THE GREEK BAILOUT CRISIS : TRAGEDY OR FARCE

Okay, the first thing I have to ask myself when considering this question is why does everything that’s ever had to do with Greece or the Greeks either have to be a tragedy or a farce? I mean, there are simply no in-betweens! It’s a bit like something straight out of Italy or better still Sicily. The daughter’s disobeyed her father. Chosen a lover of whom he seriously disapproves and refuses to give up so either he murders the guy and the daughter kills herself or else he’s welcomed into the family and soon finds himself in line to become the next Don. It’s a bit like that with the Greeks. Either one thing or another without any compromise. You know, a little comme ci comme ca like the French or a little bit of this and a little bit of that like the English. But no, with the Greeks it’s a two mask situation. Mouth turned up in a smile because you and the family on holiday in Athens are sitting in a café enjoying your wine and kebabs, or else it’s turned down in a frown because you walked out without leaving a tip!

Actually it could have been worse. You could have been Germans who’d walked out without leaving a tip!  The bastards that all Greeks think are responsible for their economic hardships, troubles and woes because they dominate Europe, bankrolled most of the money loaned to Greece by the EU and are now insisting it be paid back in regular installments with interest!

Depending on how you look at things the great Greek Bailout Crisis is either a tragedy or a farce because in truth that’s the way the Greeks themselves taught us to look at things. After all it was their ancestors who invented drama and wrote the first plays and besides, they were the first people to give us the idea that situations could be looked at either one way or its opposite. Either tragedy or farce. So what then is the truth about the current Greek economic crisis? Let’s look at the situation more closely.

Greece and most of its people are currently experiencing terrible hardship. Not so long ago, for reasons only known to the Socialist Government of the time Greece decided to scrap its national currency the drachma, join the European Union and adopt the Euro. That meant tying their fortunes to much more powerful economic neighbours like Germany, France, Italy and Britain, but doing that created a serious problem. These countries made things. They were centres of manufacturing, agriculture and finance. They had something to sell. Had more than one way of earning money. With Greece it was different. Their economy relied heavily on tourism with a bit extra coming from agriculture, specifically olives and olive oil production. There was no oil or gas; no manufacturing or engineering. And the shipping industry it had long relied on to bring in some money collapsed in the face of competition from South Korea.

Never mind. The sunny Greek illusion had to prevail and would do so because of the country’s connection with its powerful allies in the EU. After all, now they were all happy smiling Europeans together! For Mediterranean Greece the eternal long holiday of sunshine and sea would continue! Trouble was, they made nothing, earned nothing and got into the habit of paying no taxes or dodging such necessities wherever they could. So for donkey’s years the Greek Government one way or another was skint. It had little income from taxation derived from a manufacturing base that might have employed large numbers of people. Instead they worked in vast and costly public services sectors. The makings of a tragedy was coming together. Greece made nothing and earned nothing and the Government had countless employees who demanded a regular wage. 

Never mind. Greece was part of the EU. It had friends it could count on. Counties with lots of money like Germany who formed a dirty great big cash cow of northern Europeans who’d always appreciate those sunny Mediterranean smiles! The Germans! With a Government that wanted to hold European nations into the fold of Europe at any cost! They just wouldn’t accept seeing sunny little Greece have to pull out and leave because of a matter of money! Euro-Crisis or not, the Germans, stinking rich with trade surpluses and main economic financiers of the EU Project wouldn’t let Greece go down the plug hole. The Greek Government desperately needed money to pay its public services sector and smiling all sunny in the councils of Brussels and elsewhere, particularly the European Central Bank, was the first to declared itself in need of financial support closely followed by Portugal and Spain! There the crisis was just a bit different. Financial investors in bonds issued demanded increasingly high levels of interest. This was because their economies were going down the tubes fast and Government bonds turning into plain worthless paper without any value behind them. The high rates they were forced to offer weren’t sustainable and soon Spain and Portugal also pitched up begging for money!

First Greece, then Spain and Portugal! If Greece junked out of Europe so would the others so Brussels had to cough up! In Greece the ship of Government needed help to pay salaries. It was floundering in heavy seas, it needed a bailout. Help was at hand. Brussels couldn’t let Greece go under. With help from the Germans it loaned that sunny Government 200 billion, under strict conditions of course! Top to toe they’d have to reform their economy. Seriously cut their public services sector and the wages of all those who continued to work there. Seriously begin the process of collecting taxes which very few Greeks were ever willing to pay. And seriously start thinking about some economic production!

Well that was five years ago! Since then Greece has seen 25% of its population unemployed and large numbers of its people destitute or bordering on extreme poverty. And the Greeks? Alas, few of them are smiling anymore because as everyone knows the time has come for the country to pay back the first installment of its loan. The Germans are waiting and Greece’s friends in Brussels are all insisting… PAY  UP… PAY UP… AND PLAY THE GAME!

The first installment of the GREEK BAILOUT SITUATION outlined above is known as THE TRAGEDY.

Second installment. THE FARCE

With repayment of the great bailout debt facing them the people of Greece have now got all grumpy with Germany. There’s been sour talk around. Like the Germans being willing to forgo its share of the debt in exchange for Athens or some other parts of Greek territory like the Greek Islands! Or even the hallowed and saintly Acropolis! There must have been jokesters in Germany who took the idea for a spin but it would certainly have fallen on furious Greek ears. They’ve always been an ultra-patriotic people, especially after recent Nazi occupation and desecration of their country and currently there’s some serious anti-German sentiment making the rounds. The result of all this culminated in the recent victory at the Greek General Election of the far left Syriza Party whose leadership campaigned on a platform of putting repayment of the loan from the EU onto a rocket heading for Pluto with terms of interest scaled back to zero and won close to 40% of the vote. Is that all? With such anger and hostile sentiment floating around in that country one might have thought it would be closer to 70%.

