THE LONDON 2012 OLYMPIC OPENING CEREMONY PAGEANT: INSULT OR DOWNRIGHT FRAUD?

None of the twenty-seven million British people who watched this celebration of British history and culture could deny it had some very moving moments. Two of these for example would be the celebration of our unique National Health Service and the fine idea of allowing British sporting youngsters to light the Olympic flame. These things show the world aspects of a nation’s generous spirit. Most of the rest, despite all the choreographed sparkle, music and dancing, was a rotten representation of British history and life.

You may not like such a comment after all the dancing and lights, but let us look at how things actually were. The rural idyll! Girls in pretty dresses with flower baskets… kids dancing around the maypole… all against Nimrod Variations background music by Elgar and touches of Jerusalem, like all the sheep, the green grass and country cottages had some deep spiritual meaning like Glastonbury Tor which is just a hill with a tower on it. Part of the made up fantasy to help promote the sale of crystals in the nearby town!

So what cultural epoch of British history was this supposed to represent to the world, Danny Boy? Was it the time of the Norman Conquest and the 400 hundred years of brutal feudalism and peasant subjugation to rural lords? If that was the case why no mention of the great Peasant Revolt of 1381? Okay, so after the girls and the grass came the chimneys and workers of the Industrial Revolution, kicking off from around 1750. So what happened to the great Reformation of the Church by Henry VIII followed by the magnificent Elizabethan Age? And where was the defeat of the Spanish Armada by Francis Drake and the English Navy, and of course, where was the greatest genius of the time, William Shakespeare?

What happened to all that Danny Boy? What happened to the great political Revolution of Oliver Cromwell and the English Civil War of the 17^th century. Was the chopping off of a king’s head a bit too embarrassing for you in view of present Royal company whose arse you seemed to be only too happy to kiss with your child’s choir rendition of two full verses of the National Anthem? A little number that’s certainly no anthem to a nation!     

So, smoking chimney stacks, women cranking wheels, men with beards wearing top hats and looking benevolent to represent the factory owners along with a bit of Brunel. And all the symbols of industry set against endless loud pop music with the men in top hats jigging around in strange postures and doing funny things with their hands! Then a bit of the Suffragette Movement and remembrance of two World Wars symbolised by men dressed as soldiers whistling music when the organisers could have shown life in the trenches or men being machine gunned on barbed wire or a scene or two of the London Blitz. But no, don’t offend the Germans!

But then don’t offend the Tory representatives of the new industrial society, so nothing about the Trades Union Movement, the first of its kind in the world and a great example of our history. Nothing about the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Nothing about the condition of workers in factories and the long brutal hours down the coal mines. And nothing about the living conditions of working people in the new towns and cities.

The social conditions of British working people ignored, but now a jump as if by magic to West Indian immigration of the 1950s and parades of people from these islands but amazingly nothing of the British Abolition of the Slave Trade nor the Irish or Jewish Immigration in the mid-19^th and early 20^th century but lots of London’s Pearly Kings and Queens instead with a BBC commentary that bordered on the ludicrous! A silly patronising verbiage of condescending rubbish that only this prime state broadcasting channel can do in such a jolly hockey sticks manner. But now what’s this? A switch to the sixties, James Bond magically appears at Buckingham Palace, meets Queen and Corgis then flies over the sights of London to the sound of RAF Dambusters music before arriving at the Olympic Stadium with the Goldfinger theme blasting everyone’s ears. Now what made you think James Bond and fucking Goldfinger were lead examples of modern British culture Danny Boy instead of what they really were, prime commercial box office crap.

There is a distinction you know. Or did you? But then what a splendidly silly advert for our secret service to the world, but never mind, Queen and consort arrive with the President of the Olympic Committee and with the bearded hippie look-alike, the archbishop of Canterbury behind her to make it look holy, she opens the Games with a little speech. Now the Union flag arrives, carried by men heavy with medals and is run up a flagpole as a choir of kids sing God save the Queen. The crowd cheer, she looks very appreciative as so she should, and the Pageant continues on with a montage the National Health Service represented by Great Ormond Street Hospital to showcase this great achievement, to the world.

Now this was something but it was all held in place by ridiculous dancing nurses and jiving doctors all rocking in time to swinging jazz music. Is that what it’s like in hospital words and corridors these days? I certainly don’t think so or the Tories would have a ready-made excuse to close the whole lot down. There may have been lots of children in hospital beds and others all happy and dancing but where was the British discoverer of Penicillin, Alexander Fleming, or the father of medical hygiene Joseph Lister?

And where, Danny Boy, was the great cultural contribution of modern British science to the world? Where was Michael Faraday, father of applied electrical experiment, and where was the founder of modern biology Charles Darwin? Well if you forgot about Darwin how about the inventor of the lathe which made modern engineering possible, Henry Maudslay? Okay none of these but you wanted culture so we got Children’s Literature and of course Harry Potter and JK Rowling! But then how about our great British poets, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Shelley and Tennyson, or our great writers, read and admired everywhere, Charles Dickens, H.G. Wells father of modern sci-fi, and George Orwell. No, instead we got Harry Potter! Some literary nerd in a society of nerds where literature only equates to commercial success whereas the others, all giants in their own right, don’t.  

Literature disposed of, the Pageant moved to a meaningless dialogue between pop character conductor Simon Rattle and Rowan Atkinson. And what cultural pinnacle of British achievement was that supposed to represent, Danny Boy? Was Mr Bean more important than our great pioneering artists, Turner, Constable and Blake? Was Mr Bean more important than our great composers like Holst and Elgar? Music! Did someone say music? After a brief, semi-pathetic portrayal of the arrival of the digital age into British life there was at least a well-deserved tribute to Tim Berners Lee, father of the Internet. That was a fair thing but to follow it up with a series of montages of the history of British pop music from the Stones and Beatles to punk rock and rap with endless happy faced men and women, boys and girls dancing to well-known pop songs WAS SUPPOSED TO CONVEY WHAT, PRECISELY? That we gave pop music to the world and how important it is to the British economy? Well firstly we didn’t, but then who’s kidding who here? Was this more important than Charles Darwin, Dickens or William Shakespeare when evaluating Britain’s cultural contribution to the world? Only if you’re thinking of money. How very David Cameron of you Danny Boy!

