Friday 17 December 2010

When are our parents going to get back and stop all this bloody nonsense?

You may recall that Rod Liddle wrote an article for the Spectator after the election in which he predicted that, while the country may have got rid of a truly dismal Labour government, and while it now had a Conservative Prime Minister in charge, none of the things which drove us ordinary folk mad would change. And, of course, he was right.

Two things have definitely improved: Gordon Brown is no longer Prime Minister and someone is, at last, addressing the problem of the rate of increase in Britain’s humungous debt.

But that’s pretty much all the good news taken care of.

Public spending isn’t coming down – it’s just that the increase in spending will be slightly less than the massive increase that Labour had planned. Among the people paying for this slight reduction will be the parents of university-age students who live in England, people with savings (who are losing out due to the increase in inflation caused by “quantitative easing” – i.e. debasing the currency by printing money), and those who work for the armed forces, who will either lose their jobs or the variety of perks that allow them to put food on the table and educate their children. 

A few civil servants and council employees will be made redundant, a few police will take handsomely-funded early retirement, and some welfare scroungers will no longer find it quite so absurdly easy to claim disability benefits. 

Big deal!

Inside the Westminster politico-media bubble, this package of measures is being seen as revolutionary: the state is being rolled back and public spending is being cut to the bone. The BBC and some newspapers are in a right old lather about the pain being inflicted on the British people – the “poor” in particular.

What stupendous nonsense it all is.

Tens of billions could be carved out of those bloated shibboleths, the NHS and the state education system. Half of all civil servants could be sacked instantly and no one – except them – would notice. 

But that isn’t what’s upsetting. What’s upsetting is that, when it comes to the things that really get our goat, that make us splutter with rage and despair, nothing whatsoever has  changed.

Immigrants continue to flood across our borders. Hard working, indigenous Britons keep fleeing the country.

Vicious criminals keep being set free. Half-witted judges keep refusing to deport “asylum-seeking” criminals back to their countries of origin, even when they kill British children. Teenagers keep getting violently drunk and keep stabbing each other (and any adult who tries to curb their merry exuberance).

Muslim Nazis living on our taxes are still allowed to wave two fingers in the faces of the people who pay their benefits, by, for instance, holding obscenely provocative public protests during which they insult this country, its religion, and its armed forces, while being protected by ourpolice. Britain continues to be a Mecca for Islamic terrorists and extremists.

The protesters who mock our democracy and tolerance by defiling Parliament Square are shifted off the grass and immediately decamp to the pavements.

Billions of pounds of our money keep being sequestered to prop up that symbol of human stupidity, the Euro – even though we aren’t in the Eurozone, and even though most of us would vote to leave the EU (given the chance). 

The luxurious lifestyles of the Celtic fringe countries continue to be paid for by English taxes, while the people of England (who have not spoken yet) get absolutely nothing in return, except abuse and hatred.

Our schools continue to churn out illiterates who then go on to study pseudo-subjects at pseudo-universities. Our government continues Labour’s policy of wealth redistribution – via the tax and benefits systems – without asking the lucky winners for any sort of behavioural adjustments in return.

Health and Safety officials continue to terrorise anyone who wants to hold any event of a celebratory or socially useful nature. (So much for the Big Society.)

Our hospitals continue to be staffed by nurses who don’t want to nurse, third world cleaners who have no interest in or knowledge of hygiene, and administrators who couldn’t run a bath.

In the midst of the third freezing winter in a row (following the third cold, wet summer in a row) we’re planning to further bankrupt ourselves in order to cut carbon emissions to solve a totally non-existent problem.

The prison service continues to outrage the public by instructing guards to address psychopathic scum as “Mister”, while recognizing “paganism” as a religion on a par with Christianity. 

Bankers – who, with the collusion of the last Labour government, brought this country to its knees - still have their snouts firmly stuck in the bonus trough, while middle class middle-earners keep having their pockets picked by the state and any financial institution they do business with.