So the Left won and Greece has a new Leftist Government. Meanwhile German bankers along with senior officials of the EU have been appearing on television saying that Greece must pay the first instalment of its debt by due date. In a few weeks! And herein lies the problem and the essential making of THE FARCE. Essentially, the current Greek Government hasn’t got a pot to piss in. The one it replaced did its best to collect taxes. Did its best to reduce its burden of debt. Did its best to revitalize whatever economic production it could and in the last five years earned a few bob and paid its way. Just! But paying back five or ten billion as part of a loan? THEIR SUCCESSORS SIMPLY DON’T HAVE A PRAYER!  

In recent days the leftist Government of Greece has stated its determination to stay in the European Union. The main thing here I think is pleasing the Germans. It’s also stated its determination to negotiate the terms of repaying the loan. Promising its first installment in a few years rather than weeks or months. With this in mind it hopes to borrow more money from its current lenders in order to keep paying Government salaries.

IN OTHER WORDS IT SIMPLY WON’T AND CAN’T PAY A PENNY NOW, PROMISES WITH ANY LUCK TO PAY THE FIRST PART OF THE LOAN IN A FEW YEARS BUT MEANTIME IS ASKING FOR MORE MONEY TO KEEP ITSELF GOING!

And this is coming from a left wing socialist Government that promised the Greek people serious action if it puts them in power! It’s not that they won’t pay. It’s just that they can’t! In short, Greece borrowed a huge sum of money that its politicians fundamentally knew they could never pay back! Let’s look at the consequences. Is the current Greek Government taking a gamble? I think not. The Germans may be talking tough but even they know they can’t squeeze money out of a stone. There’s little to nothing that Europe can do to get the Greek money back. It’s like it’s gone down some plug hole into a bottomless pit, best known, as far as the Germans are concerned, as a Greek Siesta! Europe can demand the comprehensive reform of the entire Greek economy, demand all kinds of fiscal measures be taken by Greek Governments only none of it will help. Greece is and will continue to be up to its neck in debt for the next thirty years with little hope of reducing the burden, most of which will fall onto the necks of its people whatever the Government.

There are however a number of solutions, all of which may seem desperate but are perhaps not so far-fetched as they seem. Spain and Portugal are almost as indebted to the EU and German money as Greece.

The reason for allowing Greece to retain its membership is to prevent any catastrophic leak of more senior members. If all three opt out of then the Union comes close to collapse! However, what is there to stop Greece itself from opting out, untying its economic viability to the Euro and reintroducing its own historical currency, the drachma. The country’s burden of debt could be simply ignored. Put on a backburner. The only way of making the country repay the debt would be military action! What, with the Germans? Not too likely a prospect. Greek Government however, of whatever character, is hardly likely to stick two fingers up in Brussels’ direction. It’s a Mexican standoff. The EU knows it will never recoup the money it loaned to Greece and the rascally Greeks know that they know! YOU CAN’T SQUEEZE CASH OUT OF BIT OF GREEK MARBLE THE WAY THE GREEKS SQUEEZED IT OUT OF THE GERMANS. And the Germans know it too. It’s the Greeks paying them back for what they did to the country during the war. They took the money from Europe, smiled and made a few promises joke, joke.

There is of course another way for Greece to come out of its bailout crisis. It’s so simple and easy. Right there in front of their eyes. Why not do as the European Central Bank has recently done? Why not do what the Bank of England was doing with Britain in a similarly desperate financial crisis between 2007 and 2014? Why not do what the Federal Reserve of the United States Government did during its recent time of desperate economic crisis? Yes, they all did the same thing, polished up their printing presses and got printing hundreds of billions of pieces of paper called bank notes. The first to do it were the British. The  Bank of England when our banks ran out of money. THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT AT THE TIME CALLED IT QUANTITATIVE EASING a most wonderful phrase that’s pure bullshit and really means absolutely nothing. They just printed hundreds of millions of pieces of paper with the Queen’s head on them and called them banknotes. In the United States the American Federal Reserve did the same.  And pumped it into their banks.

This mass printing of pieces of paper by Government was an activity of exceptional economic desperation. The paper itself had NO REAL ECONOMIC WORTH because it was backed by nothing of economic value like gold or major trade surpluses. It had nothing of substance behind it. It’s value was entirely illusory. Bits of paper at best, yet on the basis of such an illusion, sold to the public of both nations, that public was assisted in continuing to believe that the money in their pockets was worth something. That it retained its purchasing power. The last time this trick was pulled was in 1920s Germany when the economy collapsed, the German currency became worthless and so huge amounts of money with enormous denominations increasingly were printed. It was a process known as hyper-inflation, causing untold misery, poverty and despair for almost the entire population and playing a major part in Hitler’s rise to power. The last nation to print money en masse was Germany. Its catastrophic result led the great economist John Maynard Keynes to formulate his economic theories and the process was never repeated.

Until recently that is! For a country to print money without the backing of gold reserves or a healthy trade balance to support its value has for eighty years been regarded as an entirely unacceptable and dangerous practice even in times of emergency. Yet it was done by the Governments of Britain and the United States who sold the deadly idea to their unthinking populations without so much as a murmur.

But wait! In recent weeks the EU Central Bank has announced its intention to inject 1 trillion Euros into the economies of EU members. This is to reinvigorate their stagnant economies so we’ve been told. One trillion Euros. Not a billion but a trillion! Here it’s worth asking a question. What will such a mass printing actually do for the value of the currency not only in Europe but also on the international markets? The result wasn’t long coming. Whether it’s a plain statistical book value or a real production of banknotes it can only have the ultimate effect of reducing confidence in current value. True, value is only a relative thing but there’s always a standard rule that applies. The more of any paper currency in circulation the less value it has.

