The Aged P

Why farmers don’t need watches……

Please Note….no donkeys were harmed in the making of this video….

Interesting post at Conservative Woman by Nicholas Booth helpfully deflating the Al Murray balloon and – shock/horror – questioning his motives in claiming that he will be standing against Nigel Farage in Thanet South.

I doubt Al Murray (or his alter ego, The Pub Landlord) will be doing any door stepping in the constituency but, if he did, what sort of returns would he get? How likely is it that even one householder would suddenly be convinced that Ed Miliband is the best man to bat for Britain on the international stage? So, what can Al Murray’s motivation be?

Here’s some news just in. His publisher – Random House Penguin – is launching a new Al Murray product to coincide with the election publicity campaign. Given the long gestation period of a book, this must have been months in planning.

Murray is a moderately amusing one trick pony entertainer. His background, of course, is very “posh” but, unlike James Blunt, he covers his origins up with with a mockney accent (in character, natch) and has fashionable liberal/left views. Above all his alter ego is constructed to caricature and demonise the white van men. Thus, naturally, he escaped the sneers of Chris Bryant re posh boys/girls dominating our cultural scene.

While he remained merely a marginal showbiz celeb very few of us gave him any thought. But the move into “politics”, while probably a very shrewd PR move by his managers and agents in terms of media coverage, has made him a legitimate target for criticism – and he doesn’t like it. A man who makes belittling and embarrassing individual members of his audience a big part of his act appeared to be very sensitive to such slings and arrows when they were fired at him on Twitter (see @almurray) complaining of name calling etc.

For people like Murray satire is very much a one way street…

But the prize for the biggest Murray blooper must go to former left wing Daily Mirror hack Tom McTague, now slumming at at the Mail. After a well researched in depth investigation into UKIP ace reporter Tom came out with this gem about Farage

His election bid was also dealt a blow after stand-up comic Al Murray announced he would stand against Mr Farage as his TV character ‘The Pub Landlord’.

I’m sure the man who duffed up Nick Clegg and is making both Labour and the Tories very nervous is shaking with fear at McTague’s revelations….

Can somebody please help me out here because I am so confused.

It’s this Ched Edwards thing.

For as long as I can remember it’s been the “accepted wisdom” (i.e. the pronouncements of the BBC, The Guardian and our moral betters from the Great and the Good) that PRISON DOES NOT WORK. Not only does it not work because prisons become “universities of crime” but it is based on the false premise of “punishment”. Punishment, we are told, springs from the quaintly old fashioned concept of “revenge” – and revenge is not good….it is so…uncivilised to just lock someone up and keep them outside society.

The only true path for the law breaker is reform and redemption. Prison will make him or her depressed, morose and undervalued and these feelings will be drivers of further incidents of unco-operative behaviour.

No, far better to use procedures such as community service or probation or electronic supervision, helping the law breaker to re-engage with society.

Hence murderers, terrorists, burglars, thieves and those who violently assault and maim others are only made worse by imprisonment – the longer they are inside the more dehumanised they become. Hence very long prison sentences…20 years, 40 years, real life….are pointless. So many murderers are back on the streets after seven years or so.

The victims? Who the hell cares? They need to move on even if they can’t forgive or forget.

So what’s my problem?

It’s simply this. If PRISON DOES NOT WORK for murderers, thieves etc. why does it work for rapists, homophobes and racists? What is it about these people which makes them unqualified for redemption/reform but prime candidates for solid old fashioned PUNISHMENT?

I think we should be told……..

I Saw Thee Ships Come Sailing In

1. I saw three ships come sailing in,
On Christmas day, on Christmas day,
I saw three ships come sailing in,
On Christmas day in the morning.

2. And what1 was in those ships all three?
On Christmas day, on Christmas day,
And what was in those ships all three?
On Christmas day in the morning.

3. Our Saviour Christ and his lady2
On Christmas day, on Christmas day,
Our Saviour Christ and his lady,
On Christmas day in the morning.

4. Pray whither sailed those ships all three?
On Christmas day, on Christmas day,
Pray whither sailed those ships all three?
On Christmas day in the morning.

5. Oh, they sailed into Bethlehem,
On Christmas day, on Christmas day,
Oh, they sailed into Bethlehem,
On Christmas day in the morning.

6. And all the bells on earth shall ring,
On Christmas day, on Christmas day,
And all the bells on earth shall ring,
On Christmas day in the morning.

7. And all the Angels in Heaven shall sing,
On Christmas day, on Christmas day,
And all the Angels in Heaven shall sing,
On Christmas day in the morning.

8. And all the souls on earth shall sing,
On Christmas day, on Christmas day,
And all the souls on earth shall sing,
On Christmas day in the morning.

