STOP ME AND BUY ONE: THE ART OF SELLING BOMB DETECTION EQUIPMENT TO FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS

Jim McCormick has just been convicted of fraud for manufacturing and selling an utterly useless and worthless bomb detection device to foreign governments around the world and making fifty million quid in the process. Shame on the police who helped prosecute him and the jury who convicted him! Shame on them! Why, in a society such as ours with its expenses cheating MPs, its multinational corporations heavily into tax avoidance, banks up to their eyeballs in widespread fraud, their executives getting millions in bonuses and pensions for running up gigantic annual losses and companies paying bribes all over the place in cash and call girls for business contracts, it’s a travesty that such an enterprising fun loving bloke like Jim should be accused of fraud in the first place when so many businessmen and politicians are doing the same to say nothing of policemen and journalists.

Don’t you know? It’s part of the British way of life these days.

Why him? Why should he be taken to task for being a crook who’s now salted his money away in tax havens for the rich where no-one can get to it, just like all the other sensible businessmen doing the same. After all, is he any different to them? No, they only decided to prosecute him because they were jealous! Here’s this genius, comes along with a bit of black plastic shaped like a kid’s toy gun, sticks a wobbly bit of silver aerial in it that’s basically not attached to anything inside, then with a bit of friendly help from the Department of Business, British Government, goes selling it round the world six to ten grand a time! Original cost fifteen quid and there’s Jim flogging it off at ten large! Bloody marvellous! He should be given a knighthood. After all, others have for doing far less!

Now truth to tell, even before he began running his caper, he already knew what was what. After all he was a former policeman who’d later tried his hand as a salesman in the technical equipment business. It was then that he came up with the clever idea of using a jokey little golf ball finder, an American novelty gadget called the Gopher that he could buy on the cheap, turn it into an explosives detector and flog it off for a fortune. All that was needed was a bit of modification. You know, some smart plastic casing, a really good corporate name like ATSC, that’s Advanced Tactical Security to you and me, a bit of cool packaging and in Jim’s hands it was now something special. 

Boy it really looked good. The top of the range model, the ADE 651, came with a handle and a swiveling antenna (like a bit of car aerial) mounted in a moving pivot so when your hand moved it wobbled. Wait, it gets even cleverer! The handle’s connected by cable to a card full of ‘dots’ carried in a pouch round your waist that’s supposed to ‘code’ information about the substance ‘detected’.  Now here’s where the genius comes in. The whole thing’s powered by electrostatic energy generated by the human body when the person holding it walks up and down. No battery or other power source needed. Just walk up and down like the guys you’ve seen doing it in Iraq! A bit to the left and a bit to the right and then you’re in business!

A brilliant idea and genuinely regarded as such by the British Government who gave Jim their full support, helping him market his great technical breakthrough at Government backed trade fairs which allowed him to use the logo of The International Association of Bomb Technicians to help sales along. How exciting Jim’s great technical innovation must have seemed to the experts at the Ministry of Defence who surely would have given such a crucial piece of equipment the once over before clearing it for tactical operations. They must have thought him a real wizard! He’d created something that detects bombs and explosives everywhere. Enhance Britain’s reputation in the world and make millions for the economy. Help make the planet a much safer place. Give it time and they’d put his name down for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Only thing was, inside the smart looking plastic case there weren’t any parts. Nothing moving! Just a case, an aerial and a wire. No matter, in best entrepreneurial style Jim was selling them all over the place. To foreign governments like Iraq in their tens of thousands along with Belgium, and that was only for starters! Trouble was, British and American soldiers couldn’t find anything there either after checking them over with X-rays but that was okay. In Iraq some money-loving generals bought them with crates of dosh supplied by British and American taxpayers through their Governments as OVERSEAS AID! Others however, such as the Iraqi Interior Ministry’s Inspector General of the Anti-Fraud Watchdog began asking questions after which Jim’s brilliant devices were tested at science laboratories at Cambridge University and found, well how should I put it… a bit wanting!

Never mind! In best British style these days Jim really can’t be blamed for trying. Anyway they’re still being used in Iraq and elsewhere, despite the fact that they can’t even detect a monkey with a finger up its arse. It doesn’t matter. More important than anything else is the fact that Jim still says they work!

