Arms and the Placeman

Say what you like about Thatcher. No, really. Say what you like. I do. Often. But while she may have been venal, vindictive and callous, she was transparently so and therefore sincerely venal, vindictive and callous. She had neither the time nor aptitude for convincing artifice and we knew where we were with her, even if this was at the wrong end of her lead-lined handbag. This albeit inadvertant honesty was to prove her downfall, something David Cameron has clearly taken note of.

While our on/off/is he? isn't he?/on/off again friend, Muammar Gaddafi, is overseeing Libya’s brutal implosion – and without even having the decency to follow the West’s retrospectively-written script, recently performed in Tunisia and Egypt - our prime minister is presently on an already planned tour of fun-loving, anything-goes, liberal democracies in and around the Persian Gulf. Yesterday he was in Kuwait, ostensibly celebrating the 20^th anniversary of its liberation from the hands of Saddam, another surplus psychopath whose tyrant’s license we revoked after he'd given Iran a good hammering with made in the U.K. tools. Don’t know about you but, after watching Cameron’s performance, my skin was not satisfied with mere crawling; it grew wings and flew off into the sunset. 

A Winter's Tale

Britain in grip of “lowest media standards ever recorded”, says report out today. 

A report out today says that Britain is in the grip of the lowest media standards ever recorded. Utility companies came in for harsh criticism after the early onset of winter failed to bring about the mass power failures and phone outages that could have protected people from the deluge of tedious and nauseating sludge still gushing from a crack in a dangerously volatile and bloated ego in the London and Metropolitan area, our media correspondent can report.

Our Information Analyst believes that the worst effects of the fog of tiresome jingoism that engulfed the country could “easily have been avoided” if people had been more prepared, and continued, “but what did you expect?” A spokesman for the Met. Office told reporters that December's cold snap had been accurately predicted weeks in advance and that there was no reason for power supplies and phone lines not to have crashed within 5 minutes of the snow starting.

The privatisation of hypocrisy

After several minutes of intentionally self-limiting and perfunctory deliberations, the Scottish and U.K. Governments have agreed to privatise the hypocrisy industry. Spokesmen for both parliaments, who refused to give their names in case these were later used to identify them said, “The advancement of complex and mutually contradictory social, economic and political ambitions simultaneously requires a degree of stratospheric detachment from reality only borderline sociopaths in the private sector can deliver.

“While we recognise that the public realm can sometimes exercise extraordinary duplicity and boundless ineffectiveness, when it comes to weasel-like avoidance of accountability and complete obliviousness to serious issues, only the private sector can provide the dedicated avarice, dubiously-obtained cash and complete abdication of social responsibility required to satisfy the demands of an increasingly confused, fragmented and, let’s face it, hopelessly dysfunctional society choking itself to death on bloated expectations and a frankly astonishing sense of individual and collective entitlement.   

The many colours of Labour

In the beginning, there was pure red in all its unmistakable primary glory. As the years passed, this just got redder. But the day came when it could no longer sustain, clashing horribly against the now true blue backdrop of post-industrial Britain. After a long and bitter battle led by a Welshman with orange hair spouting purple prose, the Guardians of the Colour were replaced with fresh faces.  Despite being completely green, these upstarts got back in and the party appeared to be in  the pink. 

Of course, this unsightly mix of colours became too garish and eventually blended to form a uniform brown. Brown went out of fashion fairly quickly. Now the party is out of vogue in both Westminster and Holyrood (where, during their two terms of office, a sprinkling of yellow had to be introduced.) 

Nobody was sure any more what colour they were, let alone what colour they should be. Compromise being unthinkable, they now spend their time rotating between calling black white and white black with such alarming speed that all the Scottish public can see is a dull Gray.

Alternative voting requires alternative thinking

The referendum in May inviting us to opt for proportional representation in the form of the Alternative Vote throws up more questions than any change to the voting system could possibly answer. The campaign for electoral reform, however well-intentioned, has become increasingly reliant  on, and hence subservient to, attempting to satisfy popular concepts of democracy predicated on what is clearly fallacy; a belief that it is possible to please all of the people all of the time (especially Me). Pursuing this, while it may please a few people briefly, in the not-too-long run, will satisfy nobody, ever. Even-handed, granted, but hardly a great leap forward.

There is an excuse - reason is another matter entirely - for this. We live in an age when our concern for the good of wider society generally sustains no further than the point at which it encroaches on our own increasingly sharply-defined and generally selfish aspirations. The electoral reformers, rather than addressing this pandemic of myopia through focusing on the jobs they were imperfectly elected to do, have given up on any efforts to tackle it, even though this is supposedly why-I-entered-politics.