9. Then let us all rejoice, amain,
On Christmas day, on Christmas day,
Then let us all rejoice, amain,
On Christmas day in the morning.

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY  NEW YEAR 

SEE YOU IN JANUARY

The fragrant Isabel Hardman interviewed Libby Lane, the Church of England’s first woman bishop. In classic hack fashion she tried the “gotcha” technique to get the lady to pigeon hole herself and thus generate a headline or two. Instead Libby skilfully steered clear of the traps and thus irritated Ms Hardman.

Good for her – in my book the more journalists we can irritate the better…

However what did initially shock me were the comments underneath the article. Then I realised that in fact this was no surprise. Nothing like a post about a woman bishop to generate a wave of misogynistic bile and venom  at the Speccie proving once again that the so-called Religion of Peace and Love is home to a vast regiment of bitter and twisted haters who yearn for the good old days when heretics could be burned at the stake and women waterboarded for withcraft.

Now I’m no fan of positive discrimination – in my view the job should go to the candidate best fitted for the task without reference to gender or race or age. But I do know this – when I was teaching in a tough comprehensive and had to ask a police officer to come in to discuss an incident or an individual pupil I found the female officers more aware, more flexible and more willing to work with us than the men who generally were plodlike in their lack of imagination.

Many of my female colleagues in the school were excellent teachers with good discipline and a willingness to get stuck in whereas some of the weakest teachers were men who had as much social awareness as a pilchard.

I’m not saying that all women police or teachers are wonderful – but they need to be judged on their ability to do the job – so give Libby Lane a break and judge her in five years time.

After all she can hardly be worse than quite a few of our male bishops….

Thus thundered Simon Walters, ace reporter, otherwise known as  Political Editor For The Mail On Sunday

Nigel Farage was in another race row last night after asking supporters to rate ‘blacks, Muslims and Eastern Europeans’ in a game – with prizes of cash and a Ukip golf umbrella.The ‘rate an immigrant’ survey is part of a Ukip private survey of members aimed at helping the party draw up its policies.Sent last week by Ukip chairman Steve Crowther, it asks members to say ‘how close they feel’ to a number of groups.They include ‘Blacks, Asians, Muslims, English, Eastern Europeans and Whites’ as well as the four main political parties.Ukip activists are urged to rate each on a scale from 0 for ‘not close at all’ to 10 for ‘very close.’But the survey was slammed as a racist stunt after details were leaked to The Mail on Sunday.Last night, senior Labour MP Margaret Hodge condemned the Ukip survey as ‘shocking’

Gotcha, UKIP….we’ve finally caught up with you. It’s Hate An Immigrant week and obviously the biggest prizes will go to the biggest haters. Another coup by the fearless UKIP sniffers at the  Mail

Except ………….there is something that was missed by ace reporter Simon Walters and his team…..the survey was designed and distributed on behalf of UKIP by a team of highly respected academics. It was framed to gain an overall picture of UKIP member’s views and attitudes. Simon Walters took a set of perfectly acceptable questions, a regular feature of many of these surveys, and pimped it up as a “race quiz”. A shoddy piece of reporting that, regrettably, is often par for the course for the Mail.

Here is your UKIP Members Survey.   Please help UKIP by completing the Members Survey.

Your Answers Help the Party and You Can Win Great Prizes!

Three academics are helping us. They are Professor Matthew Goodwin (University of Nottingham and author of Revolt on the Right),
Professor Harold Clarke at the University of Texas and Professor Paul Whiteley at the University of Essex, who are former
Directors of the prestigious British Election Study.  Professor Clarke is distributing the survey.

That’s this Prof Harold Clarke

That’s this Prof Matthew Goodwin

That’s this Prof Paul Whiteley

Now, are Mr Ace Reporter Simon Walters of the Mail on Sunday and the very wealthy Labour MP Margaret Hodge (who gained a Third Class Degree at LSE) really ready to accuse these three highly distinguished academics of putting together a racist quiz for the entertainment of UKIP’s membership?

I really think we should be told….

Russell Brand – sliced and diced during BBC Question Time by a member of the audience (who was obviously a UKIP supporter)……

It had all been going so well for Brand – he had been interrupting with impunity, shouting over the women on the panel, shrieking simplistic slogans buttered by vulgarities.
‘Stand for Parliament then!’ the old man boomed. Russell looked as though he had been rabbit-punched. ‘Stand!’ repeated the man. ‘Do it!’
‘I’m scared I’d become one of them,’ mewed Brand. He meant become one of the Westminster crowd. The audience scoffed at this pathetic excuse, perhaps suspecting that multi-millionaire Brand would hate to be an MP because he’d have to declare his income and would soon be exposed as a political fraud……….The fight went out of Brand. A balloon shrivelled

Brand had prepared for the show by memorising a few pithy phrases (Farage as a “pound shop Enoch Powell” was clearly contrived but nevertheless a neat barb) and, on a series of cards, had written down a series of Unite bullet points. Add to the mix those trusty old BBCQT crowd pleasers ”bankers” (BOO) “the city” (HISS) “tax dodgers” (SNARL) and orgasms of ecstasy were rippling through many in the “balanced” audience.