In this respect the Greeks might consider enquiring into circumstances that would help them reduce the burden of their bailout debt. One of these might be using Government printing presses in Athens to produce hundreds of billions of Euro notes. They could use these to pay their employees but perhaps more important, use them to build up the book value of the Greek economy. Alternatively, they could print huge numbers of Euro currency to hold in reserve, give up their membership of the EU and tie to the Euro and revert their currency to the old Greek Drachma which of course they’d certainly want to print with a comprehensively new appearance. One possibly might be an illustration of Greek War hero Manos Glezos pulling the German swastika down from the Acropolis!

All the above has a deeper, altogether more fundamental meaning attached to it. Namely the real value of money at any time. It is the real rather than the notional value of money that attaches the element of FARCE to the great Greek Bailout Crisis. For what is real at any one time is continually changing. In short the value of money is an illusion that has no reality apart from what we are taught, indeed led to believe it might have. What we can do with it and how much it’s worth at any one time can change in an instant. After all, all money actually is is an idea attached to a piece of paper and cemented by social consent if you will. And even if it is only illusion provided us by people able to do so, it is what makes life possible and the world go round for the billions of people who live on it. An illusion that holds everything and everyone in place with an absolutely fixed and accepted idea that what is, is the way it should be. We ask no questions about why these pieces of paper and their supposed value regulate our lives but maybe now the Greeks should. Just abandon your debt. Leave the EU and your unsustainable ties with its Euro and cast off your misery. Print millions of drachma that will be equally worthless but at least you’ll know that they’re your own. A bit like British pounds sterling. Much depends on how successful a Government can be in persuading a people to accept its illusion, eat their bread and drink their wine with a happy smile on their faces knowing that death comes to us all.

And in the meantime don’t be too hard on the Germans with their philosophy of hard financial reality and demands that all the debt be paid back. It’s only a kind of objective idealism that historically drives them into dark corners of a cold, hard world of northern European reality that would be worthless without the warmth and the wine of Mediterranean dreaming and a quiet siesta in the sun. And here again we see the two opposites. The tragedy of northern European achievement and the farce of Mediterranean contemplation and idleness.

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 a minute 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…

From the ladies… She was the first woman Prime minister!

From the men… She was the longest serving Prime Minister of the 20th 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! Like taking milk away from needy school-kids

And then, 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 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 just about everyone, on their behalf as much as anything!

Especially Europeans!

To her admirers there on the street, patriotism and self-respect went hand in hand. And 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 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 it 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 all 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 the Grand Illusion.

She made Britain prosperous again, you heard people say. For millions it was a wonderful feeling, still lovingly remembered. For millions of others though 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 only too 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 that likewise quickly collapsed!

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 bitchy cold fish then you know who it is to admire!

Most of those protesting there on the day of the funeral 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 disaster, Labour’s very own Gordon Brown! Yes indeed, the architect of today’s attack on the Welfare State by the Cameron-Clegg Coalition 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.

Yes 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 dirty 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 came, along with current and past Laborites 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, of 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 everyone know it and take note of her message just like any other shrill 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 that 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. They were journalists, people  with a crucial job in a democratic society who should, in theory, be purveyors of truth. Dedicated to presenting truth or at worst both sides of a story on any matter of public interest. In this country we have quite a few national dailies yet on 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 along with a major television network are owned by her hard right Australian former crony while two others are owned by people 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. 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 acting as 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 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.

Or did she? Did she really? Or isn’t her true heritage the plain awfulness, the plain selfishness and the plain semi-literacy of people today along with the Underclass you see on the Jeremy Kyle Show?

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. And he did it  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! 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 some 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 always 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 the 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 little girl on her own needing to find her place in a broken family environment.          

Finally, regarding these tributes, perhaps the most disgusting of all came 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, along with Mayfair and Chelsea in London where they’re currently notorious for their obscene swanking.

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 as 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.”

Exit, with a dead march.

Shakespeare:  KING LEAR

WHO LOVES YER BABY? POLITICIANS SETTING UP STALL

In the last week or so the British public have been treated to the sights and sounds of the leaders of the three main political parties beginning their campaigns and setting up stall for the coming May General Election. The process began with their Christmas and New Year Greetings on television and in the mass media to a wide audience of voters. How very nice! As though anyone could possibly believe there was anything genuinely personal in it. That here they were, they simply being plain nice and showing a real caring attitude instead of having a political motive behind their scuzzy greetings.

I mean, all you had to do was look at their faces! Of course, some did it better than others, the natural born losers who tried so hard to come over straight that the effort stuck out! Their phoniness shining through all the sincerity! One particular victim of this desperate desire to please and be thought of as a really good bloke is Nick Clegg, someone who’s continually had to explain why he and his fellow Liberal Democrats have climbed into bed with the Tories night after night five years or more and are still morally clean instead of being what they actually are, poxed out political trollops compromised in the mind of just about everyone in Britain. Nick Clegg, politically a dead man walking if ever there was one, tried to explain it all in his New Year Greeting but the moral weight of five years of dreadful opportunism by he and his Party was there in his face and simply couldn’t be hidden. The lie he’s been telling himself and selling us wholesale about those bed sharing practices with a gang of dirty old men was in fact for OUR benefit. In short, that somewhere in the back of that dark mysterious place he calls his mind he reasoned in best biblical fashion that like Jesus he did it to save us all! That it was best for the economy and for the nation… if you actually believe it!