Yes, that’s the important thing really. Jim still has absolute faith in his product. It’s the sign of a true Brit, that integrity, that faith in his product. And no better indication of it is the fact that he’s got most of the money he made salted away in places where no-one can touch it. You see, he was someone who really knew how to get on with people. He knew what people wanted and he sold it to them. Isn’t that something in our best British tradition? I mean, same as how our politicians and captains of industry once gave their native friends in Africa beads and mirrors in exchange for large bits of their country to say nothing of lots of their own people to work in our sugar plantations? So what’s the difference? Jim helping bring peace after the war in Iraq by selling bits of wobbly metal in plastic to help detect bombs, and even contraband ivory and drugs as he’s claimed.

Let’s not knock all his effort. I mean, you could never say he was anything nasty like an arms salesman, could you? Just a chap who wanted to make the world a happier more peaceful place. Giving assistance to Lebanon, Iran, Syria, Jordan, China and Mexico among other places. Yes, even America, Canada and Japan. Surely all their technical experts and military can’t be wrong too? It all points to one thing… the sheer genius of a man like Jim McCormick. Fifty million quid for a plastic box with sixpence worth of aerial stuck in. It speaks worlds for the man. How dare he be prosecuted? Someone like that, in our current economic climate, ought to be the Prime Minister, or at least Business Secretary. He’d get Britain out of its mess.

Think of the ideas he could think up. Like selling grains of sand to our American cousins as treasures of English Heritage. Please… I’m being serious. Everyone knows how Americans love a bit of ancestry, a bit of heritage, and each grain of sand would be individually inscribed and come with a title. Like Sir this, or Lord that! After all, there’s nothing that Americans like more than think they’ve got a title to something!

Now that’s what you’d really call clever. I’d recommend it myself but I’m quite sure he’s thought of that one already!

THE FUNERAL OF MARGARET THATCHER : TRIUMPHANT DISASTER

Anyone thoughtful watching the funeral procession of Margaret Thatcher on the BBC or Sky Television, owned by Rupert Murdoch, her good friend and staunch media fan, would have noted two things that particularly stood out. One was the relatively small number of people who turned out to watch. The streets along the route weren’t packed and buzzing with great crowds of admirers. On the contrary, in places the expected numbers of well-wishers paying their respects were only two or three deep. Secondly, by way of contrast, the route was well loaded with the military and the police. Indeed, they were so much in evidence that with the addition of her coffin draped in a Union Jack and pulled along on a gun carriage, the whole thing had the appearance of a military state funeral given to a major war leader which of course she was not!

So where were the mass ranks of the public? Where were the hundreds of thousands who took a day off from work to be there? To see their so-called well-loved Prime Minister home? Answer, they never came! Indeed, far more turned out for the coaches of winning Olympian athletes and the England World Cup Rugby Team. Even Football Association Cup winners have had greater crowds cheering them on and that’s a fact. No, the public stayed away en masse.  Oh dear, oh dear, where was all the respect? Indeed, many of those who showed up were simply tourists or dyed in the wool Tory oldies for whom she could never do wrong, or youthful Tory-boys straight out the shires. So it was a scattering of oldies, goggle-eyed tourists all up for what must have seemed an English ceremonial heaven they could tell all their friends they’d been to or a few hundred protesters that made up the ranks!

As for the protesters it was all so very Margaret Thatcher. As we all saw, anyone opening their mouths for too long were immediately rushed by a police arrest mob in yellow jackets to say nothing of the many plain clothes dicks tucked away in the wings ready to pounce. So taken as a whole a fair percentage of all the respectful well-wishers must have been the military or the police in one form or another. Alas, there weren’t any grateful millions respectfully hanging their heads along the route, just the state forces of law and order and a swell here and there of the ultra-patriotic, ever deluded.

Naturally the television presenters for such a ‘national’ ceremonial occasion were commentating with their usual hushed reverential tones while lower order journalists were busy up and down the lines asking well-rehearsed questions of those purposefully there to adore. Could the answers then actually be anything less than expected…

She made Britain Great… She made Britain Great Again… She made Britain prosperous…

And from the ladies… She was the first woman Prime minister!