Teenagers endlessly dancing! Well you know teenagers Danny. They spend all their time dancing! Is that because so many are unemployed or so happy working in rotten jobs for rotten wages? Is it because affording a higher education is impossible for most unless their parents are rich? Are they all dancing because so many are deprived and depressed that they riot or get drunk or get a lengthy prison sentence for stealing a bottle of water?

Pop music in spades, like it’s the chief cultural contribution of modern Britain to the world. Well here’s a few more British cultural contributions in our recent history you could have mentioned. How about our cheating, lying British bankers and rotten financial system in the City of London? Surely they showed the world how to cook up interest rate deals or sell people insurance schemes they didn’t need. Or how about our MPs swindling the taxpayer with their expense claims? Best of all would have been to show Oliver Cromwell once beating them all out of the House of Commons with a stick because he knew they were all crooks. Indeed, it was our great English Revolution that once showed the world how to get rid of Kings and the French soon followed!

Why no mention of that in your cultural pageant? Whoops, I forgot that your mates Lord Coe and the Queen were there and we couldn’t have any of the grim realities of English history played out in front of them. Never mind, after all the countless opportunities you missed or turned your back on to show the great historical contribution of British culture to the world you finally went all religious. Maybe it’s because you lacked the imagination or had nowhere else to go that you introduced the entry of the Olympic Torch into the Stadium and the lighting of the beacon with a singularly British religious down in the mouth dirge, Abide With Me, a wretched piece of pathos particularly aimed at the working class and perfectly in tune with their enforced tribulations.

Okay, a hymn to end your cultural pageant. Lots of shouting, dancing and symbolism but no real substance. Symbolism without continuity and lacking in depth. Britain gave the world far more than the crap in your pageant and you had the chance to encapsulate all that genius and energy and strut it but you weren’t up to it and chickened out. Forget the rat-arsed Tory MPs who said your presentation was lefty. Britain’s true cultural greatness had so much more to it historically and you muffed the chance to show it.  

And after your pageant came the parade of athletes and their at times colourful entry, all accompanied with the fatuous commentary of BBC presenters Huw Edwards and Hazel Irvine. Much of it plain ghastly in its sheer awfulness but what a treat it was to see each team supported by the political leaders of their country along with their wives, most of them looking like the well fed gangsters they actually are. Each flag leading its nation till its team passed and then stuck in the rural muck heap of Glastonbury Tor. Now just how symbolic was that?

Finally the big London Olympics of 2012 cultural give-away in the speech of Lord Coe, Olympian gold medallist and former great athlete but now jogging jonny to the British Establishment. His placing of royalty status above all things, above that of the athletes for whom the Games are for with the words, “Your majesty, your majesties, your royal highnesses,” says it all. The athletes of these games perform on behalf of unelected feudal monarchs. They are at the end of the line, monarchs at the beginning! Ancient Greece was a slave owning society. Women never had the vote their but the men who did were free men. Not so where a monarch rules. People are subjects, not free citizens.

Thank you Lord Coe for describing London as a thriving commercial centre but with its banks fraudulently fixing interest rates and acting as laundering holes for drugs money, that is apart from swindling customers , I’d have thought that any serious Russian Oligarch or gangster would have preferred stuffing it in Switzerland! They’re far better at hiding things in Zurich than London.

And finally this… Most British people who’ve lived and died in the last thousand years had to work incredibly hard to achieve the few rights and freedoms they’ve got and have created the wonderful cultural legacy they have. The creation of the National Health Service came after a tremendous struggle by working men and women for a cleaner, healthier life as was given to them by a Welshman who’d spent much of his early life down a coal mine. The social welfare benefits they’ve gained, from pensions to unemployment protection, came after a struggle by British working people for a better more secure life after the depredations of poverty they’d suffered throughout the 19^th century. These human rights are cultural milestones for the world and its working people to see, not for the rich or the political elites who want to take it away. They are a British example of what can be achieved by courage.

Likewise the achievements of British Art, Science, Engineering and Education. It was the humble people who led the way in so many things and then not least our feudal aristocracy in their own quest for political rights and a Magna Carta. Rights that spread in time from high to low and became a beacon for the world. Our great men and women didn’t dance their way to excellence and social justice. They worked for it and like our modern Olympic athletes taught themselves to be excellent. I guess that was the special something they showed to the world.

To minimise all the great examples Britain gave to the world or to ignore them, like Shakespeare and Darwin, the Peasants Revolt, the struggle of working people to organise themselves, to pass over our great political English Civil War with all its achievements, to ignore the sufferings of the poor of Scotland and the hell of the Highland Clearances and replace these with a national anthem to royalty, with dancing teenagers, pop music and cavorting national health service staff is an insult to all those who lived and died to create the greatness of Britain’s cultural heritage.

OH THE TIMES THEY ARE A CHANGING

Once upon a time the Labour Party stood for decency, honesty and integrity; for social justice, liberty, social equality and comradeship. They were a Party of high moral values and standards.

Today they’ve abandoned most of their principles and core values and become liars, cheats and thieves who’ve allowed their financial friends in the City of London to attack and damage the Welfare State and standard of living of millions of already poor people.

During their recent decade or more in power Labour Governments actively worked to turn the United Kingdom into a venue for mass immigration. One and a half million Poles and half a million non-EU East Europeans were allowed into the UK along with three to five million Muslims (the exact figure will never  be known) with permanent resident status, mainly from Pakistan but also Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Iraq, the Lebanon and countless other Arab and Muslim states. The question is WHY when most of the latter come from cultures whose values are alien to our own, who are fundamentally indifferent if not hostile to our values and whose youth are at best antagonistic to our kids both black and white but particularly the former. Who are in a word racist and whose women young and old are not allowed to educate themselves outside Muslim traditions and are often denied an education in co-educational non faith schools.

Furthermore these Labour Governments through the direction of their various Home Secretaries allowed fanatical Muslim clerics to publically preach hatred against other faiths, protected by the police, and also permitted despicable and grossly offensive Muslim race hate propaganda to be sold openly in public places.