Well, that’s what came out on his face and in the increasingly desperate sounding words of his greeting. But let’s not be too critical of this wretched political gadfly who never hesitated for a moment at jumping at the chance to be someone, a Deputy Prime Minister no less!  He’s got to say what he does and now more than ever with the guillotine of public contempt hanging over his neck. He’s got to keep up his charade of trying to convince the electorate he did the right thing. That he and his Party won major concessions for their beddy-bye practices! Oh really, you mean like electoral reform, or controlling the banks and those financial executive bonuses do you, added to which you now have the plain gall to tell us just how necessary you and your Party are, no matter who you might be in Coalition Government with next time around, to create economic and political stability!

Well that’s really big of you Nick. So the political ideas and programs of the Labour Party or Tories don’t really matter that much, just as long as you and your friends can be there doing your so called bit of moderation! Well really Nick, don’t you think the gramophone record you’re playing is getting just a bit worn? We all know you’re desperate. That you, Vince, Danny, Ed Davey and all the rest are on the edge of a cliff currently battling it out with the Monster Raving Looney Party for fifth place in the ratings and that after the May General Election you’re dogmeat and not going into Coalition with ANYBODY. It’s just that you lied Nick and someone like Gordon Brown only made you look good on television because he himself was so deeply pathetic. Okay you’ve had your five years of fun. Five years of thinking that you and your crew actually made any real difference when actually you didn’t and now quite frankly no-one gives a shit anymore so why not go gracefully? Try and understand things for the way they are Nick. Time’s up for you and the Scarecrow. You’ll not be playing those naughty political games with anyone anymore so why not bow out with a bit of decorum instead of pretending you’re something you’re not. From May the days of playing Mister Nice Guy are over and you’re just a footnote in history so why not go to confession while you’re still able and get it all over! THAT YOU ALWAYS WERE JUST A PLAIN OPPORTUNISITIC POLITICAL DUMMY AFTER ALL AND AT HEART YOU REALLY NEVER GAVE A SHIT ABOUT ANYONE!

But then the prospects could be even worse for the Millipede. Imagine what dear old Ed’s having to face. Labour losing around forty of its once guaranteed safe seats in Scotland to the Nationalists, and then the added horror of watching a third of its once solid northern working class vote going down the plug hole to UKIP. None of it’s as unimaginable as it might seem, especially with potential voters telling polling organisations it’s UKIP that stands for traditional Labour Party values these days. So what do they think Labour actually stands for our Ed? Well they clearly associate the Party with the uncontrolled mass Muslim immigration of the Blair and Brown years and they don’t want any repetition of that. Then they connect you with unfailing support for the EU and they’re certainly not enamored with that either. But worse, even worse, they rightly blame Dark Gordon’s Government of which you were a part for creating a catastrophic economic collapse and see you and your Party as synonymous with mass unemployment and the cause of a major deterioration of their standard of living. Indeed, millions of working people regard themselves as far poorer today than they were in the past precisely because of Labour Government policy that favored the wealthy.

In other words they look at the record of recent Labour Government and see that it stinks where they are concerned!

 Just around Christmas, Ed, your former guiding spirit Tony Blair told you that the Labour Party risked being seen stuck in left wing policies and needed to shift more towards what he called the center ground in order to gain wide public support for the coming General Election. An interesting view but then what values should the Labour Party actually stand for? Historically, even up to the 1960s it represented the interests of working people, the poor and the unemployed. It’s values were steeped in its socialist ethic of helping those who were the most needy. These were first watered down by Neil Kinnock then abandoned entirely by Tony Blair whose Labour Government in the late 1990s had far more in common with the Tory policies of Margaret Thatcher than anything in previous Labour Government history, reaching an apotheosis in the financial policies and catastrophe of Gordon Brown. In fact it was Blair’s Labour Government that was responsible for beginning the process of destroying what was once free Higher Education along with bringing an ethic of profit and competition into the National Health Service. Today the NHS is all that’s left  of what were once the core values of the Labour Party and today remains as the only pillar for Ed Miliband to campaign around and that’s serious, because what is it that actually makes Labour different to the Tories in the eyes of their voters?

In recent times Ed Miliband referred to Gordon Brown as a towering figure in Labour Party politics. That’s plain disturbing because most of Labour’s natural electorate see the dark mumbler as the legitimate cause of so much of their misery! Even worse, he’s expressed the view that Labour under his Premiership would even more assiduously pursue the current Tory program of cutting social welfare to pay off the deficit caused by the economic policies of his predecessor. This in effect is a guarantee of continued cuts in any remaining social welfare programs left in place by the Coalition Government only this time supervised by Labour! How then one wonders can Labour shift into the center ground as suggested by Blair when Ed Miliband’s already committed it to being stuck out on the right with policies nastier than those of the Tories?

In short, thanks for your Christmas message Ed but I’m having trouble imagining exactly who might vote Labour in the May General Election. There could well be much tactical voting by Liberal Democrats in Labour’s direction but it’s hard to imagine much of the Labour’s traditional vote remaining loyal when UKIP’s offering an open door waiting to be kicked in. Of course the space itself is imaginary. UKIP’s social and economic policies are nothing like those of Labour of old but most people abandoning a sinking ship don’t ask too many questions. They’ll remember Labour’s diabolical record. Remember the Islamic fanatics running riot at the Finsbury Park Mosque and spouting their filth with Labour Home Secretaries turning a blind eye and Abu Hamza playing cheerleader while the police stood by doing nothing! And they’ll remember Labour’s refusal to guarantee a Referendum on EU membership but above all they’ll remember Labour ditching its traditional values in favour of cosy chats with bankers and business.

If Nick Clegg says he’ll offer Labour Government Liberal Democrat spine in any future Coalition it certainly won’t be the kind that helps ease the burden on the backs of the poor! So who is it our Ed who’s likely to love you come Springtime? Well certainly no-one in Scotland and with the strategic situation looking increasingly desperate I for one am trying to understand why you can’t stop your grinning. Do you know something I don’t or did your campaign managers tell you to keep smiling. Look like some grinning idiot all the time when you come out with your meaningless political snippets of nothing!