From the men… She was the longest serving Prime Minister of the 20^th century… Won three elections in a row… She made us feel good about being British again… She was someone who always did what she said she said she would do!

Before she came along no-one took us seriously anymore…

Such answers from her loyal supporters deserve consideration. They contain a clearly evident patriotism, that’s for sure, but underneath it all there’s something more disturbing. A kind of latent inferiority, not only about their nationality but far more important, about who they were. To them she was a strong personality. She made Britain a force in the world. A force to be respected. She not only recreated a sense of national pride but also gave it to them. It wasn’t only that Britain could be respected again but they too! She not only made them feel proud to be British again but returned to them a sense of self-respect. What went for Britain went for themselves. If they’d become something of a joke under Labour Government and endless trades union troubles, if they’d been made to feel inferior in the eyes of the world, she’d removed it. She’d made others listen to her, particularly in Europe. A Sun newspaper headline said it all… UP YOURS DELORS! It was her great moment of putting two fingers up to them all. On their behalf much as anything!

To her admirers there on the street, patriotism and self-respect went hand in hand. Their previous lack of it had indeed been the cause of their sense of inferiority, both nationally and personally. Now, because of her ‘strength’ they’d felt important again. Much the same psychological process had occurred, let it be said, in Germany under Hitler, who’d made Germany ‘great again’. ‘A voice to be reckoned with no matter what’.

If she made them feel good about themselves again she also made them feel prosperous. Made Britain feel prosperous again after all the union troubles so called. It’s a consideration fraught with illusion. With the sale of council houses at knock down prices and cheap mortgages at the ready, she created the bubble of a property boom then denationalized a vast swathe of state owned industries selling millions of people shares, also at knock down prices. Psychologically, this too made people feel good about themselves. They were the owners of private property, just like the rich! Owners of private wealth who could, furthermore, continue to borrow money and spend on the back of the inflated value of their homes!

People not only felt good about who they were but also what they were. And with it in tandem came an explosion of financial wealth creation in the City of London. Money washing around everywhere to be made and spent with her many new working class followers part of it all. Part of a Grand Illusion.

She made Britain prosperous again, you heard people say. For millions it was a wonderful feeling. Still lovingly remembered. For many millions of others however without the fond memories, it was a gigantic calamity of lost industries, lost jobs, broken communities, family dislocation, loss of pride and endless years of intimidation and suffering. This was the plight of so many industrial workers and their families. People who made things sacrificed to the new economics of people who bought and sold money, or furnished their houses on the back of an artificial property boom which collapsed three years later.

She made Britain prosperous again… Consider the judgement. Ninety percent of the denationalized industries, from steel, shipbuilding and water to electricity, gas, the railways, transport, automobile production, power generation and more are now foreign owned. Their shares, once millions of pieces of paper, quickly sold by the newly prosperous for a quick profit to investors and speculators who in turn sold them on, have long gone. Only the silly memory remains of supporters, once all hot to be prosperous owners of shares so go and tell Sid! The heritage of this artificial prosperity, a plain confidence trick in the mind of the greedy is with us all over again. Margaret Thatcher Part Two! This time perpetrated by the jack the lad executives who worked the banking bubble of 2004-2008 which collapsed likewise!

She was the first woman Prime Minister! A massive feather in her cap! This was a question specially for the ambitious, determined go-getting woman. Sounds fine if you’re a stop at nothing self-seeking type with iron in your soul who cares about nothing and no-one except herself and her plans. Where’s the feminine  warmth, the kindness, the generosity of spirit, the humanity, the personal conscience, the honor and tenderness of the caring generous heart? Ladies, if you want none of that and prefer instead to be a pushy cold fish then you know who it is to admire!