And all this to say nothing of allowing East European criminals and criminal gangs mainly from Albania and Romania to enter the United Kingdom and perpetrate violence and endless effortless criminality on the streets of major British cities. It was not the Conservative Party that allowed these things to happen but the New Labour Governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

And it was these Labour Governments that used the undercover police spying organisation set up by Margaret Thatcher to spy on trades union activists and the Trade Union Movement, to continue their work infiltrating protest groups, from students and environmentalists to Green activists, clean energy campaigners, animal welfare, anti-genetically modified crops and many other generally harmless organisations whose worst transgressions were a bit of pathetic sabotage, paint spraying and chaining themselves to trees. Naturally no spying on the real criminals, saboteurs and hidden cliques who really did conspire privately to fix interest rates and wreck our economy like the bankers and financial fraudsters. Naturally no spying on tax avoidance companies set up in tax havens. No spying on Members of Parliament fiddling their expenses and defrauding the public. No spying on any of the City of London finance houses by these police infiltrators whose behaviour was at best reprehensible and often downright criminal. And of course no spying on New Labour friendly Rupert Murdoch newspapers!  

Not a bit of it! It was all quite okay with New Labour Government Home Secretaries and Police Ministers. These Labour Governments were endlessly more filthy than the plain nasty Tory Governments that preceded them. No-one ever expected anything better from those bastards, but the Labour Party and its Governments knowingly betrayed everything decent they ever stood for, backed up by a Trades Union leadership that stayed effortlessly silent and complicit in all the atrocities of lying, cheating and thieving perpetrated on the British people.

Light touch regulation. One of the key phrases of New Labour Government. So what did it mean for the Utility Companies who supplied your gas, electricity and water? Actually it meant NO REGULATION. No Government control on their ability to put up their prices on a regular basis. During the period of New Labour Government there was less control over Utility Companies operating in the United Kingdom than those anywhere else in Europe. No wonder that most now operating here are foreign owned. New Labour welcomed them in with open arms. Light touch regulation meant they could do whatever they liked. Same as the boys in the City of London. Same as the local authority charges that endlessly increased. 

Damage, break up and change the cultural character, traditions and unity of the working class by dumping in their midst millions of culturally alien immigrants. Rob their youth of employment and educational opportunities by destroying apprenticeships and driving up study costs to infinity. Take away from them activities that were once traditionally theirs and turn them into ridiculous overweight slobs.

THANK YOU NEW LABOUR.

OH THE TIMES THEY ARE A CHANGING     

Once upon a time Journalists did their best to seek the truth and tell it best as they could or were allowed. Today most are plain liars who manipulate or temporise with facts, use detectives or police informants to investigate private, too often sad or damaged lives and reveal the secrets of the unfortunate to a mass market for money, obtaining information for their stories through illegal methods to dig dirt and do harm. And these charming people have the gall to use campaigning platforms as a cover for thoroughly filthy conduct and think themselves decent when they are more often dishonourable and dirty. Once they knew where the truth was. Today, having sold themselves to dirty men and women with unclean values they don’t have a clue. They have been a conduit for buying for-sale politicians and facilitating the mass communication of lies to influence and control the way people think.

They may have begun with a concern for freedom and truth but that was somehow always light in their minds. Easily bought and so easily sold. Now we know what so many of you are, even though there are some glorious, courageous exceptions. Real heroes actually in a dark time. Yes, you know who you are and will never change. It’s just hard to stay clean these days…

OH THE TIMES THEY ARE A CHANGING

Once upon a time Barclays Bank was founded by a Quaker family whose values were sober prudence, integrity and honesty. The only quakers associated with Barclays these days are its shareholders, savers and the staff who work in its high street branches who don’t know whether they’ll still have a job tomorrow! When their head office executives are not busy illegally manipulating interbank lending rates they’re screwing their savers with derisory interest rates for borrowing their money.

But that’s alright! Alternatively there’s HSBC, now shown by federal authorities in the United States to have been a conduit there for laundering billions of dollars of Mexican “drugs kingpins and rogue nations, ” according to a Senate Committee investigating money laundering claims at the bank. Banking controls and oversight was too lax it appears AND SOMEONE WAS RESPONSIBLE!! One of the HSBC officials interviewed said he found it “painful and embarrassing” to talk about the bank’s shortcomings while the bank’s Head of Group Compliance resigned at the hearing!

My, if you’d ridden your mule into one of their banks over there wearing a sombrero, poncho and sandals they’d have invited you round the back for a chili while they offloaded the loot in your saddle-bags.

OH THE TIMES THEY ARE A CHANGING

There was once a time when you really believed in the Inland Revenue! They were tough all right. Make a mistake with a few quid and you got a really bad letter. Yes, they were tough and you didn’t like your hard earned money going to pay for the palatial lifestyles of the African gangsters who now ran the ex-colonies, but you accepted it. The Inland Revenue! Straight as a die, no favours for anyone and everyone treated the same. You could count on them for absolute fairness. No flies on them. Right?

Wrong! In recent years members of its Executive Board have been getting up to all kinds of tricks as individuals, as executive directors of private companies registered in tax havens! One particular speciality noted in the recent Channel Four Despatches program has been designing tax avoidance schemes for clients of their companies. And goodness only knows, they should know about such things also working as they do as senior management at the Inland Revenue!   

Nothing illegal in all these capers of course. Being paid by the Inland Revenue to crack down on tax avoidance while at the same time working privately as an executive director of a company where your skills are profitably used to create such schemes and make lots of loot for your company that pays little to no tax because it’s registered in a tax haven!

FANTASTIC WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT WHICH OF COURSE YOU CAN IF YOU WORK RIGHT AT THE TOP OF THE INLAND REVENUE.

Conflict of interest? Double standards? Downright moral rottenness? What on earth are you talking about? It’s all above board and legal! And they’ve also been helping large corporations get round every loophole going for years!

New Labour, what a lovely bunch of people they are!

OH THE TIMES THEY ARE A CHANGING

Once upon a time when all the world was young your local constituency Member of Parliament used to be a nice old dear. You remember him or her don’t you? Sir Someone or Other if he was a Tory and likewise Lady Spade-Dasher in a blue suit with pearls. She let you call her Maude if she liked you! Labour MP’s were ex trade unionists neutered at some Oxford college to be harmless who now talked fries instead of chip butties.

Ah the good old days! The elderly sir so and so probably fingering boys in some below pavement public toilet or tonguing out some Private Secretary hopeful late nights in his Commons Office while her Ladyship, MP of some rural constituency and seriously ugly at best, no doubt having her way with a certain prize vegetable from the local farmers show, the competition of which she’d been chief judge.