The Left, with its hatred of Western society, culture, history and tradition, still controls practically every aspect of our public life, and continues to punish anyone who can’t claim vicitim status.

Here’s the big question, the one many of us have asking since (at least) 1997:

When are Mummy and Daddy going to return from the party they’ve been to and throw out the trollop of a babysitter and her abusive drug-addict boyfriend, who locked us kids in the bedroom, invited over a bunch of mates, and then proceeded to run riot - drinking all the booze, urinating on the carpets, smashing up the furniture, leaving all the taps on, emptying the freezer, running up a huge bill on the family credit card while emptying the bank account, ripping up all our clothes and setting fire to the curtains? 

But it’s not going to happen: the grown-ups are all too busy trying to scrape a living so they can pay the taxes which the self-indulgent twenty-somethings who now run this country will then hand over to their European soul-mates and the vast army of angry, whining, greedy, feckless adolescents at least half the people in this country seem to have turned into.

5 comments:

  1. Time was when we had a Lord Chancellor's Department, like a proper country. Then one of the children, Blair, tried to abolish the post of Lord Chancellor and we ended up with a Ministry of Justice, a construction any Englishman would have associated with a Latin American dictatorship or one of the satellite states of the USSR.

    Still, at least we don't have a Ministry of the Interior. Yet. We still have a Home Office.

    The previous Permanent Secretary, Sir John Gieve, one of the adults we might hope to be able to look up to with respect, had a rather torrid time with the Home Office accounts [1]:

    QUOTE
    A FINANCIAL shambles at the Home Office resulted in its accounting system producing figures showing transactions of more than £26 trillion: one and a half times higher than the GDP of the planet, according to a report published today.
    UNQUOTE

    He had to go. But where? A computer with a sense of irony made him Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, just in time to oversee the collapse of the banking world.

    Sir John was replaced as Permanent Secretary to the Home Office by Sir David Normington. He hadn't been there for long, so it wasn't his fault, but he promptly lost his Home Secretary, Charles Clarke [2].

    Clarke's replacement, John Reid, started by diminishing the Home Office [2] ("unfit for purpose", etc ...) and finished off the job by handing the department's traditional responsibility for prisons over to the new-fangled Ministry of Justice.

    Sir David's empire was shrinking. But at least he was still responsible for the National Identity Scheme, whereby everyone in the country would be given an ID card and entered on a National Identity Register. At least they would have been, until the coalition government arrived and killed the scheme stone dead. £292 million spent and nothing to show for it. Absolutely nothing.

    The Home Office is now ostracised in identity management circles, their old job having been given to the Cabinet Office and DWP.

    Not looking good for Sir David, was it, the children misbehaving all over the place, particularly Jacqui Smith, but at least he could hope to retire, as he does in a few days time, leaving the ship stable.

    Oh dear. No. Now look. His Home Secretary has just been found guilty of breaking the law, in the matter of temporary caps on non-EEA immigration.

    Are there any adults left?

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    1. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article690660.ece

    2. http://dematerialisedid.com/BCSL/eOdyssey.html
    Saturday, December 18, 2010 - 11:30 AM

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  2. I'm not really an expert on these things, DM, but you can't really blame a civil servant for the fact that the Home Secretary is confused about where she lives and has a husband whose guilty pleasure is not the sort of film recommended in the Gronners blog. Still, the shame of being "ostracised in identity management circles" should bring the chap to his senses.
    Saturday, December 18, 2010 - 11:47 AM

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  3. DM, as a BBC political journalist for several years, I’m afraid I took the classic news approach of not really bothering about the details, which, in hindsight, was shameful. Coverage of the Civil Service and the vigorous shafting of the constitution was always considered too dull to bother with – by myself as much as anyone. I’m beginning to realize how wrong I was – and grateful that others, like yourself, are paying attention.