Most of those protesting there on the day had their voices and their emotions drowned out, not by her loyal admirers but by the endlessly soporific gush of slush pumped out by the media. The procession to St Paul’s was essentially military and surely delighted the hearts of her party, a ceremony, indeed a pageant capped by the attendance of the reigning monarch as its highest accolade. As a showpiece of Tory grandiosity and tribute she’d been roped into a piece of party political activity but then you’d have thought that such a splendid occasion had required some Tory guru, some adoring Tory publicity mastermind to have conceived of it as a tribute to one of their own. Alas you’d be wrong! The whole idea for this Tory militaristic parade and Service was conceived years earlier by the architect of today’s national economic collapse, Labour’s very own Gordon Brown! Yes indeed, the architect of today’s attack on the Welfare State by the Cameron-Clegg Coalition Government was that former dour master of prudence!

It was Gordon, don’t you know, who invited Lady Thatcher to his Prime Minister’s Residence in Downing Street for tea and a chat! Was there no greater love shown from a Labour Prime Minister than to design such an outrageously camp piece of eulogizing for a Tory predecessor! Gordon of course has gone down to political oblivion and ignominy along with his ship so let the dead bury the dead in best groveling style.

He organised it all and sat in St Paul’s along with a tearful George Osborne, dear boy! So who also attended the Memorial Service? Naturally you heard it all in those very BBC hushed tones as only that sniffy organisation can muster. You were told about many of those there sure enough but maybe not too much about those who weren’t! No members of the current Governments of leading world powers such as the United States, Russia, China, Japan or Brazil. Even former soul mates like Gorbachev cried off. And no-one important from France or Germany either. She’d insulted those countries and their leaders too many times. Alas, no respectful attendance from those quarters and no dignitaries from the EU or the Arab League either. No-one really important at all from the political world of today for such an ‘internationally respected figure’. THERE’S JUST NO RESPECT ANYMORE… NO RESPECT! 

Instead, scores of her old political cronies along with current and past Labourites and Lib-Dems. From the top only. Countless other Labour MPs who knew her only too well stayed away along with trades unionists. The greatest mystery of all though among the 2000 bums on seats was the matter of family and friends. Where were her personal friends from childhood, university and today? Old mates from the factory she once worked in, and where were her family connections? Sure, her children and two grandchildren were there but a family’s much bigger than that. Why no descendants of uncles and aunts from her or her husband’s side of the family? Where were they all to create a sense of family warmth and togetherness? Why was everything so political, so military? Why so many dispassionate relationships that were ultimately only user-friendly and chilling?

Biblical type words in a eulogy from her Christian fundamentalist granddaughter to clad her soul and spiritual garments in iron. A real biblical rendering of iron in the soul, but then iron for what? If she was born into the world on a mission she spent most of her life letting other people know and take note of her message just like any other evangelist. Only there’s a time when people get tired of the same old tune and don’t want to know anymore. Just like her own Tory Party who eventually said enough was enough and booted her out on her arse.

The television presenters, journalists and well-chosen pundits, from the slimy obsequious to the fawning raconteurs told us little about who she really was. I mean as a person. Outside politics did she ever have any real friends? On the day, despite all the words, it left a great gap in our knowledge. We knew what she believed and knew what she did but did anyone apart from her husband really know her? Or was there really nothing at all there except her endless political evangelizing? Most newspapers the following day were full of adulation writ large. The front pages of most could have come straight out of North Korea. The Beloved Leader etc etc… The significance of the military carrying her coffin up the steps of St Paul’s along with displays of mounted cavalry and armed soldiers created a war leader-hero perspective and was ultimately a display of power. The military plus the Tory Party equals state power. That was the image portrayed.

It begs a question. Portrayed by who? Let’s not forget who these people are. Journalists who have a crucial job in a democratic society and should, in theory, be purveyors of truth. Dedicated to presenting truth or at worst both sides of a story, an image or a matter of public interest. In this country we have quite a few national dailies yet the day after the funeral how much more did we know about Margaret Thatcher? What other images did we see apart from those of the military or the politicians and religious at the Service at St Paul’s?

Two of these dailies are owned by her hard right Australian former crony along with a major television channel while two others are owned by those with Tory populist values. What then could we expect from most of the mass circulation media? From journalists whose stories are often littered with lies, who’ve been paying the police for stories in recent times and who’ve hacked into the mobiles of endless victims or paid others to do such dirty work? What else could we get from the Thatcher-loving owners of so much of the mass media other than sentimental slush, half-truths, misrepresentation or distortion with their well-paid hacks only too willing accomplices?