Labour MPs altogether more earnest. No sexual slush like the Tories. Talked about Lenin till two in the morning somehow sounding like they really meant it without having a clue then forgetting the whole thing over the next round of beer. Hundreds of them who once really cared about working people because that’s where they came from all that long time ago.

Then it all changed! With Thatcher the Tories turning into nasty little thuggies from Essex. The women too arrogant, the men too vile by half only New Labour under Blair took a far bigger, far deeper dive into moral oblivion. The Tories stayed Tory. The Labour professionals, boys and girls, chucked everything once decent overboard and joined the Tories. Well not quite in their political outlook. Not entirely that is. Oh no, they joined them in fiddling and cheating on their expense claims. Became thieves and rascals just like everyone else.

The best was yet to come my friends! Expenses were one thing, handing over the working class and the poor, the Welfare State and its lifeline benefits to the banking and financial rascals of the City of London was Labour’s Gift.

Members of Parliament! Once they served people. Now they serve themselves. Not all of them. Some still care. Most can’t. They have no moral compass. They can’t get back what they never had in the first place.

OH THE TIMES THEY ARE A CHANGING

Working class women of the fifties and sixties were once lithe, slim and good looking. They were quiet, sober and knew how to cook. Today they’re often so fat with thighs, arses and stomachs that are frankly disgusting, even obscene, and roses no less, tattooed over their arse cracks that you just can’t help but wonder if they have any awareness at all of just what they look like in their grossly absurd mini-skirts. To an outside observer they’re just an out of control sick joke. Teenage girls on the other hand, Friday nights and weekends, are more often than not pissed out of their heads, falling over in streets, full of vile manners and rudery and more often than not chlamydia-ed up to the eyeballs! A really great advert for working class femininity these days!

Their husbands, boyfriends or both follow not far behind. You need to be a generation or two on to remember men in their thirties or forties, or teenage lads, say in the 1950s and ‘60s. Some guys had tattoos. A few, not many, and they were mainly Navy. Certainly not teenagers! When you worked out at a gym you always washed or showered at the end of your routine. What you didn’t do was just spray on some shit that made you smell like a tart as a substitute. Again, very few guys wore earrings and those that did were regarded with suspicion.

Earrings, spraying on scent, tattoos all over your legs, arms and body, hair colouring and shaved legs? Leave it out. Working class guys once worked in apprenticeships, in mines… They built ships and engines, roads and houses. Did tough manual labour. Today they work in shops, serve coffee, drive vans, work for the council or if they’re over fifty do something in ‘Heritage’. They drink twenty pints of tasteless lager every weekend with their mates, watch football, abuse their wives, have no deep fundamental interests and make nothing. Their thought processes are restricted and limited. The cultural shift between them and their counterparts of the fifties and sixties is remarkable in appearance if only for the silly gold chains and jewelled decoration that hang on them today along with the moron look of their endlessly shaved heads! The fact that they look different is because they ARE different, the profound cultural difference of appearance and values based on the fundamental change in their work lives. They’re no longer employed in masculine occupations demanding physical exertion and their pathetic modes of self-expression are a desperate form of digression from their altered, neutered lives.

British men and women, boys and girls, look different, think different and are different. Most, but certainly not all, care about themselves as individuals and no-one else. They’ve been Thatcherised at the deepest psychological levels. Millions of people with pictures and writing all over them who get drunk, look obscene and can barely think for themselves outside their vile appearance. The British working class, never culturally great, once had some very fine moments. After all, they kicked the shit out of the Nazis! Now they’ve had a job done on them and they’ve allowed it to happen. They’ve been cheapened. Woozified!

OH THE TIMES THEY ARE A CHANGING

You need to be over 60 to remember real footballers and football. You need to be ‘old’ or have talked to ‘old’ people and asked them who and what they remember. Either that or have seen old newsreel footage. Seen what it was like then. Men from poor working class backgrounds who knew how to kick a leather ball and make it go where they wanted… knew how to pass that ball to each other… knew how to run with it… to dribble with it…

Dribble with it? I can already hear the sound of protest from media pundits of newspaper and television. Dribble with it? You mean actually run with it and get it round the player from the opposing team in front of you? Jesus, did they actually do such things in those days? We thought that dribbling was when you foamed at the mouth or something they did up north in l920s working men’s clubs. You know, had it on bread with margarine.

Forget Chelsea and Manchester. Those days it was Blackpool, Preston North End, Bolton, Huddersfield, Newcastle and Everton! Working men’s towns with working class lads playing for peanuts, but boy they were good. They knew how to control that leather football. Knew how to run with it and knew how to think on their feet. And they were proud of who they were. They didn’t spit in front of their audience of kids on the field of play or shout abuse. They didn’t pretend they were fouled because very few of them did that kind of thing anyway. They didn’t have private medical staff or personal agents. They didn’t put themselves about all over the place because they understood the ragged urchins that paid sixpence to see them. That’s what they were themselves once… ragged urchins who had a dream.

And now? What are they now? The so called footballer turned into a vile, out of control, thoroughly untalented prima donna, petulant on the field as well as off. You’ve seen them ‘train’ haven’t you? Doing their little skips from side to side and running three yards with the ball and congratulating themselves with little high fives! And they call it ‘training’ joke, joke! Yes, the professional footballer of today and the ragged urchins who once loved and adored you now turned into drunken foul-mouths who can’t control themselves. Whose only wish is to mimic the petulant character and prima-donna life style of his spitting useless idol who can’t even pass a ball on the run. 

OH THE TIMES THEY ARE A CHANGING

But then that’s okay because no-one remembers how it once was anymore. They’ve all gone to cemeteries and crematoria everyone! Their skilled footballers, their honest, caring MPs, their typewriter tapping journalists all thrilled to be bringing the truth to a mass public with a wonderful story, the honest, caring managers who sat in the back rooms of high street banks and wanted to help people and try their best for them, the Labour Party, full of men who’d fought in the War or worked down mines who actually knew what life was like and wanted to do good things for people, the tax collectors who believed in fairness and honesty all round… They were all of them the same kind of people. Of whatever social class or wealth, values or manners they all shared the same fundamental thing… that same fundamental streak of plain common decency that ran through each and every one of them no matter who they were.

