Our English correspondent Seneca III presents this meditation for the Holiday Formerly Known as Easter.
A Brief Conversation Between Three Old Men in the Outside Lavatory of a Village Pub on Easter Sunday Just Prior to the Boat Race
“Bloody hell, it’s cold in here!”
“Yeah, and you know what’s going to happen? They’re going to blot the landscape with more *%!$#&* windmills.”
“Bloody windmills — my electricity bill’s just gone through the roof!”
“Yep. And have you seen your latest Council Tax bill? The so called ‘Community Charge’ is twenty four per cent up on last year.”
“Can’t figure that one. We’re not paying for that many bloody immigrants and illegals here — what’s it for?”
“Dunno. Mind you, over the way they’ve got a real problem. Friends of mine in Banbury are now referring to it as ‘Islamabad-on-Cherwell’.”
“Can’t be as bad as Milton Keynes, though. More Somalis there than in Puntland. All living off benefits and up to their necks in every racket going when they aren’t knifing each other with gay abandon in drug turf war disputes. Just keeping them contained is costing a bloody fortune.”
Short silence.
“I’m glad I’m old, you know. I’m not going to be around much longer. It isn’t going to get any better.”
“And me, but I fear for the kids; Christ! What a heap of *&!@#%* we have left for them.”
The old men lapse again into silence, shake, put away, and leave for the warmth of the pub with its small fire and its small television, totally unaware that Middle England is waking up far too late.
— Seneca III
For links to previous essays by Seneca III, see the Seneca III Archives.
“The so called ‘Community Charge’ is twenty four per cent up on last year.”
If my community tax, which here would mean the town tax, were to rise 24% over last year I sure would know why and I would fight against it tooth and nail. This indicates to me that these men do not take an active part in their community and, quite frankly, deserve what they get.
It’s easy to complain while at the pub but, what are you doing about it?
And what would you do in your ‘tooth and nail’ fight?
You sound like a typical SWP apparatchik. Fight tooth and nail? Normally that’s a case of round up looney rent a crowd, wave a few banners, shout a few tired old slogans and then what? More of the same? Don’t make me laugh.
To whom are you replying? Your comment makes no sense in any case, at least I can’t make any sense of it.
What would I do in my “tooth and nail” fight?
I would be following the proceedings of the council to begin with and not have it come as some surprise that an enormous tax increase is on the way. If such a thing were proposed I would stand up and speak at council meetings and demand an accounting of the tax increase. I would tell my friends and neighbors about the situation and implore them to attend council meetings (I’ll drive) to voice their objections and alarm over a massive tax increase. I would make an appointment to personally speak with my elected representative to voice my objections and hopefully bring one or two neighbors along with me.
My community is currently involved in a similar tax increase battle with the school district which claims that rack and ruin will befall the district if they don’t once again get another 4.75% increase in property taxes. And that is with a declining enrollment!
What I am describing is called being active in your community.
Complaining down at the pup acomplishes nothing. In my community’s case maybe we will lose and the school district will get their increase. However, if the council, or school district in my case, sees voters actively engaged in a serious way with the issue they will know that their jobs are on the line the next time they come up for a vote. We get to elect these people and we can also “unelect” them.
Two months ago we had a very serious blizzard here. We got about 3 feet of snow. It took the highway department over 5 days to clear some of the roads. People were locked into their homes unable to get out to work or even to buy food. Unfortunately for the highway superintendant he was up for re-election one month later. He went down in flames.
Are you familiar with the way in which council meetings are conducted in England?
“You” had no part in leaving the future generations anything, old man. At least not as long as you can’t leave your direct heirs in debt.
The blame/shame or glory must always fall on the officers-in-charge, and Lord knows we have no say in appointing them, not really. One has only to look at the last American election to know the game is rigged, the fix is in.
If we are (perchance) permitted to live in peaceful times, that is a beneficence not given to very much of humanity, ever. So look for the small opportunities to do some *individual* good as those moments come in the course of our daily lives, old man.