This ceremonial procession and service was essentially a portrayal of power much as the political and media establishment had wanted. A real triumph of fawning idolatry. In reality however it was an abject failure. Most people saw this crowing as a symbol for what it actually was. Crowing triumphalism, and the British people don’t like that. They prefer dignity and modesty. Both speak louder than any words, especially those that are hectoring, imperious and demanding. Besides, let’s take a longer view. A wheel always turns. Politicians, their values and their evils come and go. What fine values, what generosity of spirit, what noble deeds and genuine humanitarianism will Margaret Thatcher be remembered for? Possibly, only for the inculcation of greed and the hardship and misery of many who have long, long memories for what people suffered passed down the generations as a millstone of fear.

Seen from the distance of a many faceted and much changing world it’s not looking good. In national well-orchestrated terms, a spirit of triumphalism! In terms of our planet and its people over time, a mere interlude of unpleasantness. She didn’t make people any better, any kinder, any wiser, any the more human. Viewed from the longer perspective of time and distance she strutted her mean stuff for a decade then vanished.

And finally, as for her playing a vital role in destroying ‘communism’ and bringing down the Soviet Union with Ronald Regan… really, who’s kidding who? Gorbachev did that, not Margaret Thatcher, because that’s what he wanted to do. The so called Iron Lady was only iron at home for a few years playing with tin soldiers. On the international scene her raucous voice and poshed up supercilious tone was little more than a barely tolerated joke. An international joke that in reality made the people of Britain look foolish.

THE DEATH OF MARGARET THATCHER : AN OBITUARY OF ANOTHER KIND

So sad! So very sad really! On the day that Margaret Thatcher died, thousands of disabled people would hear the news that they were losing their crucial disability living allowance benefits. So very sad! How she would have loved to hear it too. She who’d taken away free school milk from the poorest children. And if she’d heard about riot police in Bristol attacking young people with batons just because they were out on the street celebrating her death, how she would have rejoiced. It was so very much her way of doing things.

So sad she missed it all really. Never mind. Let the removal of Disability and Housing Benefits to the most needy stand as a monument to her name, same as bankers bonuses and bank swindles, corporate tax avoidance, robbery in the City of London, attacks on the Trades Union Movement and of course, her lovely friendship with Rupert Murdoch and their lovely police. Yes, let all these things stand as a glowing tribute. A lasting memory to her dear name. Such a lovely lady! Especially if you’re a scrubby little scrote from Essex.

Really? Don’t you remember her always telling you what was what? And oh what a treat it is to see the whole Tory Rat Pack come out of its box and unanimously coo! Oh what a lovely lady she was! She’d have known what to do with them all in her time, yes she would. A smack on the bottom and back in your cage Geoffrey!

She’s dead. Big deal. So what’s her story?

Margaret Thatcher was a child in the middle. She detested her cold mother and loved her Tory councilor greengrocer daddy who always spoiled her with sweeties. As Daddy’s girl she came to dislike the idea of family as an organic unity with its sense of a collective togetherness. That was something else and so was she. A solitary child. A little individualist. Her individualist childhood without maternal warmth explains much and lays down a pattern for later as her Tory shopkeeper father drove her to become an achiever who loathed the collective idea of family and in time social class, the Trades Union Movement and ultimately the notion of Society itself. ‘There is no such thing as Society’ she once remarked. What for others was a collective concept was for her millions of discrete individuals all working hard to achieve and better themselves just as she had done.

She made the philosophy of individualism her very own political theme. Gave council tenants the opportunity to buy the homes they lived in. Privatized property owners. This set off a gigantic property boom during which house prices rose on a daily basis like an ever expanding bubble. It was a time when the entire population of Essex and the South-East of England endlessly occupied itself looking in estate agents windows to see how much more their house was worth by the hour. It fostered a get rich individualistic conduct which made as much money as work, enabling millions of people to borrow money from banks on the strength of increased values and begin a wonderful time of spending!