That said let’s turn to the Tories. This is the sensible Party. One that understands only too well that the only thing voters really concern themselves with is the money they’ve got in their pockets. A symbol of their economic health in the future. They know they’ll look back at Labour’s record, see what they’ve done, consider the gradual economic turnaround and their slowly improving personal prospects with Cameron. It’s a clear choice. Labour’s record and the shit they’ve been in five years or more or the possibility of something better. With Cameron, firm unsmiling and determined against Ed Miliband’s grinning and promising little except more of the same it’s a plain and simple no brainer. It’s all very well saying the Tories are nasty but it’s nothing compared to the situation that millions of people found themselves in through no fault of their own and whether Labour like it or not it’s just a plain fact, made even worse because it’s something that you and your friends have always refused to acknowledge.

Lack of trust however is a sword with two edges. The one precious thing that voters will always want to hold onto is the National Health Service created by Labour. Still part of its soul no matter what else they have done. For tens of millions of people the free at the point of delivery National Health Service is everything. In essence their guarantee of health and something as precious as the money they’ve got in their pockets, especially when they consider any alternative like what there is in America! The National Health Service is Labour and will always be Labour no matter what and the vast mass of British people trust Labour with it. No matter what assurances the Tories and David Cameron give about the NHS being safe in their hands there will always be an underlying element of doubt in their commitment to a permanently free non-profit making national institution. A permanent doubt as to how safe this key tenet will remain in their hands. In the minds of the electorate then, if the Tories are to be trusted with their economic health it is more likely they will trust Labour with their personal wellbeing and welfare.

That’s the real choice laid out. The Lib-Dems are blown away fly-boys, the Greens organic bullshit merchants and Nigel outside some local or other dolled up in tweed and playing the role of the Great Pretender. Up north though the Scots mean serious business. And if they give Labour a leg up down south it will only come at a serious price. That said go make up your minds if you’re able!

As for WHO LOVES YER BABY you can forget it. That’s because really none of them do!

PARIS, ISLAMIC TERRORISM AND THE NEW LABOUR CONNECTION

On Sunday, January 12^th in Paris we saw one of the great moments of modern history. Two million or more men, women and children, mostly French but many of other nationalities, led by 40 political leaders from around the world marched to uphold the great principle of Liberty, for the idea of freedom of expression that France and its people gave to the world at the end of the 18^th century. This great, joyous and quite frankly heroic march against the Islamic fundamentalist threat to silence and destroy that idea in the barbaric murders of French journalists, satirical cartoonists, police and French Jewish citizens, 17 people in all, will live in our minds for the rest of our lives and go down in history as an example of human beings of many nationalities, races and religions standing together as one in the face of a twisted perverted religion to silence them and our modern universal spirit of freedom.

Many people around the world witnessed this great coming together on television. For most of us it was a symbol of hope. For those on the march it was a symbol simply of being together for a great common cause. Who of those watching it could fail to be moved? Fail to be inspired by the people of Paris, by the citizens of the French Republic, because between those world leaders on the march whether conservative or liberal, the great mass of people and the police there to protect them there was a real common bond, that of the principle of freedom. The refusal to be terrorized into silence.

Many of us undoubtedly had our own individual high moments. For me two events stood out among so many others. That of a group of young French children holding up a placard on which was painted a bright yellow flower and singing the stirring national anthem of the French Republic, the Marseillaise. Secondly that of a police marksman standing high on a roof directly over the march and raising his arm in salute to the hundreds of thousands parading below. His great symbolic gesture brought endless roars of approval from the crowds below because here a policeman of the Republic protecting its people was telling those people that they were together as one. That he was defending their right to march for the principle of freedom! It was all great and fine only maybe we should consider for a moment where it all actually began.

So where did it all actually begin, this great march from the Place of the Republic? Was it just with the murders of journalists, police and French Jews a short time back or were the killings that led to the march inspired much earlier, years back in time to the end of the 20^th century? We know that the Kouachi brothers, who murdered the journalists had strong terrorist connections with the Yemen. One received military training and religious indoctrination there by an Al Qaeda fundamentalist preacher. The other, Cherif, served time in a French prison from 2008 for terrorist recruitment where he met and became a disciple of Al Qaeda lynchpin Djamel Beghal. As it turns out this meeting was more than significant because it marks a key stage on the road to mass murder.

Arrested in 2001 over allegations of involvement in a bomb plot and released in 2010, Beghal comes to our attention as someone with serious fundamentalist cred. In the mid-1990s he headed a puritanical extremist Islamist group in Western Europe initially financed by Bin Laden but was then dropped by him for being too much of a loose cannon. Undeterred he spent time regularly travelling Britain during in the late 1990s recruiting young British Muslims for jihad, finding the climate around the Finsbury Park Mosque particularly congenial. Already a notorious anti-Semite he openly called for the murder of Jews and other infidels as being particular enemies of the faith. A constant presence at the Mosque for 2 years during the late 1990s he was close to Abu Hamza, one of the main fundamentalist preachers outside on the streets but also to Abu Qatada, both men being self-styled imams with a considerable following among young Muslims.

Many British people will undoubtedly recall the genuine shock of hearing for the first time the extremist views of those Muslim fundamentalist sermons made by both Islamist preachers with their violent anti-Western, anti-Christian and particularly anti-Semitic content all of which were made freely and openly on the streets of London. It is of the utmost importance to grasp this singular fact. That these highly charged inflammatory diatribes, openly racist and threatening in character, were made in the hearing of a heavy police presence. In fact during the early years of this preaching of openly hate propaganda no attempt was made by the police to intervene or prevent it. In fact it seemed to many that the police presence was there solely to protect these preachers and their followers. It was like the whole Finsbury Park area had become a hotbed of Islamic extremism with its followers just about everywhere, one of the most active and dedicated of whom, Djamel Beghal, would later become friend and mentor to Cherif Kouachi in a French prison.