Do you remember any of it, any of you? That wonderful thing? That’s not right… That ain’t fair… That’s just no good…

Those words stand like giants of men and women. Giants when you compare them to the words of today’s cheating bankers, rotten politicians, lying journalists, pathetic working class men and women and rat-shit footballers. Once, not so long ago, people were mostly the same. Had the same basic streak of fundamental decency in them. Now they’re not like that anymore. That something special has gone, replaced by foul mouthed, selfish, uncaring Thatcherite individualism of the worst kind.

OH THE TIMES THEY ARE A CHANGING!

And I suppose, dear readers, that some of you think that I’m just having a rant. That’s what they call it these days. Powerfully express the opinions of so many and you’re ranting. You’re really not allowed to do that you see. It’s quite okay for all of the above and so many more plain awful creeps to do what they do and collectively shit over everyone BUT WHEN SOMEONE PUTS IT TOGETHER, POINTS OUT WHAT GHASTLY PEOPLE THEY ARE AND WONDERS HOW THEY’VE SUDDENLY COME AMONG US IT’S CALLED HAVING A RANT!  

Yeah, they can collectively shit on our values and sensibilities but that’s okay, but stand up and point the finger and you’re having a rant! Well you know where you can stick your peevish complaint!

TRUTH IS ON THE MARCH

HAVE YOU GOT ANY ROAST HORSE? ENLIGHTENING THE ENTHUSIASTIC

A short chubby little blonde lady came to my stall the other day and after engaging me in conversation for   a few minutes wanted to know if I had any roast horse. Market traders get asked some strange questions, you’d better believe it, so I was in no way surprised and suggested she try the French charcuterie a few streets away and gave her directions.

The look on her face! “No, roast horse,” she stated emphatically. Now I’d realised she wasn’t dyslexic and understood what she had in mind. She’d obviously heard the name of the mineral from someone or other and got it mixed up in her head. I pointed to the piece I had on the table. Rose Quartz I said slowly, smiling. Her face immediately brightened. “Yes, that’s it,” she acknowledged, looking all pretty with a fringe of curls and two adorable dimples.

“It’s a loving stone,” I said quickly. “Peaceful and calming with lots of energy.”

It transpired that’s what she’d heard. “Silly me,” she murmured. “Can I pick it up?”

“You’re welcome, I gestured. “Here, let me hand it to you.”

As she grasped it I waited for the usual loony-moony look of rapture that accompanies the knowing enthusiast’s journey to the ethereal world of the spirit but it never came. Eyes closed I could see she was trying but wasn’t getting any of the feedback she expected. Clearly the lady wanted enlightening. “Relax,” I said softly like the Good Samaritan I was, but then somehow I heard the word charlatan instead!

Banish it from your thoughts, the traders voice snapped back in my head. You’re there to make a living not run a charity. I pulled myself together. What on earth could I have been thinking? “Yes, relax,” I repeated. “Rose Quartz is for gentleness and emotional healing. A stone that brings love and frees you of stress. Love is freedom. Emotions liberated, bringing love.”

I could hear myself saying it. Thinking what a load of old twaddle it was. I panicked. No, no… Fight against it. I was a market trader. There to ladle out bullshit in spades. I couldn’t be doing with this. Pull yourself together. Right now it looked like I needed the bloody rose quartz more that she did! Then above it all I heard her voice. What was that she was saying? She could feel I had conflict?

I can feel the conflict within you. Here, take this. Let me help you with your pain.

I looked around me, startled as never before. I was there and so was she, in front of the stall. I definitely wasn’t in bed having a nightmare. What the hell was happening to me? I took the Rose Quartz she offered and held it. Somehow everything eased. There was her smile again, eyes twinkling with merriment. It was then, only then that I understood. I’d fallen into the hands of a witch!

Her question kept coming back to haunt me. Did I have any roast horse? Had she said it deliberately? To throw me off balance? Roast horse? The idea was ludicrous. She was just another customer. An enthusiast who’d got it all wrong. In that moment I came to my senses, the conflict in me beginning to fade. I was standing there holding the quartz, nothing else.

“Feels great,” I said. It’s a fine piece of Brazilian Rose Quartz. A loving stone. Important for personal relationships more than anything else.”

“It’s like a talisman,” she replied mysteriously. “A talisman of love. Creating a spark between people.”

I agreed. You gave it to the person you cared about most. It spread compassion and understanding. Helped them to know your feelings.

She’d heard her friends talk about chakras. What was that all about?

Right, if she didn’t know about chakras she wasn’t a witch. I suddenly felt safe.

They gave rose quartz its place and its qualities, I explained. Its positioning in the 4^th, the Heart Chakra, was key, and because it stimulated the Crown Chakra, the third eye and Throat Chakra, it was able to bring them all into harmony, into a unity within the heart. In that sense its energies were binding. Everything led to understanding. To a unity of love. 

“That’s what gives Rose Quartz its elemental power. It’s more than a combination of atoms. If you don’t already believe in the reality of spiritual energy Rose Quartz will show you the way. Act as your guide.”

There, I was giving it my all. My crystal healing sales pitch everything it should be. Doing my best to persuade such a nice lady that the bit of rock I was holding would help her find love in her life. But then who was I to say that it wouldn’t? That if she really believed in it enough it might be possible for something to happen. Something quite wonderful really. All you needed was faith. Just like in any other religion.

But then there are believers and believers. Either you’re a scientist dedicated to experiment, to rationality and logic, or you subscribed, dare I say believed, in something else. You had religion. Believed in God or in some cases the devil. You worshipped trees, animals or idols. Bowed down to graven images and risked the wrath of Jove or Jehovah. On the other hand you might have a political creed. Had faith and in the word of the Leader. It was either God is Great, or Hitler, Stalin, or the word of the Pope. It used to be inanimate objects that gave you your faith. Then came the transcendental spirit and his supposed son, the man on the cross. His representatives on Earth followed fast until in the twentieth century men turned themselves into gods like the Fuehrer, the Beloved Leader and today’s harmless relics of absolute monarchy. It’s God Save the Queen these days and you don’t even have to stand up when you sing. That all disappeared in the nineteen-sixties.