Industrial production, as the collective activity of industrial labour had to become marginalized as a class activity along with trades unionism. Their collectivist structures were anathema to her deep psychological sense of individualism that came to characterize her political outlook. Something had to be done to replace them. A new type of economy was required. Fortunately the theory of monetarism was not only ready and waiting but entirely in keeping with her mentality.

On the day of the Big Bang the City of London had all its controls removed. Stockbrokers and share dealers ran speculative riot. The ‘City’ was already perfectly structured for rampant go-getting individualism so on that special day with the controls taken off traders ran wild with other people’s money. It was a time of rampant speculation, takeovers and unashamed piracy. Companies were bought and sold wholesale or merged on promises to pay and millions of workers busy making things soon found themselves unemployed across countless occupations, from mining, shipbuilding and engineering to metalwork and all the automotive trades. All of it happening alongside the juicy fortunes made by her new financial heroes, the individualist piratical speculators who only cared for themselves. A philosophy of libertine individualism ran riot to a chorus of champagne corks popping all over the financial square mile. Her visceral psychology had come home with a vengeance. Soon it spread from the City of London to the mind of the public. It created her very own private electorate filled with the idea that making money was everything and greed no longer a sin. On the contrary, it was a much maligned virtue! 

Soon, with her insistent little foot and contemptuous manner to anything European she became the nation’s favorite lady. One who’d have her way with everything as it had been once before when she was daddy’s favourite girl. She bought people with the right to own personalized property and shares on the cheap in the privatization of State property, railways, electricity, gas, water, British Airways and the bus services. These no longer belonged to a whole people but millions of private individual persons. Shareholders! A once collected people, recently unified by war, were turned into private individual owners. She bought what was once their collected sense of self and sold it back to them on the cheap as little pieces of paper! People became less concerned with each other and increasingly more with themselves, with their own material worth. Her impulsive visceral individualism changed the psyche of a nation. Its emotional nexus was greed!

Of course there had to be losers but that was okay. They were mainly industrial workers up north holding fast to their communities and trades unions. People and things that ran contrary to the new selfishness so had to be suppressed. With the aid of the press, essentially Rupert Murdoch and the Sun newspaper, the police and a deeply reactionary judiciary, they were sneered at, vilified, threatened and attacked on a regular basis. Meanwhile good friends and supporters like Jimmy Savile and other creepy-crawlies were regular guests at Christmas!

It must be clearly remembered and understood. She recreated the entire population of the south of England in her own image and won three straight General Elections in a row. A large majority of people supported her, admired her and gave her their devotion. Became her kind of people. Made in her own image. In love with her forceful individualism. In love with themselves. This was a new self-satisfied, smug lower-middle class . Working people who’d bettered themselves and abandoned what they once knew. Wanted to be materially better than what they once were and she gave them the chance. Just as long as they were prepared to forget everything else. What they once were! Their emotional bonds. Their solidarity. They had to be psychologically privatized. Made cold. Without emotion or warmth, same as a greengrocer’s nickel and silver.

Just consider how this greedy-to-better-themselves south of England working class with lower-middle class aspirations, many of whom worked as clerks or other kinds of dogs bodies in the City of London, along with a small army of tradesmen, must have regarded the industrial working class elsewhere who dug for coal or actually made things? These men and their wives were part of another world being forced into decline as finance and the City of London were on the rise. With Margaret Thatcher’s economic policy of monetarism squeezing industrial production into decline and one set of factory closures following another, this old ‘industrialism’ and its northern working class stalwarts were viewed with loathing and contempt. Like they were already an anachronism out of a past time. It was little wonder that the attitudes of the police towards the striking coal miners up north along with their wives and families were so deeply hostile, callous and brutal. After all, many of them brought in to crush the Strike came from Essex and the South-East of England!

Interesting then to hear Ed Miliband, current leader of the Labour Party, stand up in the House of Commons on a day of political tribute to the deceased, praise her strengths and state his respect for what she did. Interesting too that David Cameron, current Tory Prime Minister, should state his admiration for her because ‘she made Britain strong again’. A rationale which someone on Labour Party benches should have pointed out might just as easily have been made in the case of Hitler and Germany Alas, no-one did! As for their  leader respecting her actions there are simply no words to measure his party’s decline as a force for decency and social equality. So Mr Miliband, you respected her legal crippling of the Trades Union Movement and endless attacks on the working people they are supposed to represent. Respected too her liberation of the City Of London for its endless piracy and swindles, the consequences of which so many people in Britain suffer today!