The political class is determined once more to leave the ground of England soaked with blood. They are an inbred, inalterably stupid lot. Do your best to avoid coming to their attention; they’re skittish and quite likely to trample anything in the vicinity if something frightens them.
Just ask Tommy.
The blame/shame or glory must always fall on the officers-in-charge, and Lord knows we have no say in appointing them, not really.
Look for the small opportunities to do some *individual* good as those moments come in the course of our daily lives, old man.
Quite.
I’m a bit fed up, frankly, with the generation struggle which is quietly replacing the class struggle.
We, older guys, are blamed for not delivering the world in a tip-top shape to the younger generation.
Nobody asked me about turning Europe into a muslim cesspit. Nobody told me what was happening, either, until I discovered it by myself — and it was pretty late by that time.
On what do you base your description of the British political class as ‘inbred’?
Oh, please. Does David Cameron’s face exude vitality and masculinity — or pasty, effeminate, “inbred,” clueless, elitist arrogance?
Or, maybe it is just me?
So no evidence, simply prejudice, which this blog makes a frequent point of pointing out are not the way to win an argument.
That notwithstanding, I suspect that you have simply confused the British political class with the British upper class, which are not the same, and conflated them with the British ruling elite, which is a different beast altogether. Assuming that you were describing purely indigenous groups, the idea that any of them are ‘inbred’ is, following two costly world wars and a long history of surprisingly fluid social mobility, long past its ‘sell by date’.
You’re not Anglophobic are you? I ask only because I’ve found that, too often, criticism of some widely believed yet actually non existent or otherwise long obsolete aspect of the British, or more often English, national identity is invariably prompted by antipathy to it (a misplaced visceral dislike of the empire based on nothing more solid than historical animosity for instance). I’m no fan of Cameron (he’s Scotch for one thing, and a Conservative for another), however, I’d like rather more than your subjective appraisal of his looks (Never judge a book … .) before damning an entire group.
David Cameron is a bottle of whisky?
The British political class, the British upper class and the British ruling elite – a very British Soviet Troika.
The British political class is not just inbred but incestuous. From a country where most of the people are working class, it is an exception indeed to find a politician who can be described that way. Most of the politicians went to Oxbridge. Far-left radicals are close personal friends with the Tories they purport to despise. We have the PM, The Mayor of London, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the Archbishop of Canterbury all being old Etonians. And this in a country that claims to have a “representative democracy”.
My father is a member of the Labour Party. My family report that he is the only labourer in the Labour Party meetings he attends. The rest are graduates. The MPs are parachuted into constituencies from central office. The political class use a smattering of non-white middle class graduates as a pretence that they are not inbred and incestuous (and those people are parachuted into constituencies where there is a large number of inbred immigrants to whom they appeal).
The 35% who don’t vote, don’t vote for good reason. They see that the political class are in no way connected to the poorest 35% of the country. The next 35% vote even though they know that these in-bred yahoos are the only option on the menu, and they still despise them.
The entire middle to upper class in Britain is far more inbred than the working class. Whilst lots of working class white people end up marrying non-white immigrants, the middle-class are very careful to make sure that their children only marry people like themselves. My Oxbridge-educated SWP friend who advocates the benefits of multicultururalism and anti-racism, made sure his Oxbridge-educated child married an Oxbridge-educated white doctor.
Is there any news of Tommy? It’s been very quiet.
After spending the day with a bunch of white, middle-class, politically-correct, 40+ graduates and their children, I can tell you that they seem well and truly oblivious to what is going on. The conversation was all about “how much we have made” on property prices (still high in south-east England), about how much they pay out for their teenage children to go to see Lady Gaga/have a new iPhone/rent a room at university, and about the latest rubbish reality TV/competition to which they are addicted (“The Great British Bake-off”). It appears the blinkers of the politically-correct are exceedingly wide.
