The Daily Telegraph ran a piece the other day about Whitley Bay’s council sticking up fake shop fronts to cover up the fact that many businesses have gone bust and to create the illusion that their High Street is still thriving. What a perfect metaphor for our prevailing culture of fakery!
For instance, Gordon Brown says that, as Chancellor, he never turned down a single request for defence spending in support of our lads fighting in Iraq. He also says that he’s really optimistic about the British economy. See? Just say it often enough and it’ll come true.
The Met Office says it has collated all kinds of research which shows, definitively, once and for all, (no, straight up, honest!) that not only is global warming a fact, but it’s absolutely, undoubtedly, cross-our-hearts-and-hope-to-die - and we heard this from a friend, right, so it must be true - caused by our own bad carbon-emitting selves.
And when has the Met Office ever given us cause to doubt what it says?
They’ve also just announced an end to long-term forecasts - to avoid further humiliation, one presumes. Of course, predicting the future is problematic, because time can prove you wrong. When your predictions proves inaccurate, you look a bit of an idiot, and there’s no way of covering it up. (Mind you, if Gordon Brown were running the Met Office, he’d now be assuring us that we’d just experienced the mildest winter since records began.) The Met has decided that issuing fantasy interpretations of dodgy data concerning the past is a lot safer than issuing hilariously inaccurate predictions regarding the future. Mainly because you can get away with any old bollocks! Say it often enough…
And remember all those assurances from a succession of British governments that closer European integration would certainly not mean a transfer of power to unelected bureaucrats in Brussells? Well, next month the low-grade bank clerk and his sinister army of highly-paid, unelected gauleiters will announce proposals for a “green” levy on petrol which could cost the UK some £3000,000,000. It’ll be the first time the European junta has extracted money from subject peoples in nation states without bothering to ask elected governments for it. Still, don’t worry, let me assure readers that the British Government remains firmly in charge of the country: only ridiculous Little Englanders would suggest that this represents any loss of sovereignty. The very idea! See? Say it often enough…
A plan to equip every police force in England and Wales with mobile finger scanners will save officers 30 minutes a pop, according to the National Police Improvement Agency (whoever the hell they are). According to a spokesman that’ll mean giving our boys in blue tons more time to spend “working in their communities, helping to fight crime, bringing offenders to justice, and better protecting the public”.
Of course it will, dear.
And our courts will immediately renounce their policy of releasing every criminal who appears before them back into the community before you can say, “Go on, son, fill yer boots!”, and Labour will start building lots of new prisons to house all the extra offenders police are going to catch via their brilliant new electronic identification aid – and the police themselves won’t spend all the extra time at their disposal in the canteen or hiding behind their desks internet shopping and planning their next holiday or car purchase or dreaming up new ways of punishing the law-abiding middle classes. No, the vast rising tide of crime (which is all in our imagination in any case) will be reversed and the police will be our friends once more. Say it often enough…
And tomorrow, even though it’s Sunday, I’m getting up at six and I’m going to work a 12-hour day and go on a diet and lose two stone by the end of March and go for a ten-mile run and find a cure for cancer and abolish Third World poverty and…
Yes, this is fun!
Maybe next week the government and its agencies can simply announce that they’re abolishing reality and will henceforth inhabit a parallel universe where whatever they announce will come true if they say it often enough!
Mind you, it’s the principle on which they’ve governed for the past 12 years.
Why change a winning formula?
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