Yes Margaret Thatcher has died and the eulogies are flowing. A sea of eulogizing and tributes already gushing out of that great sewage faucet of old Tory colleagues, disgusting Labour Party political creeps who discarded values of fairness and decency long ago and journalist hacks from the gutter press stables. Yes, she taught them all well. Made them all in her image too and that indeed is her legacy. That so much of this country is less warm, less humane for her cold sterile childhood. That so called ‘steely determination’ in her never really came from any honorable convictions. Only a need to find her place in a broken family environment.           

Finally, regarding these tributes, perhaps the most disgusting of all comes from Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Stalinist bureaucrat with whom she once famously declared she could do business. Of course she could! At the time of the Coal Miner’s Strike he promised her supplies from Russia to help break it if needed, after which, as we know, he handed his country over to gangsters, speculators and on the make criminal exploiters who stole whole industries and indeed, most of that country from its citizens before taking their loot and leaving for Cyprus where the Germans later gave them a haircut.

IF YOU’VE FOUND MY OBITUARY TO MARGARET THATCHER INTERESTING AND ENJOYED READING IT  PLEASE RECOMMEND IT TO YOUR FRIENDS: DON’T LET THE PEOPLE WHO SUFFERED AND STRUGGLED SO MUCH DURING HER TIME PASS OUT OF HISTORY IN VAIN.

“The weight of this sad time we must obey,

Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.”

Exeunt, with a dead march.

 

Shakespeare  KING LEAR

THE GREAT FISH AND CHIPS SWINDLE

Fish and chips sir? Eat here or take away? It’s all part of the traditional British, almost holy way of life. Even the middle class do it, for a bit of slumming that is! Oh Rory, do let’s have some fish and chips tonight. The real thing... We can have them back at my place with a nice bottle of Chardonnay... Sure thing Jemima, should be real fun!

That’s not to say the working man always has it with fava beans and a nice chianti, after watching some arsehole football club like Sunderland somewhere up north. By no means! Fish and chips is still as traditional as warm beer and unemployment. Trouble is, it isn’t that traditional anymore. I mean, it’s no longer what you expect, that greasy cod or ‘rock’ in inch thick batter, rolled up in a newspaper as greasy as the Sun to match. Sure, the latter’s always tits with a pack of lies round them only now the vertebrate of your choice is as much suspect as your favourite reading material.

After the great horsemeat scandal maybe we should have expected it. What? A horsemeat scandal? Where’s that gone in recent weeks? Disappeared from the media like it never happened under the new Pope Francis the Popular, endless out-takes of the Vatican, some poxy little Italian fascist football manager and the usual celebrity tart to say nothing of benefit cuts and the National Health Service going private. I mean, if you’d been out of your head on rocket fuel for the last few weeks on some Spanish Costa you wouldn’t have known about it but now a new food scandal has come along to replace one the media have airbrushed out of existence!   

Sorry to disappoint all you football junkies but cod might not be cod anymore or ‘rock’ and haddock not quite the real thing. Yes, I suppose we really should have expected it. Another nasty bit of substitution on the working class food front only this time it’s altogether more serious. Okay, horsemeat substitution for beef is just about everywhere. It’s cheating and fraudulent, only beef-burgers and lasagna aren’t exactly what you’d call holy. Sure, all the cheap take-away aficionados and burger addicts are horrified and incensed. All those working class stomachs being polluted by diseased Irish racehorses straight off the knacker’s block. Horrible as it is though you can be sure that the Government and their friends in the food industry are working overtime to keep those equine kidneys off your kid’s plate, joke joke! But now fish! Fish that comes out of seas polluted by oil and sewage is something else! Fish is traditional, utterly reliable, HOLY! Fried fish is British! It’s got the Union Jack all over it and who cares about the outrageous price for a large bit of cod, so called!