In more recent times a new faith’s emerged on the scene. Minerals and crystals are deemed to have spiritual properties and with a wee bit of physics mixed in came energies, the buzz word for crystal healing adepts, or better call them disciples. After all, all party leaders, ideologies and faiths have disciples to help spread the word but even that wasn’t good enough. Oh no! Once an idea or a faith captured a country or most of the world it got hold of you too. Indeed it got hold of everyone. You weren’t allowed to believe in anything else. Free thinkers got burned and people who asked questions were shot. It was either one thing or another. If you believed then it had to be absolute. Doubt wasn’t allowed. No questions! If you didn’t believe you either stayed silent or faced some Inquisition or Show Trial. Christianity started things early. Kids dipped in water then they were done!

It was all there before me. There was I at my stall with Rose Quartz, love and a lady. I was selling crystals but it could have been indulgences! If I’d been an unmitigated scoundrel of a medieval monk I’d be taking the poor child to my cell in the cloisters and educating her in the pleasures of Christ the Healer but here was I, a man of scientific reason, working to support my wife’s Geology research by engaging enthusiasts of another faith with ideas I didn’t believe in.

And that was the truth of it really. It all came down to a matter of freedom. Once you fully believed in a faith, an idea or a political creed, you weren’t free anymore. Once you’d stepped onto the path you had to go all the way. You’d given up your freedom to think. It wasn’t a case of being free to choose one thing or another, once a choice was made that was it. You gave up your critical faculties. You were no longer free to assess, consider or reject. Whatever it was you’d given yourself to, now had you by the curlies. You couldn’t stand in relation to ideas anymore. Consider one thing then another. Free to think and enjoy. Proud in your understanding, confident in the power of your mind. You now belonged to something or someone else, whether they were dead or alive. Or something unreal like the spirit.

Me, my crystal and mineral stall and a lady! Who was I? Who was she? And what were the crystals between us? Me standing there smiling at her. Thinking and thinking, my thoughts running like lightning. That was it! The electrons in my brain activating the neural chemistry that caused me to consider was racing at light speed! That’s why so much was packed into just a few seconds. And I could know that because I wasn’t a faith junkie. I was a modern free thinking man. Yet what of these crystals between us?

Suddenly I saw it all for the reality it was. The stall was a bridge. A crossing point between science and faith. She had her enlightenment and I had mine. She could have been a member of some Nazi party or the Hari Krishna mob. Just imagine if the last lot took over! I’d be dancing down Oxford Street in orange pantaloons banging a tambourine! Far better than murdering millions of children.

A scientific mind on the one hand and someone hungry to enter the paradise of faith and find love through a rock on the other! And it was because once there were Popes who burned people like me that I was determined to do her no harm. Even if her faith took over one day and I’d have to kiss crystals it was still better than murder. Or was it? If your mind wasn’t free then you might as well be dead anyway.

And there it was. My stall and its crystals! As is said in the Muslim religion, a bridge between time and eternity. Yes, but then who was I to take from her the promise and prospect of love, even if it came through a stone? I had to be bigger than that. Allow my knowledge to harm no human being. Why, if I could help her find love wouldn’t that be something, for what is love but the highest, the most wonderful of feelings. As wondrous as the ability of our minds to think, to know, to understand and to be free. As long as you weren’t a slave to either. Neither a slave to love or a slave to thoughts. That’s what it means to be free.

“Wherever you’re at you’d better come out of it mister, or you won’t be selling me anything.” I heard a voice say. My thoughts moved easily. “Whatever madam wishes. It’s a very fine piece for a tenner.”

She nodded, handing me a note. “Good deal!”

Should I wrap it up for her? No, she didn’t want that, and as she said it I noticed a man draw alongside and take her hand. She looked up at him. In moments they were smiling at each other. Definitely something between them I thought and as I passed the Rose Quartz to her she gave it to him. “I thought you might like it my dear.”

“Rose Quartz!” he exclaimed. “What a beautiful piece. Thank you ever so darling.”

It was all quite enough for me. I really felt chuffed. There was something nice about him. Something I liked about both of them. It was going to a good home. I knew it for sure and in my heart I wished them all  happiness, and said it as they walked arm in arm from the stall.

So where did it leave me? In my own way I too was enlightened. In that moment between them, in their look and their taking of hands I felt my own spirit soar.

EYES DOWN FOR THE GREAT, THE EVER POPULAR, HIGGS BOSON SWINDLE - ARE YOU READY FOR IT ?

As everyone these days knows, there are all kinds of swindles! In fact there are as many swindles being worked on the general population of Britain today as there are chancers and jack the lads of all social classes and occupations. Neither is there any limitation of age, colour or creed. In fact it would be true to say that whenever or wherever a situation opens up for single individuals or groups to exploit and make money out of, they are more likely than not to show up and quietly start getting busy pecking away at the pockets and sensibilities of all the good old fashioned gullible but basically decent folk out there just waiting to be taken for a ride.

This re-emergence of the opportunist and spiv began in modern times under the loving tutelage of Margaret Thatcher who opened up the City of London to a legion of on the make wide boys and continues to this day in all areas of life. Indeed, whenever an opportunity presents itself either large scale such as Members of Parliament swindling the taxpayer with false or exaggerated claims for personal expenses, or on a small scale the bullying of tenants of charity registered housing associations to pay for false or non-existent buildings and repairs works or pumped up so called service charges… you know, if you’ve still got the ability to think, that you’re being got at by something thieving and dirty all hot and ready to cheat you.

Then there’s the really big time! The real juicy stuff! The executives and directors of banks who’ve turned the institutions they supposedly work for into hundreds of personalised self-enrichment schemes. The interests of the shareholder-owners and customers alike long abandoned with dividends, share values and customers only a laugh, these people have appropriated the idea of working for others into working solely for themselves. They do not even work collectively for themselves as a group let alone anyone else. They work for themselves AS INDIVIDUALS. As dozens of discrete self-serving money making outlets in shares and bonuses within the one institution using the name as a cover. And the millions of customers simply live an illusion. Big time you can’t go wrong! Take all your customer’s money and play with it on the international money market casino. If you win you earn big time for yourself. If you lose you get the bank to ask the Government for a taxpayers’ bailout. That means less social services and more unemployed youth. Less for those who are old, poor or disabled!

Okay, the taxpayer recapitalises your outfit so you can try your luck all over again. And of course you can still award yourself a bonus for staying on and pretending you’re trying to get back the money you lost!

GORGEOUS ISN’T IT?