On the way home, on trains where there was barely a white face (the politically-correct all drive cars), I wondered why I spend so much time fighting for the civilisation their children will inherit.
I came home and looked at one of the politically-correct news sites. I only looked at 3 stories: 1 on immigration in Britain, 1 on the rise of “the far right” in Cyprus, and 1 on the “racist violence” of Golden Dawn in Greece. In the comments sections, the politically-correct were being slaughtered. The up-voting of remarks showed the politically-correct to be entirely in the minority, and on their own turf.
At least one of my politically-correct friends who was keeping the conversation frothy today told me a few years ago, that she’d moved her family as far away as possible from muslims (after her husband used to get attacked by gangs of muslims, when taking their toddler to the park). Maybe that politically-correct friend goes home and slaughters the politically-correct views on websites, from the comfort and anonymity of her own home.
One thing of which I’m convinced: when the results of an opinion poll appear in the news, it is matched by 5 or 10 other polls of which we never hear. Through those polls, the one-party state is assessing the spirit of the nation. And my suspicion is that they know that things are far worse than they’ve ever seen them to be.
From the late 1930s the state financed an operation called Mass Observation. They had thousands of “observers” who were paid to go to pubs, cinemas, buses, etc. and eavesdrop on the conversations of the nation — to find out what people really thought. http://archiveadventure.wordpress.com/mass-observation-a-history/ No doubt that is going on now, dressed up as science.
The spirit of the nation as seen in the media is filtered, through a glass darkly.
The recent American election was not rigged enough to have tipped the presidential outcome. The announced vote totals were a pretty good match for polling predictions, and proven irregularities were few and on a small scale.
You can make the case that the media biased its coverage and that this influenced votes, but the votes themselves were counted honestly enough that if the count had been letter perfect, nothing of any consequence would have gone differently.
And you know this to be so exactly how…?
Or, are we just to take it at your word?
I suspect there is much we do not know about the most recent election — particularly in the key “battleground” states, such as Ohio.
For an example of an egregiously stolen election, I give you the loss of his Congressional seat by Allen West.
Who are you to say this kind of thing was not replicated to a great extent (and with considerable effect) across the country?
Two things are conflated in the question:
(1) Rigged elections
(2) “Choice” Between Candidates.
Rigged elections are a feature of American politics, not a bug. In the backwoods, back when only white men voted, they could be bought for a stiff drink. It was no different in England, according to the novels of Anthony Trollope. I recommend them to anyone in the UK who wasn’t schooled in RealPolitick during the beginnings of ‘universal’ suffrage (meaning men of all classes).
Back in the US, political machines control the numbers of votes, especially in large urban areas. My grandfather was a well-rewarded cog in Tammany Hall back in the day. After this last election, I read several interviews with ppl in Chicago who openly bragged of voting not twice, but several times. And parts of Philly voted 100% for BHO? Sure they did.
Our large urban areas are largely black and Democrat. The district pols in charge deliver the vote in their area, all nice and legal – it’s their job. But the real control is in the hands of whites, always has been. Detroit is an exception *now* but you can see what happened to that hell over the last twenty years.
The current Dept of Justice has charged itself with protecting the black vote, even if that means white voters are disenfranchised. A number of long-term employees in DoJ, unable to change the environment back to something resembling sanity, have resigned. Their books make interesting reading.
When the Hispanic increase is finally factored into the mix – witness the whites and blacks fleeing regions of Los Angeles – it will change once again.
By “the fix being in”, I mean we get to choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The Republicans are a disgrace; at least the Dems are straightforward in their push for ever-larger government interference. But the last two GOP candidates, McCain the Meanie and Romney the Righteous, were never meant to be solutions to federal hubris and over-reach. They had no programs, just echoes. Romney was appalling.