When looked back on from today the timing of all this was auspicious. In 1997 a New Labour Government was elected to power and Jack Straw chosen to be Home Secretary, a position he held until 2001. Throughout his period in office, Muslim extreme fundamentalist preaching continued unchecked around the Finsbury Park Mosque with police protection always at hand. Both the despicably vile racist content of these sermons and the protection given to these Islamic hate preachers by politicians and the police was supported by a host of woolly headed liberal lawyers and mealy mouthed leftists under a muddle headed notion of freedom of speech. In short the Islamists were allowed to say what they liked, grossly offensive as it was, without hindrance. Furthermore, during this time many stalls appeared on the streets of London run by these extremists openly selling anti-Semitic and often Nazi material.

It was a time of great consternation and anxiety for British Jews, perplexed at the time by the failure of Tony Blair’s New Labour Government to prohibit the activities of these Islamic extremist preachers and their anti-Semitic diatribes, any complaint usually met with the glib retort that there was no law against it! In other words these hate preachers were given carte blanche under New Labour Government to say whatever they wanted. The consequence of this was to radicalize of tens of thousands of British Muslim youths and inspire others already converted to the extremist ideology of death to go on to greater things, like radicalizing others and preparing the way for mass murder in Paris.

In short there is an undoubted linear connection between the early years of Tony Blair’s New Labour Government with its policy of facilitating mass Muslim immigration into the UK while at the same time turning a blind eye to the radicalizing of Muslim youths by fundamentalist Islamic preachers and now the barbarous events in Paris of recent days. Before the appearance of Blair’s New Labour Government in 1997 there were already millions of Muslims living in France as a relic of its conflict with Algeria. These however had never in main been radicalized with an extremist fundamentalist Islam. From the time of their arrival in the UK from the Middle East and the appearance at the Finsbury Park Mosque of Islamic fundamentalist preachers this was to change. Their overt anti-Semitism and authoritarian views were soon to radically affect many French Muslims, create devastating tensions with long established Jewish communities, particularly in Paris, resulting in many acts of violence towards Jews, and a general hostility towards the general universal principles of freedom on which modern France is based.

New Labour Government from 1997 and its permissive attitude to Islamic extremism at Finsbury Park has a great deal to answer for, same as it has for its disastrous policy of removing financial control over banking practices from 2006. As for the later career of Jack Straw as Foreign Secretary from 2001 it’s worth noting that to many he became known as the Ayatollah Straw in view of his visits to the fundamentalist Islamic Republic of Iran where he was always given a friendly welcome.

MUSLIM MASS MURDER TERRORIST OUTRAGE

I’m interrupting the Post I’ve been writing, POLITICIANS SETTING UP STALL, to comment on the immediate media concerns of the moment, the Islamic terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical magazine based in Paris, and the French police. Ten members of the magazine staff including two of its precious cartoon artists shot dead at point blank range by two Muslim hit men armed with semi-automatic machine pistols who knew their names and knew who they were killing. No problem! This wasn’t just a well-planned attack on artists and journalists, it was an attack on the free thinking cultural values of France itself, the country that gave the whole world freedom and liberty, equality and fraternity. Gave all of us in the West a belief in the rightfulness of free expression.

Free expression! Something that the religious faith of Muslims, Islam, abhors and believes it has the right to attack at every opportunity going. Freedom of expression and belief! Something utterly alien to Muslims and their faith who are quite clear in their belief, and let’s not mince words about it, that our own Western cultural values are alien to theirs. And indeed, those of them who are the most dedicated in these beliefs aim to show it by the endless terrorist attacks they have perpetrated against both our civilians and cities from Madrid and London, New York, Rome and Amsterdam in recent decades let alone various atrocities carried out in Asia and Africa from Bombay to Nairobi. Just about anywhere and everywhere will do so long as they’re attacking what they believe to be the Western values that they abhor.

And the values to which they are dedicated? Why, they’re plain and simple enough. No freedom of expression of ANY kind except their own i.e. Islamic and straight from the Koran! No toleration or notion of justice of any kind except theirs, which includes stoning to death, public beheading and the amputation of limbs. No education or rights of any kind for women. No freedoms of any kind except the right of men to practice the Islamic faith and certainly no tolerance of any others under threat of death. In short, no tolerance or respect for the rights of people of any of the countries they happen to live in. Only hatred and contempt.                                                

So how is it one repeatedly wonders, after yet another display of this contempt and Islamic mass murder in the nations of the West, how it is that the politicians of Europe and the United States have allowed countless millions of Muslims whose beliefs are so utterly alien to our own to obtain citizenship of their countries, to take full advantage of our liberal Western values to set up places of worship in which our Western values are daily reviled by their preachers? To set up their own distinct cultural associations and faith schools in which their children are inculcated with values so different to ours? How has this mass Muslim settlement been allowed to happen in which they have established themselves in main as an entirely separate cultural entity, so often hostile to the values of the countries in which they settle. Examples that immediately come to mind are Holland and France, those of Scandinavia and perhaps more than anywhere else, Britain. Today we have the extraordinary situation of so many of the youth of these Muslim families abandoning the countries in which their parents became domiciled and were made welcome,  journeying to the Middle East to receive terrorist training in order to take up arms against the soldiers and civilians of those countries stationed there to protect civilians against Muslim terrorist fanatics.

