Carnal Canal
Shock, horror, a vast gay dog shot out of a thicket next to the canal just before Lymm and then poor innocent Moses found himself horribly hidden under a labbymongrel, all set to have his wicked way with him. Reader, when did you last try and prize a rampant dog off another when they are locked in a homosexual embrace ? After heaving and cursing we just about managed , then the bounder escaped down the towpath. Poor Moses. Having just about escaped a date worse than death, he spent the rest of the day either coyly sitting down or peeping round corners to avoid the second coming.
Judged Suitable
I see that the judge in the Grenfell disaster is deemed to be unsatisfactory by the suffering victims. No one can do anything other than evince heartfelt sympathy for all those involved. However I hope they will be able to show some restraint and accept the High Court judge who has been asked to do the job instead of campaigning he be replaced. Once sufferers find they have the power to accept or reject judges there will be no end of it.
This started eighteen months back; ‘victims’ of sex abuse campaigned to get HMG to reject Dame Elisabeth Butler schloss, said to be too “establishment” and therefore unfit to preside over the enquiry. At last the. “Ideal” judge was found: Dame Justice Lowell Goddard from New Zealand.
Goddard was established with four first class return tickets to New Zealand in a flat a heartbeat from Harrods and a half million pound package. Then it was found not only was she more or less impossible to work with but she knew little about UK law. A few months later the dear lady apparently got homesick and that was the end of her.
We have very little corruption in the UK. Our judges are world class. If our judges find themselves conflicted they will “recuse” themselves and they should be trusted to do this without a campaign to oust them. If these campaigns are seen to succeed then the integrity of our court processes is weakened to the loss of us all. I experienced some attempts to undermine judges in the Lloyds’ of London debacle in the early nineties and it was as disgraceful then as it is now.
The Great British Baby
As Dickens’ Wilkins Micawber says in David Copperfield:
“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure, nineteen pounds nineteen and six: result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result: misery.”
Pigs Might Fly
During the election, politicians talked about increasing expenditure as if the government had its own money – not taxpayers – and had to be badgered into spending it on the needs of an impoverished and deserving electorate.
The party that borrowed the most was “generous and kind”: the one with modest plans was “mean and nasty”.
For heaven’s sake! Are we infants? If so, it’s our own fault for being credulous fools. As DH Lawrence writes:
We can’t be too careful
about the British Public
It gets bigger and bigger
and its perambulator has to get
bigger and bigger
and its dummy-teat has to be made
bigger and bigger and bigger
and the job of changing its nappies
gets bigger and bigger and bigger
and bigger
And the sound of its howling gets
bigger and bigger and bigger and
bigger and bigger…
So our party leaders are howled at by reporters:
“Don’t doctors and nurses deserve a pay rise?”
“How can benefits continue to be cut?”
“What about increased funding for the schools?”
It seems implicit that good politicians have to do the decent thing and spend more: only the mean and nasty embrace “austerity”.
The late US President Reagan once joked, “The US national debt is big enough to look after itself.” It was (I hope!) meant to be Ronnie’s little joke.
But seriously, don’t voters even notice that the UK remains submerged in debt? Dear old Gordon Brown borrowed vast sums and we haven’t yet recovered from that binge yet. And an ageing population and creaking NHS promises further acute pressure on the public purse down the track.
So how can we save? It’s hard politically. Take the so-called “triple lock” on pensions, a Cameron gimmick he never believed he would have to deliver as he was sure he wouldn’t win the 2015 election. But today the “triple lock” is inevitably regarded as a “right”, and any reduction is described as an “assault on the elderly.”
Every day, HMG is spending money that it hasn’t got and no one seems to mind. But there has to be a day of reckoning. Every attempt to try and live within our means is described not as praiseworthy, but “barbaric”.
Change can only come after the questioners start asking politicians, not how much money are you going to spend, but how much are you going to save?
Gosh! Are those pink pigs flying past my window?