Obama’s style – flaunting his ‘cool’ and exhibiting a breath-taking mean-spiritedness (e.g., closing the White House to public tours to make legislators “pay” for voting into place a sequester that was his idea) – appeals to those who voted for him. Many people chose not to vote. Not out of disinterest, but out of selfishness: register to vote and you become theoretically available for jury duty. A lot of folks are not willing to do that to participate in a sham ‘vote’.
Back in the Nixon-Kennedy mess, it was obvious Mayor Daly had swung the Chicago vote to Kennedy. Nixon’s advisers wanted him to contest it. He refused, saying it would cause too much turmoil among the restive Catholic vote. And he was right. Kennedy was inept but popular. One difference btwn Kennedy and Obama is that JFK already had the wealth and influence BHO longed for. JFK was cynical but BHO is both cynical and mean-spirited.
‘By “the fix being in”, I mean we get to choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. ‘
The power elite are smart in how they control the political agenda. Make people believe they have choice, but control what is on the menu.
The smart people are those who have seen through the sham theatrics of western managed democracy (not that different from soviet or chinese managed democracy). They don’t bother voting. The day will come when outside the stupor of welfare-state serfdom they will rise up.
In countries with PR like the Netherlands, the power elite had to have Pim Fortuyn assassinated, as the system was going to present a new menu that they did not want.
Sam it is totally irrelevant whether the US election was fraudulent or
fair. The only point is that the US Electorate could not have gotten a
more evil President had they dialled Hell and asked for Lucifer to be the next President. These 4 years will probably see the destruction of the US either into total lock-down or Balkanisation.
“In the comments sections, the politically-correct were being slaughtered. The up-voting of remarks showed the politically-correct to be entirely in the minority, and on their own turf.”
That seems to be the case doesn’t it. It’s getting clearer by the day that those who run the state are running it for themselves, not for those they purport to represent.
And yes, they are aware of this – that’s why they’re doing all they can to build a new constituency, ie immigration and immigrants.
We old people are advising our children to get out. Go somewhere still upholding laws on freedom of speech, freedom from religion, etc.
Unfortunately, lots of British children have been brainwashed to believe that these poor, downtrodden muslims actually want to live in a British UK, and running away from shariah, rather than importing it.
Hell, the schools even teach that, while the English Labour Party is a left wing socialist organisation (and therefore good), the German Socialist Labour Party was right wing (and therefore bad – nazis).
And nobody calls them on the contradiction.
The dust hadn’t settled after WWII when the Brits tossed Churchill over for a socialist and in spite of the obvious devolution of their society they continued to vote for anyone who would give them something seemingly for free. The Brits are not great but they once had great leaders. Left to their own devices they turned their beautiful country into the equivalence of a hideous tattoo.
Yes, the British working classes have themselves to blame in a way. Churchill may have been an aristocrat but he did care about all the British people. The socialists that the working classes have been voting for since the War have always had an international socialist agenda which, if it runs its course, will make Britain look more like Cuba or Brazil than the Britain it has always been. The socialists they keep voting for haven’t cared about them for decades. A working class conservative like Frank Field cares more for them than New Labour’s Marxist graduates and communist graduates, like Dennis Healey, before that, or the absolutely bonkers Tony Benn.
William @ 9:04 PM
No, I am not aware of how council meetings are conducted in the UK. Possibly I am neive and relying on tactics used to object in a peaceful and educated way against local gov’t actions in the US.
I think you would do all the UK readers on this site a favor if you would give your ideas about how to object (fight tooth and nail) against confiscatory tax increases on a local level.
I am reminded of Mr. Boby, mosque buster, and his tactics. Based on what I have heard of him it seems a constant refrain is citizens not knowing how to approach their local councils or, being too apathetic to find out and then being left with the results.
Civic action takes energy. If I am not quite sure how to go about it in the UK, one thing I know for sure is that sitting in front of the TV or complaining down at the local watering hole won’t help.
I would be very interested in learning your thoughts about how to approach the local council with an objection.
I have laid out the generally accepted tactics that gain results here in the US. Please let us know what you think the parallel actions would be in the UK.