Another fabulous idea is the great football swindle! Grown men and occasionally women paying good money every week or seasonally to sit together on a terrace to watch…? WELL TO WATCH WHAT? You really need to be offensively stupid or endlessly lie to yourself or just live in a dream to describe the activities of its participants as skilled. In the Premier League they’re often pathetic but in all the rest of the leagues verging on a sick joke. And yet the attendance of countless fans is worked for and paid for. Sacrifices made for that one treat a week. I suppose in all fairness one could say that those who sit there and watch really don’t know anything better. They give their support and their children often plain adulation to their team of hopeless chancers putting themselves about as professional sportsmen when all they’re really good at doing is plain putting themselves about, full stop. Little wonder that the high fliers in the Premier League earn annual salaries on a par with bonus payments to bankers. They’re individuals acting under the cover of the same kind of corporate swindles.

At one end during the course of the year, people are fleeced through the diminution of the Welfare State i.e. public services being trashed to pay for banker losses in international casino gambling activities. At the other they’re being fleeced every week paying the salaries of 18-28 year old working class jack the lads whose real skills are spitting, assaulting opposing players, doing nasty things in night clubs and showing a fabulous ineptitude for controlling the flight of a football! Is it so wrong then that they put up with foreign managers of the English football team being paid the annual equivalent of a bank executive’s bonus when they are simply unable to understand that all these people, M.P’s, footballers and managers, bank executives and all other manner of jack the lads writ large are all of the same stripe. Predatory, exploitative, on the make scheming chancers who have nothing but a fundamental contempt for everyone else in our land.

Okay then… Footballers, M.P’s, bankers… You think that’s really big do you? Well think again! What they’re after is only the small stuff! Your money! Cheat you here, dupe you there! Get you to park your arse on a terrace seat once a week… Get you to vote for them every few years… Small stuff I tell you! The Bank of England can print wads of the shit for Bob Diamond or Wayne the brain Rooney to make merry on. No, the people who I’m coming to now, who are the real subject of this post, are into eating your brain. They are the supposed scientists and researchers at the supposed cutting edge of nuclear, or more accurately particle physics, interested in the matter and energy that makes up people, the world, the Universe and, dare I say it, even the Queen. They are the participants in scientific research to discover a particle of the atomic nucleus  known as a Higgs Boson and in the last few days they say they think they might have possibly come close to getting near to or maybe have done it.

But wait, please do! They’re not sure yet. After fifty years working at it with bigger and bigger machines and more and more money that’s way past Bob Diamond they think they’re almost there. You’ve seen them haven’t you? Every few years on television. A collection of strange looking people holed out somewhere near Geneva all doing high fives and saying they’re getting close now but need lots more money to go away and do it all over again for another five years just to make sure by which time they’ve all had affairs with each other and look greyer or there are new loopy-looking guys on the block along with a new class of superhero television presenter who knows about particle physics, cosmology, geology, biology and just about any other ology you can think of. Yes you all know him don’t you!

It is really very important for sub-atomic physicists, i.e. particle physicists, to find a tinsy-winsy particle of matter from a smashed atom nucleus called a boson, whose name derives from Chandra Bose an Indian scientist and called a Higgs Boson after a Scotsman who said it had to be there. Without it, the whole theory of how the nucleus of an atom is made up, known as the Standard Model, would fall to pieces. The rare and wonderful breed of particle physicists who have been busy building this Standard Model for donkey’s years, most of it constructed of notions and ideas glued together by conjecture and based on a quicksand of endless speculation rather than solid experiment, have constructed this lovely thing with matter and energy all neatly balanced up. The only thing needed to make it work was an explanation of what actually made all these countless tiny particles hang together. For that each needed to have mass. The solution was simple. Another tiny particle had to be found which gave all the others mass and make the whole bloody thing work!

The need for the ‘discovery’ was out there ready and waiting. Just a few things first though. Start by presenting it as an idea, then give it a name and go out and find it. Then everything would be proved and the world would be okay. Just that one little thing more called a Higgs Boson and all the world would be right! It was so important to find it that it just had to be found. If not nothing would hold together and everything begin flying apart. A bit like the Greek, Portuguese, Irish and Spanish economies. Something just had to be found or else nothing and no-one could exist. Not Bob Diamond or horror of horrors, the saintly Brian Cox himself let alone the one and only, the true Master of the Universe, Stephen Hawking. No, the thing had to be found or none of us would exist. There’d be no mass anywhere in the Universe. Forget the stars, forget the galaxies… I’m talking Barclays Bank here and the guru behind all modern cosmology.

And no, arsehole, I’m not talking Bob Diamond! According to the situation that’s been theoretically cobbled together and for which little hard independent evidence exists, outside its hard core activist fan club that is.

The Standard Model of the atomic nucleus needs the Higgs particle to explain why everything is where it is and doesn’t come flying apart. Mass gives matter its place, much the same as money and power for the basis of the class structure. Take away money and Bob’s cleaning out the portaloos at Glastonbury.

Now let’s get serious here. Particle physics explains much more that our own material world. It helps us understand the existence of stars, stellar gas clouds and galaxies. It may help explain the content of those great voids of space between galaxies with their hypothetical dark matter and energy. Briefly, particle physics and cosmology go hand in hand only there’s a whole lot more to it than that. Cosmologists seek to understand the nature of the Universe, how it started and what it’s like, how long it’s been around and where it’s going. Nearly everything they have to say is speculative. Theoretical. Full of problems about proof, yet recently things have been turning political, religious and nasty.

Up to the end of the fifties the views of Fred Hoyle, Cambridge professor, held sway. He was an atheist. Didn’t believe in any God or the idea that such a thing could have any part in the creation of the Universe. In his Steady State Theory of Cosmic Evolution he argued that the Universe had always been there and always would. It just evolved and changed and kept on growing in a kind of cosmic evolution. Then suddenly everything changed. For reasons never explained he was dismissed from his job at Cambridge and not long after a religious young Catholic scientist and mathematician took his place. Stephen Hawking believed that everything started off with a single explosion. A Big Bang. That all matter came into existence in a single moment in time and eventually turned into stars and galaxies. He got his idea, the Big Bang Theory, from the background radiation data coming into our planet from every direction in the Universe discovered by scientists at the American Bell Laboratories which seemed to support the theories first put forward by a catholic priest at the end of the l920’s. Hawking went along with it all and developed it further into The Big Bang Theory of Cosmic Creation.

