in these matters, but I just wonder if, rather than seek ever more ingenious ways to treat mentally deranged people, it might be better to try to create a saner world?

04 Nov

The Ladies Misbehaving

Michael White is that rare – perhaps unique? – thing: a lefty with a sense of humour. His political articles and sketches in The Guardian have been making me laugh for decades. But this week Michael was not joking.

He was a guest on BBC Radio Four’s The Media Show, hosted by Andrea Catherwood and of course the subject was the “inappropriate behaviour” of the naughty MPs and so many others that Andrea wondered if to our concept of institutional racism we should add institutional sexual misbehaviour. This was when Michael roughly interfered with the feminist, politically-correct prejudices of the BBC.

He said that inappropriate sexual behaviour was not exclusive to men but that “Clever, attractive young women can play the power game too.”

Outrage was swift and violent. Andrea expostulated – which is a polite way of saying she went into full bollocking mode: “D’you mean to say these women are at fault?”

Good grief! Didn’t Michael understand that he was talking on the BBC where it is an article of the severest dogma that women can never be at fault?

No, he didn’t understand or, brave man, he didn’t care. He said, “I’m going further than that. I’m saying women too can be predators.”

He spoke the truth – however unacceptable to the politically-correct establishment. We were given an example only this week of a woman prominent in society exhibiting inappropriate sexual behaviour. Kenneth Branagh reported that Dame Judi Dench had exposed herself to him backstage. Poor Ken, I understand he’s still receiving counselling for post-traumatic stress disorder!

Moreover, Michael didn’t merely speak the truth: he spoke the universal truth that there have always been women sexual predators. I don’t suppose they read the Bible much at the Beeb, but they might make a start with the story of those two randy young tarts the daughters of Lot who got their father drunk and took advantage of him: “And the firstborn said unto the younger, Our father is old and there is not a man in the earth to come in unto us after the manner of all the earth. Come, let us make our father drink wine and we will lie with him” (Genesis 19: 31-32).

Well, if they haven’t read the Bible, surely they have glanced at bits of bawd in Chaucer and Shakespeare – to say nothing of the misconduct of some of the Borgia ladies. I won’t get on to the psychopathic predations of such as Rosemary west and Myra Hindley.

Even nice girls have been known to lay hands unseemly on men and boys

My first job out of school was in a textiles warehouse in Leeds. My bosses wanted me to gain experience and advancement in the trade, so they sent me on a week’s course to the cotton mill in Barrowford, near Nelson in Lancashire. Here I came across a most unladylike custom. When a new lad, aged fifteen, started at the mill, the girls would leave their looms and shuttles, womanhandle him into the ladies and black his balls with boot polish.

I rush to add that I don’t think even Andrea Leadsome in all her fury at Michael Fallon would have bent so low as to smear the former defence secretary’s scrotum with a coating of Cherry Blossom

Quite posh girls have been known to misbehave. In my late teens I worked in the stats office at the Ministry of Labour. In those days before computers, all official letters and documents were typed by young women specially employed for the task. I would be sent down from the third floor to the typing pool on the first floor, there to enter on a scene so intimidating I nearly dropped my documents and ran straight back up the staircase, In the scented haze, thirty or forty miniskirted nubile females sat at desks in ranks. When a man opened the door, the clattering keys would cease and the timorous visitor, if he was a handsome – or even a passable – man would be ogled and whistled at.

At my theological college I quickly learned to heed a word of warning concerning the lecherous assistant cook and housemaid, “Don’t let yourself get talked into shelling peas with Celia!”

Sexual misconduct has always gone on and it always will even if Mrs May passes a Bill for the Abolition of Original Sin. So let’s ditch the shock and mock horror and get on with the serious business of running the country.

I am just a little concerned to know whether Michael White got out of that BBC studio alive

03 Nov

Look on these things and laugh

There was a spectacular sunrise over the sea this morning in Eastbourne, so I got out of bed early and, with as much cheerfulness as I could muster, prepared myself for another day in the asylum. It’s getting so you daren’t open the newspaper or switch on the BBC propaganda machine for fear of cracking up completely and running out into the street shouting, screaming and foaming at the mouth.