I had a large bit of cod the other night. Ate in at some café in London. The chips were excellent and filling, but the cod? The four or five mouthfuls I managed to get out of the cholesterol popping batter were a swindle for a tenner. Yeah, the chips with a bit of salt were alright but I could have sliced those potatoes at home any time or else gone for McCains. Little wonder that blokes are turning to Gooray as they say up in Birmingham. No, the fish is a disappointment that quite frankly wouldn’t even satisfy a small appetite but there it is, all greasy and inviting under the glass so you go for that well known taste of the briny with a serious shake of the vinegar bottle if you’ve got any doubt.

Get your nose round the smell and your tongue on the flavorsome flesh of your favourite bit of white vertebrate ‘cos you never quite know whether the illegal immigrants who work in your local Gooray take-way haven’t been using their fingers to wipe their bums rather than bog paper so you go into the chippie ‘cos it’s reliable and you’ve got to have some. That cod or ‘rock’ or haddock. It’s traditional so you forget about the last time you had it and really loved those chips, yum yum. Only the word now is, after various wide-ranging checks and inspections, that what you’re getting isn’t the real thing anymore, isn’t what you expect but a cheap fish composite or defrosted substitution by way of New Zealand like pollock or tilapia. Only you wouldn’t know after ten pints of lager and besides, you’re not entirely sure what the real thing tastes like anymore! You only think you do. Don’t you?

So far the scandal’s low on the horizon. Being kept off the media headlines. Only occasionally a news item.  It’s understandable really, the Government keeping things quiet after the last major cheat that cost the food industry so much. They don’t want to alarm you! It’s because they care don’t you see?

We eat a vast quantity of fish in Britain and what’s this, even the middle class are doing fish fingers on Fridays… so given our current climate of thieving, cheating, swindling and foul behaviour along with the omnipresent gallery of nasties that have crawled out the woodwork and typify Britain today, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that another food substitution gold mine in the making was left unexploited by the jack the lads so ubiquitous in an exploitative climate. A traditional product with a mass market consumed by countless good-natured unquestioning folk was ripe for the taking so when everyone was beefing about horsemeat and eating more fish - healthy you see - they were already being had by a real double whammy. Taking another tradition on trust all over again and being suckered same as before! After all, we live in a time of on the make rascals so why not expect another food substitute racket? Perhaps those being cheated and exploited no longer ask questions. Just accept what’s there and eat it. A bit like prisoners. Like everyone accepting their energy bills going up every five minutes! Just shrug their shoulders like the rascals who run the Energy Cartel want them to do!

No-one asks questions anymore. Cod and chips? Say no more! I’m up for it squire! It’s almost like we’ve gone back to feudalism. People believing that everything’s normal. That the world’s flat the way the priests, the media and the politicians say it is and that everything’s okay! Sorry, you forgot about The Black Death and the Peasant’s Revolt for justice and likewise you haven’t fully taken in that you live in a society dominated by on the make chancers who’d let you eat shit reprocessed as chicken nuggets if they had the technology to do it. Food substitution, reprocessing fish or substituting something cheap and similar for what you expect, something more expensive, is actually criminal and an only too typical characteristic of the society we live in where literally anything goes. Why, if a bank like RBS can make a gigantic annual loss yet award its chief executive a staggering £5 million bonus it ought to say something. In Britain 2013 anything goes. Your housing benefit… your disability living allowance… your tax credits… your ability to obtain legal aid… your ability to believe in the food that you’re buying… Anything goes!

And has anyone who’s actually been caught engaged in the crime of processing horsemeat and selling it on as beef yet been prosecuted? It’s a fair question. WELL WHAT DO YOU THINK?

And do you think that anyone caught in substituting cheap fish for expensive and selling it on as expensive be prosecuted for such a crime? WELL WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Anything goes… Your trust in fish and chips… Your faith in your Members of Parliament; in the integrity of the police; that what you read in the newspapers is true and the story honestly obtained; that your burgers and sausages are made of what is said on the packet! It’s time you woke up because today anything goes.

Want to keep going to football? It has a mass market. Just keep on tuning into my blog. Could be that the next scandal awaits. Like footballers aren’t really footballers at all but juvenile robots secretly manufactured in China! Oh, do you really think it’s impossible?