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?