What’s new? The defence secretary has resigned because fifteen years ago he placed his hand on a woman’s knee. Even the woman – described of course as “the victim” – said it amounted to nothing much. It is alleged Mr Fallon also gurgled suggestively in Andrea Leadsom’s ear, perhaps with a view to some hanky-panky. Getting suggestive with Andrea Leadsom? Like cuddling an icebreaker. Well, I suppose a defence secretary ought to display some courage.

Someone else whose name I forget – they are all so damned forgettable, these persons-of-note and celebs – has apologised because forty years he spoke to a woman “in a funny tone of voice.”

The madness of modern society is produced by politicians and the media who vigorously sexualise every aspect of our lives – children from the age of five get early training in sexual deviancy – and then affect surprise and outrage when people behave in a frisky fashion

Don’t worry. it will pass. The “inappropriate behaviour” syndrome will go the way of the “every egg is poisonous” proclamation and mad cow disease. In other words, it’s a fashion, a nine days wonder. Before it dies out though, it will have to go through its utterly bonkers stage. In fact we are reaching this stage now – the day when anyone who has not been chatted-up or mildly molested – that is has not been accorded “victim” status – will feel feel socially excluded, a pariah.

But while this latest nonsense is running its course, it is doing a hell of a lot of serious political damage. Brexit is in crisis. The world teeters on the edge of nuclear war. The global Islamic insurgency gathers pace. Immigration remains out of control. Meanwhile the Marxist Corbyn – friend of Hamas, Hezbollah and lately of the IRA – prepares his government in waiting, all unchallenged

The only response from the prime minister is to thrash about like a fish escaped the landing net.

Theresa May is so comically, so pathologically, incompetent that she dare not fortify her political chances by having around her colleagues of ability. Each one is carefully checked to make sure he/she is no damn use and therefore no threat.

That is why we now have her chum Gavin Williamson – of no ministerial experience and knowing nothing of the armed forces – promoted to be defence secretary in place of knee-stroker Fallon.

When we recall the names of those in post-war cabinet office, we can hardly help being impressed – even when the politics of some of them may not be to our liking. There was more than a smattering of ability and panache around in those days.

Churchill’s cabinet in Coronation Year included Eden, Butler, Macmillan, Sandys, Thorneycroft and Brook.

Wilson in 1967 sat round the cabinet table with Stewart, Castle, Crossman, Jenkins and Shore.

Maggie’s gang in 1987 featured Whitelaw, Wakeham, Lawson, Howe, Hurd, Baker, Parkinson, Ridley and Waddington

Now look at Theresa’s pigmies and toadies: Green, Rudd, Greening, Patel, Williamson and Sajid – “Terrorist attacks are part and parcel of living in a cosmopolitan society” – Javid.

Look on these things and laugh. But our laughing is only hysterical. The cackling of the madhouse.

01 Nov

The New Janet and John Reader

“Look, “says Janet “I am a little girl.”

“And I am a little boy,” says John

Janet smiles: “I can be a boy if I wish.”

John pulls a funny face: “And I can be a girl!”

“Can’t!”

“Can!”

“Can’t” How do you know?”

“The gender man told me.”

“There’s no such thing as the gender man. It’s only the prime minister dressed up.”

“Does your dad dress up too, Janet?”

“Sometimes.”

“My dad used to be a woman.”

“Didn’t!”

“Did!”

“Didn’t! Then he would be your mum and not your dad.”

“I like your dress, Janet.”

“You can have it if you want. When I am a boy I shall wear short pants.”

“I am nearly ready to be a girl.”

“How can you tell?”

“I sit down to do a wee.”

“I tried standing up, but there was an awful mess.”

“If I don’t like being a girl, can I change back to a boy again?”

“Of course. You can change as many times as you like.”

“I don’t have to be a boy or a girl.”

“What will you be then?”

“I shall be Zie. The gender man told me.”

“What sort of girl do you want to be, John?”

“I want to be a gay girl.”

“What is that?”

“I shall kiss lots and lots of other girls.”

John starts to cry: “So then you won’t kiss me anymore!”

“Yes I shall – because you will be a girl by then. Why are you still crying”

“I’m so mixed up. And the gender man is scarier than the bogey man.”

“Yes, I wish they would just teach us how to read instead!”

All Things Considered

Rev Dr Peter Mullen

Monthly Archives: November 2017