    Charles Moore writes an excellent article in this morning’s Telegraph,( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/charlesmoore/8210383/The-beleaguered-masses-are-wondering-who-is-on-their-side.html)
    on the same theme as my rant, but somewhat more elegantly expressed (I think he’s probably the best political commentator they’ve got left):

    “This country's political culture has become much more Continental. Once we had political parties with deep roots and large mass memberships. They were key participants in what is now called the Big Society. Today, we have a nation ruled by a large, subsidised, semi-permanent political, financial and bureaucratic class that seems impervious to voters' wishes. William Hague may be our new Foreign Secretary, but have you noticed any difference in the policy our permanent representative pursues in Brussels? The Tories may mumble about a new British Human Rights Act, but the judges continue to find in favour of the most extravagant indulgence for the most undeserving people. Our politics has become more like that of a court than of a Parliament. When electors ask, "Who is our friend at court?", they cannot find an answer.”

    Friends of mine, (of ours, DM), who live in Italy, told me about ten years’ ago that Labour was Europeanising British politics, and that this would result – as it already had elsewhere in the EU – in a semi-permanent ruling class doing exactly what it wanted, and an irrelevant electorate who’d be left wondering why nobody ever paid the slightest attention to their wishes, no matter which sleazy snake-oil salesman they voted for. The same thing’s been happening in the US, of course, but at least there the Tea Party has sprung into existence as a response to the death of representative democracy – here and in the rest of Europe nothing much seems to be happening. Which is a shame.

    Ex-KCS: I really wish you hadn’t mentioned Jacqui Smith’s husband: the image of him “jacquing off” while watching a film featuring anal sex which I was unknowingly paying for has been the “trouble of my dreams” ever since. It’s also just about the most powerful symbol of the deranged arrogance of Britain’s politico-media class during the Noughties. As Nigel Farage was moved to ask of another group of enthusiastic tossers: “Just who the hell do you people think you are?”
    Saturday, December 18, 2010 - 03:24 PM

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  4. I wish I could say it was deliberate, Ex-KCS, but, no, "ostracised in identity management circles" is a product of my inner Pooter. Well spotted.
    Sunday, December 19, 2010 - 12:36 PM

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  5. Scott, thank you very much for your comments.

    One gloss on the matter, it strikes me, failing to report the civil service more, is that the meeja are missing some very good stories. Which is silly of them. They could be boosting circulation, increasing audiences, attracting more advertising.

    For example, Martha Lane Fox is in charge of Race Online 2012, the campaign to get more people using the web. She says that 10 million people in this country have never used the web. She also says that all public services should be delivered over the web. That would save money. Imagine what Eddie Mair could do with that on PM.

    It's not difficult getting this news. Government departments spend all day every day issuing press releases, trumpeting their hard work.

    There's a chap called Tony Collins who has covered NPfIT for the past nine years. That's the NHS's National Programme for IT. Slated to cost £12 billion, they have managed to spend £6 billion already, they've got the bit between their teeth and nothing if going to stop them spending the next £6 billion, not even the fact that the NHS doesn't want the wretched NPfIT, it was Tony Blair's idea and, zombie-like, it just won't die.

    The other day, Tony reported [1] that the Department of Health are about to sign a contract for between £2,700,000,000 and £3,200,000,000 for the next slug of NPfIT software that no-one wants.

    Staggering numbers, I think you may agree, have you seen this matter covered anywhere? Me neither. I wrote to the Guardian and suggested that maybe a bit of the front pages currently devoted to St Julian could be given over to the billions being wasted in the NHS. What is newsworthy? Well, apparently, not that, what we all need is to be told that it's snowing, as though we can't see that out the window.

    These crazy civil service decisions are taken by people. There is a huge cast of extraordinary grotesques in this play, it's real-world soap opera [2], I just can't see the difficulty in turning them into entertaining news. What's the matter with the meeja? Aren't they interested in surviving?

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    1. http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/the-tony-collins-blog/2010/12/more-npfit-craziness/index.htm

    2. http://dematerialisedid.com/BCSL/Adventure.html
    Sunday, December 19, 2010 - 04:06 PM

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