Although Hawking has been careful never to state the connection himself, the idea that the Universe was started off by THE HAND OF GOD was taken up enthusiastically by the Vatican, especially by that most political of Popes, John Paul 2^nd  who much favoured the young Englishman and fellow in the faith. It’s pretty straightforward really. The idea that the Universe came into being in an instant is a dead ringer for the hand of God explanation, taking the science of cosmology back to its religious roots of the 14^th century. Indeed, cosmology today is ruled by the Big Bang Theory and is comprehensively imbued with theology. Wherever you look you’ll find God. As for today’s cosmologists and those interested in the formation and structure of our Universe, the best one can say is that they’ve offered token resistance if any to the onslaught of religion and the Divine into their once precious science and have fundamentally capitulated to this entire retrograde movement.

Stephen Hawking’s cosmology with its endless speculation of black holes and other universes now rules everyone’s thinking. When you think cosmology today you can only think the Hawking Way. His views may not be challenged and have spread into every corner of our consciousness about the Universe we live in, courtesy of his many disciples and the countless institutions and children’s books spreading his thoughts like a religion. To put it all very broadly, everything started with a Big Bang and will one day all end in fire followed by absolute darkness. Perhaps, that is, until God comes around again. Simples!

For myself, I think that all these notions will one day pass in the face of experiment and discovery and that our knowledge of the ocean of space and time and so many worlds will be constructed on the hard won basis of evidence and fact, and that evolution, in matter of all kinds, will come to our rescue and help direct our thinking. Science and its ideas, like truth itself, doesn’t need to be based on necessity and fear, the way our economic life is today. Why is it that everyone’s calling the Higgs Boson particle ‘the God particle’? It’s because it’s supposed to be able to explain everything. That’s how all the media describe it yet how many scientists do we see standing up to challenge this kind of description, this artificial entrance of faith into their views? Why shouldn’t something that explains our natural world originate in our natural world and not simply be viewed as a divine happening?

Have our scientists today, our physicists and students of the cosmos then sold themselves so cheaply to the men of religion? Where speculation all too easily replaces fact in the absence of empirical data gained through experiment because of the difficulties for research in the field, the subject itself becomes a vacuum likely to be filled with theology and the divine, and the minds of researchers all too easily taken over by the stardust of faith from the heavens and the men who purvey it on Earth.

Maybe that’s why particle physicists and cosmologists today don’t get along too well with real scientists like astronomers whose discipline or more often based on mathematics and the sciences of measurement and optics. These are the real scientists of the cosmos. Their work a great ocean of technical data, measurement and photography than bullshit ideas that endlessly may or may not be. When do our saintly cosmologists these days forever hanging onto the coat-tails of the Divine ever talk about the great Hubble Constant, a mathematical equation based on endless empirical data connecting the motion of galaxies, their recessional speed away from our own, to their distance from us. The equation describes this hard empirical fact of galactic motion perfectly and is so important for understanding the size and extent of the Universe that cosmologists today can barely bring themselves to talk about it and its Doppler Red Shift verification.

So sad for all your endless Big Bang Swindle and your Higgsy-Pigsy Swindle too. Of course you’ll find the energy signature for the particle in the Large Hadron Collider. You need to so you’ve got to. It’s only then that you’ve got the real problem. Somehow the swindle has to be maintained but quite frankly I see no great difficulty in that. Once the particle has ‘definitely’ been found there’s always the possibility that it can also be broken and what have you got? Lots of tiny Higgsy-Piggsies all packed together, each with their own little energy signatures working together to create an equilibrium we can call mass! That means work for all those particle physicists at the Large Hadron Collider and elsewhere for the next fifty years. All the European Central Bank needs to do is keep printing euros. Billions of them so that the scientists can find the next tinsy-winsy!

And now that Bob has left Barclays, guess who’ll be the new Chief Executive Officer at the bank financing all the new and endless experiments? And for every great discovery those scientists make guess who’ll be getting a bonus? But by that time the City of London will own the whole Premier League so that banking executives and football supporters can all sit down together and work out how England can win the World Cup in 2150!

However the real trick is to take it all a lot further! Amalgamate football, politics, banking, finance and phone hacking into an understanding of how the Universe really works!  The banking and financial swindles, the political crooks and their expenses, the fabulous football swindles of guys pretending they can kick a ball around, the newspaper journalists who buy policemen for money and of course, the great big Higgs Boson Swindle of physicists telling us when our bank accounts are all coming to an end and how much more money they’d like us to give them for proving that a banana isn’t really a pooh stick. Now that’s a really clever idea isn’t it! We’ll call it Intelligence Enterprise and float it on the London Capital Market, say at £1 a share. The Coalition Government with Nick on hand will help things along. Each month every worker in the country will have five quid docked from his pay packet to make him the proud owner of five shares!

Not half a dozen dirty great big swindles here and there but one ginormous swindle involving the whole country. Then at last we’ll have what Margaret Thatcher always thought we should be. A nation of swindlers! And won’t she be proud. There alive and well in her Alternative Universe she’ll be looking across at us and smiling at her beloved Nigel. Didn’t they do so awfully well, Nigel… didn’t they do so awfully well? You can hear her saying it in that superior little voice of hers. She whom you all voted for when she robbed children from poor families of their free school milk. You remember how you loved her when you watched your house prices go up in the wretched estate agents windows then crash to nothing in no time! You remember that swindle don’t you? After all, you made it happen. You went along with it like all the swindles today that you’re just letting happen.

That’s the real meaning of the great Higgs Boson Swindle. Soon they’ll be lying to you about what you’re made of and the Universe you live in while they’re making off with your remaining welfare and social services. Soon it will be the National Health Service, the money you have in the bank and your pension. Soon you won’t know who you are anymore. You’re now in a Universe full of filthy journalists who don’t care what the truth is, politicians who pretend that they’re different, financial rascals and bankers who are plain thieves, ball kicking jokesters and up front merchants who put themselves about as something they’re not… BUT DON’T BE DISMAYED… Get a grip on reality fast and hang on for dear life. Fight for justice and truth wherever you are and don’t be afraid. Someday soon you won’t be surrounded by Higgs Bosons and life will be clean again.

With the decent men and women left in our country, with our pensioners, our students and our struggling youth there is still hope.

TRUTH IS ON THE MARCH…