In other words the children of so many Muslim immigrants to Europe have contemptuously turned their backs on every Western freedom and opportunity they were given and sought to maim and murder those who so generously held out hands in friendship. In this respect, purely from a British perspective, how is it one may rightfully ask, that the Labour Governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown allowed at least two million Muslims to so easily settle in Britain providing them with full rights of citizenship and all those benefits to which British people themselves were naturally entitled? Alongside of this however was a studiously contrived lack of effort to integrate these immigrants into British society while allowing them to retain in full their own very separate religious and cultural identity. Its consequence has been the creation of separate Islamic society within our own British state. Currently many Muslims are insisting on receiving their own Islamic justice through their very distinct and separate Sharia law and in this at least have the ear of the Labour and Liberal Democrat Parties who both have no problem whatsoever in allowing further unchecked mass Muslim immigration into the United Kingdom against the wishes of most British people!   

And a possible result of it all? A serious increase of Muslim terrorist incidents in British cities. This is exactly what happened in France after its war with Algeria when millions of Muslims from North Africa were allowed to settle in that country with the consequence I would suggest of yesterday’s attack on the liberal, democratic values of the French people and the Republic of France. These people aren’t republicans. They have no interest whatsoever in the historical values of the French people. They are Muslims first and foremost and don’t give a shit about the values and rights of anyone else. That is why they attack the humor and satire of France. Theirs is a religion that does not allow them to laugh. To look at things with a critical, questioning, humorous eye. Mockery and humor to them are a criminal offence, especially when it’s directed against themselves and their religion. Yet it is their very own religion that insists that they criticize, denigrate and mock the faith of others. IN OTHER WORDS THEY CAN HAVE FOR THEMSELVES WHAT THEY SO EMPHATICALLY DENY TO ALL OTHERS ON CLEAR PAIN OF DEATH… Because it is so clearly on pain of death that they threaten and harm anyone else except themselves.

That was the murderous message they gave the French people in their attack just a short while ago. An attack on the French people and an attack on their values. Yesterday the Muslim terrorists of France laid down a marker. FROM NOW ON IT’S YOUR VALUES OR OURS.

Right now Friday morning let’s take a further look. The killers, two brothers of Algerian descent, are currently holed up in a small town north of Paris having taken hostages and are surrounded by the French security services. Much more has now been revealed about their background, some of which has come from the United States. One of the brothers was jailed in 2008 for recruiting young French Muslims for terrorist training in Yemen. The other spent time in that country receiving terrorist training and fundamentalist indoctrination by a leading Al Qaeda cleric. Both brothers are Al Qaeda recruits and protégés of an Islamic fanatic. So let’s ask a simple question. If the background of these goons was known then why the hell were they allowed by the French security services to walk the streets of Paris collecting weapons and planning mass murder?

And with a hostage situation in progress it may well be that the killing has only just begun. Unless that is, being so close to Charles de Gaulle Airport, they can persuade the French authorities to give them a plane and fly them out to the Yemen where they’ll no doubt be welcomed as heroes! In Britain we await a copycat repetition of such a situation! Thanks to our Islamic friendly Labour Party and Liberal Democrats.

JEWELS TELEVISION

With the absence of anything even half decent on television this Christmas with its worse than ever diet of films that have been on ten times before in recent months along with ghastly games shows and police dramas most of which are American and full of plain crap, the only genuine entertainment has come from the jewellery channels with their fabulous motor-mouth sales girls giving us an endlessly lively, superbly contrived patter about the glittering little bits and pieces they’re flogging off. And quite frankly it’s all beautifully done so that most of their viewers and customers are led to believe that they’re being offered real bargains. For anyone with a thoughtful cast of mind though i.e. anyone with just a bit more than half a brain or the plain emotionally needy, just a few serious questions ought to be asked!

There are not many of these jewellery sales channels on television but those that exist run a highly effective sales operation, each with its highly skilled, highly trained girls at the focal point of doing the selling. Many of them undoubtedly bringing to the role their own natural personal abilities so that to the independent, observant eye, each in their own way provides what may best be described as a masterclass performance. Occasionally there are a few lads doing the business but quite frankly their technical ability as sales vehicles is as nothing when compared to the sheer razzling brilliance of the ladies. The rapport they have to create with their undoubtedly large audiences of potential customers is crucial to their daily performance of flogging off jewellery gear in quantity and each little item they sell has to be repeatedly talked up as an absolutely must have item.        

Talking a thing up and turning it into something unique and special is at the heart of each sales pitch. It is the point at which the psychology of each viewing individual is gently massaged into play. Both the unique and special aspects, coupled with what appears to be a tasty affordable price for what that unique and special thing is, form the psychological linkage between bank balance and need so if any of you think that the abilities of these girls in flogging stuff off is simply sales technique then you’d be wrong. What they’re actually doing is playing to the personality of their viewers, most of whom are women aged 30-50, and worming their way into a generalised psychology of loneliness and need. They are in fact taking hold of the psychology of necessity that many women have who are single and out of their first flush of youth.

The jewellery they sell is more often than not bought for personal possession, for personal adornment by women who seek to brighten their lives with a little small something shiny and special. Something perceived as warm in the absence of real human warmth which is something desired more than anything else. In other words the purchase of jewellery by woman customers of these sales shows on television is a displacement activity, occasional at first but likely to become increasingly regular. A single, lonely woman, may want to spoil herself with something colourful and bright that she regards as attractive, as a kind of compensation for her lonely state of being.