Everything was working to script.

But Russell had made a fatal mistake. He had forgotten that BBCQT is a two way show. Unlike his own routines or the regular chat shows or HIGNFY the audience is not there as a congregation of sycophants whose sole purpose is to massage showbiz egos with rapturous applause. It’s there to come back at the panel with awkward ripostes – and that’s where the script gets blown out of the window.

Brand was obviously shaken by that man’s contemptuous put down and, for the rest of the programme, appeared visibly shrunken.

But why the hell does it take an anonymous face in a crowd to show up Brand as a stuttering, stumbling knownothing with less grasp of political and economic reality than an earwig of average intelligence?

It’s because, on television, he’s been given an easy ride with softball interviews, indulged like some sort of precocious infant actor from a remake of “Annie”….Paxman, anyone?

That hasn’t always been the case with other inarticulate peddlers of political  infantilism. BNP’s Nick Griffin was mercilessly dismantled on one BBCQT show and the assault was so savage that both himself and his party slipped mercifully into oblivion.

So why not Brand?

The answer, my friend, is obvious. His infantile pseudo revolutionary rhetoric, his friend of the downtrodden posturing, his carefully choreographed presence at left wing protests fits comfortably with the mindset of the middle class metropolitan poseurs who dominate the worlds of the media and the arts. They despise the “fatcats” of industry and commerce, the men and women who run the systems that generate the wealth that funds the cultural sector either directly by paying the wages which enables their employees to purchase the tickets or indirectly via the taxes that subsidise elements of the media (BBC) and whole swathes of grant funded artistic ventures.

If only once, on television, an interviewer or a fellow panellist had just turned round at the end of one of Brand’s unintelligible diatribes, looked him squarely in the eye and and said “What a load of bollocks” and asked him to explain his commercial activities in Hollywood, his association with nice little tax avoidance schemes in the UK and his regular forays into the Ritz and Claridges.

But he’s a luvvie – and luvvies never eat their own…unless they’re called Angus Deayton

It seems that The Revolution is alive and well in Bristol

In recent months, police in Bristol have dealt with over 100 related acts of vandalism to police stations, military bases, banks, multinational companies, railways and churches. The police are in little doubt as to who is responsible – anarchists and animal-liberation activists – and have put up a £10,000 reward for information that leads to the arrest of even one suspected offender. 

It’s all part of rage against The Man, of course, particularly, the establishment’s “failure to live up to green ideals”. It’s no good trying to convince ordinary voters via discussion and debate, naturally, because, frankly, the masses have been brainwashed by an education system and a media that simply sneers at environmentalists and their concerns.

It’s the Russell Brand school of “don’t vote – act” Which is rather strange when you come to think of it because isn’t it The Man in Westminster who has increased energy bills by making us pay for vast numbers of expensive and inefficient windmills – and insisted that the school curriculum should teach some very questionable “facts” about “manmade global warming”

The primary driver of  this “green vandalism” is, of course, hatred of humans….we are all far too stupid and selfish to rein in our greed – and we need to be taught a lesson. Echoing the ISIS jihadists the fault lies with the seductions of the modern world. We need to return to a life of marginal consumption away from the technologies that have poisoned our world view. In other words – a medieval rural based self-sufficient society where travel is limited and priests (be they imams or green gurus) can keep our minds tamed and our horizons lowered….

….and if they have to use violence to recreate that world….so be it…

Neil Hamilton has just stood down from Ukip selection in Basildon S & endorsed local cllr Kerri Smith, reinstated by HQ as contender today

— Michael Crick (@MichaelLCrick) December 10, 2014

That is really good news. In the age of Douglas Carswell, Diane James, Tim Akers and a multitude of others like them – serious people for a serious party – poor old Neil has simply too much baggage. Rightly or wrongly he will always be associated with brown envelopes and cash for questions and 1990s Tory Sleaze  and subsequent appearances on low level TV shows, describing himself as  “an object of professional curiosity” Perhaps he hoped UKIP, which he joined in 2011, would provide an opportunity for a political second coming.

On the surface he appeared to receive a welcome but, though he had aspirations to become a candidate for the Euros he failed to make the final cut. I heard him speak at the 2013 UKIP Conference where he was presented as the party’s Campaign Director. He was pure unadulterated ham. The party was already on a high and all speakers, good or bad, got a good round of applause – except Neil. The clapping was polite, nothing more and I noticed that quite a few members kept their hands apart. Obviously they shared my  misgivings.

He was removed from his new role a few months later and appeared to be a fading star so the news that he was replacing Natasha Bolter at the South Basildon UKIP hustings was a nasty shock. However, by a strange coincidence (cough,cough,) on the very day of the hustings it seemed that Mr H received a letter from UKIP’s beancounters asking some rather awkward questions about expense claims. He then turned up at the hustings, withdrew his candidacy and endorsed local UKIP councillor Kerry Smith.

Sighs of relief all round….

With hindsight the candidate selection procedure for South Basildon showed up some flaws. Not much due diligence appears to have been done on Mrs Bolter, a Labour defector who joined UKIP only four months ago. Councillor Smith had been blocked from the hustings and although he didn’t throw his toys out of the pram some local members were unsettled. Then the sudden appearance of Neil Hamilton, carpetbagger extraordinaire, threatened to turn the whole thing into a circus…..but, fortunately sanity prevailed.

I do have a sneaking admiration for Neil. He has taken quite a few kicks from fate (mostly as a result of his own actions) and remained chipper and self deprecating. His wife, Christine, is his tower of strength – a tough cookie and a tiger in defence of her man.

Now if Christine Hamilton took it into her mind to put herself forward as a candidate, well, that might be a different story…

A confession.

My first political action was helping my dad, a working class Tory, put a poster in our window for the 1950 election. Since then, until 2013 I was often an active party member but always a loyal Tory voter…sometimes while holding my nose (Heath) other times almost ecstatic with enthusiasm (Thatcher)

Admittedly from 2006 I had my doubts about Cameron and developed an interest in UKIP but I only actually joined UKIP in 2013 because of Diane James and Eastleigh. Until then, outside of Farage, many other UKIP figures did appear to me to be oddballs. Diane James was no oddball and, more importantly, she almost won – and that was why I joined. UKIP was obviously appealing to a considerable number of ordinary voters.

But I have never been a libertarian.

After all, who in terms of practical politics could honestly see a “libertarian” government being elected and then proceeding to dismantle the apparatus of the state? Ron Paul won the devotion of a handful of bright young Ayn Rand groupies. He managed to win straw polls yet remained electorally irrelevant. The Tea Party was a genuine grassroots movement with a laser like focus on fiscal probity that fired the 2010 election and began the undermining of the Democrats and their hold on political power that had been handed to them on a plate by the beltway GOP in 2006 and 2008. After 2008 the GOP leadership and their media pundits were all for going with the flow and working with the Democrats. The Tea Party and their biggest fan, Sarah Palin, went for Obama, Pelosi & Co with knives and baseball bats. The beltway pundits rolled their eyes but the voters liked what they heard. Meanwhile Ron Paul stood aloof from the Tea Party and watched as politics passed him by.

Similarly while UKIP was a tiny fringe cult where libertarians could play all day it attracted few votes outside the meaningless Euros. Once it began to be perceived as a populist party resonating with a shift in public mood in 1913 it began winning local council seats and making an impact in parliamentary elections. This was accompanied by a dramatic increase in membership and the expansion of the branch structure which in some areas generated a lively and energetic core of local activists. The result? More local election gains in 2014 and UKIP’s first MPs’

Not all of the pre 2013 kippers have been impressed, particularly the libertarians. Policy shifts on the NHS, taxation and welfare have led to mutterings about “red UKIP” and perhaps one can understand their concerns. But I also feel that some of them are maybe subconsciously uncomfortable with the influx of new members and the prospects of electoral success. They were happier being perceived as the followers of a fringe cult baying helplessly at the moon because it helped to reinforce their own conviction that they were prophets crying in the wilderness, ignored by an ignorant majority who would suffer on the Day of Judgement.

I would guess that the vast majority of the post 2013 UKIP intake are, like me, inclined towards small government. But we also recognise that a modern nation state is a highly complex structure that needs a modicum of direction if only to guard its citizens from the designs of those who wish us harm through criminal activity within or without the realm.

Of course any political movement needs to be grounded with principles – yet it must also seek to gain power to put those principles into practice. There are only three ways of doing this – by taking over an existing party, by creating a separate party and start to win elections or by some sort of coup or insurrection .Either way means getting your hands dirty with political action….and I really can’t see any of our libertarian dream weavers leaving their ivory towers to do that….