This need is skillfully played on throughout with a variety of words, phrases and specific display modes of each item. The verbal induction into the process for each item is initially meant to engage, then with repetition and display on finger, ear, wrist or neck, quite frankly drown. One has to do little but listen to the opening words of each pitch to appreciate the creation of fantasy. One in particular stands out and that is lorique, a word that’s entirely contrived. Made up! Nowhere to be found in any dictionary. It is in fact a symbol. Its sound and meaning a compendium of luxury and unique and it rolls off the tongues of the masters of selling like it’s a reality when in fact it actually means nothing at all. To say that however is a mistake because to the women being initiated into making a purchase it actually means how it sounds! Something unique, something luxurious! The induction however is bolstered by detail. The origin and rarity of the gemstone, often from what are said to be unique and difficult to get to sites in Africa or Asia found nowhere else in the world! Just that single small mine where their extraction is supervised by the television jewellery company who ensure that fair wages are paid, thus entitling them to be regarded as ethical employers! Such ethical employers stuff being a very recent addition to the sales patter! You know, wealthy European ladies feeling that they’re doing the right thing for those dusky guys sweating under the ground to give them a bit of glamour!

Sorry to sound cynical but it’s imperative in these post-colonial days to give every hard sale an ethical rationale… as though the selling process itself and the stuff being flogged are all so unreservedly kosher.

That said let’s take a look at the jewellery, at the gemstones that go to making it up. The claims often made for some of these minerals are extraordinary. Many are described as gemstones or gems when strictly speaking this is simply untrue. In the recent past, before the jewellery channels came along, many of these minerals were described and known as semi-precious, especially when cut and polished. Particularly well known were silica dioxides such as Rose Quartz and Amethyst with their titanium and iron impurities giving them colour. The category of precious gemstone however was singularly limited to the Sapphire, Emerald, Ruby and Diamond. In recent decades this narrow category has widened to include such rarities as Alexandrite. For the jewellery sales channels however the distinction between semi-precious and genuine gemstone material has been so far stretched that it has become almost meaningless and that anything highly polished with a lively sparkle is described as gemstone material or a gemstone. The truth is that in their rush to sell jewellery, established scientific test and definition have been stretched to the ludicrous with the motor-mouth sales girls pumping out information to audiences that are semi-ignorant at best about the true character of materials they’re selling.

This of course matters little when the stone is attractive and being sold at low to rock bottom prices. Does no potential customer ever wonder how items whose prices start at hundreds, even thousands of pounds, drop in minutes to one tenth the price! Such enquiries would generally be countered with contention that careful buying prices at source coupled with mass sales enables the company to offer their jewellery to a mass audience at a highly competitive price and that the price drop is only part of the selling technique! What is actually a genuine bargain is often a very debatable point. Debatable relative to the carefully manicured desire of the potential customer rather than any expert knowledge that customer may have about the rarity and perfection of gemstones! Most items offered, however, are those for a mass sale of anything between twenty to sixty items, and for decidedly technical reasons. A particular show may have say one hundred different lines of jewellery to sell in a given time period with a specific number of each item for sale so the idea is to end up with the price cheap down from expensive and let the sale of each item roll fast with the brilliant patter of the motor-mouth egging it on.

And it’s a real treat to listen to the names of the women purchasers roll off their tongues. An analysis of these can be highly instructive. They’re invariably from the same socio-economic working to lower middle class background. Very few Judys, Henriettas, Nigellas or Elizabeths from anywhere north of Oxford but plenty of Samanthas, Melanys, Chantelles and Tracys from Essex and Kent! There again, nothing plain common like Betty and Brittany or Chelsea! When the telephone sales commence, the same names are rolled out show after show and seem to have a certain inevitability about them, like they’re coming straight from a prepared script so either they’re all manufactured and contrived or else a plain straightforward feature of a class structure that produces this type of woman. Lonely, needy, and with a little spare money in her account she can treat herself with. Yes and it is indeed mainly women!

All those lonely women… where do they all come from? All those lonely women… where do they all belong?

Another thing that’s instructive is to carefully observe the size of any stone or stones set in a ring on a finger or hanging in an ear and contrast it with the size of the finger or ear itself. Do that and you’ll invariable find that the actual size of the stone is tiny and that the way the ring is shown in camera focus tends to magnify it. Nothing illegal of course! Camera angle and focus are just some of the tricks of the trade, helping massage your mind and taking you in hand for the sale. It’s really a bit like orgasm, ladies. Once you start coming you don’t want to stop. Buying jewellery from the television sales channels is much the same thing. One sniff of the bait and you’ll want to sniff more and before you know where you are you’re Hayley from Hornchurch, impulse buyer with fifty quid off her card for a little red garnet treat surrounded with diamonds half the size of a pinhead. No, whatever the stone, cut and polished, it’s crucial to visualize its size sitting there on your own finger. THAT’S ALL YOU NEED DO… JUST THINK HOW IT WILL LOOK. Sitting there on your finger! Whether it’s really as big as it seems or whether the endlessly lorique-ing patter you’ve had stuffing your brain, from country of origin, colour and rarity, that’s it’s a one off offer and will never happen again in your lifetime, no, never… never… never… from the motor-mouth salesgirl about the bargain on offer, you’re ready and ripe for the take!

The techniques don’t work so well with men. You’ll rarely hear a man’s name. Men are more often vain. Altogether less needy. Far more difficult to exploit. The bit of extra money is more often for clothing. Something they can show off in a social capacity. To their mates or a woman they’re after. The needy woman prefers to keep her newly acquired little sparkling thing to herself. More as a personal treat. A private possession! The needy woman isn’t so vain, but don’t you or anyone else go calling her sad. Treating herself isn’t sad. It’s really a pleasure!

And that’s what those who sell jewellery on television channels understand more than anything else. The hidden psychological character of personal pleasure. Something that has to be liberated. A touch of self-indulgence freed from constraint. That’s the real message. It’s quite simple really.

GO ON, WHY NOT SPOIL YOURSELF? IT’LL MAKE YOU FEEL GOOD!

And before you know where you are ladies you’ve been loriqued!