VIEWING HABITS

At one time (like most), I would have favourite TV shows – programmes that aired at a set time on a set day of the week that I would look forward to. The addition of the VCR to the electronic household furniture partially shattered the appointment-to-view aspect and enabled such shows to be recorded and watched at the viewer’s leisure, and as many times as the viewer liked; this is why numerous TV series (and movies) recorded back then can often be recited word-for-word even now, countless years later. In more recent times, the gradual diminishing of television’s appeal in the face of online challenges has led to the streaming revolution, whereby a new series is ‘released’ and then receives a binge-watch that was previously the province of the DVD box-set. I personally don’t subscribe to Netflix or any other channel of that ilk forever unleashing these shows on a seemingly daily basis, finding much more entertainment of an original – and admittedly niche – nature on YouTube. Regardless of my own battles with that corporate monolith – and my expulsion as a creator from it – I nevertheless still enjoy more of its output than that which emerges from traditional (and in my opinion, redundant) broadcast mediums.

The Wild West element of the internet that existed in its early days was characteristic of a new platform that can now be seen as a necessary rites-of-passage moment that all media goes through before it becomes mainstream; both the cinema and the music business experienced similarly exhilarating teething troubles prior to the potential of their long-term prospects attracting money men seeking to smooth out rough edges in order to make them profitable investments, and the internet’s most popular windows are no different. That said, in the past five or six years there has been an undoubted advancement in the YT channel as a positive alternative to the tired and jaded formats TV offers, giving people with something novel to say a way of saying it without having to jump through the hoops that television imposes upon its future saviours via focus groups, committees and the insidious ‘diversity and inclusion’ agenda that strangles all creativity on the altar of ideology. The days when the assembled writers and performers comprising the nascent Monty Python team were offered 13 episodes and advised to go away and get on with it are long gone in television’s corridors of power.

Just as Lucille Ball was perhaps the first international superstar whose rise to fame bypassed the movies and instead owed everything to television, YouTube has now made stars of characters who at one time would have required a TV show to establish themselves; they have shown that the antiquated goggle-box is no longer required to make their mark or attract a sizeable audience to whom they are a household name; and the antiquated goggle-box only has itself to blame. Through monetising – as long as their output avoids poking fun at certain sacred cows – these YT stars can produce videos that provide either an entire living or at least a handy financial sideline; and one reason is due to the fact that the best of them today have a professional sheen that makes their efforts the technical equal of anything to be found on TV. Faced with no option but to operate on a shoestring budget, they nevertheless produce channels of a high standard because much of the equipment needed is now available within their price range – and the majority of them set their videos on location to minimise the expense and expertise required if seeking to emulate the TV studio and its notoriously difficult reliance on sets, lighting and sound recording.

Ironically, as TV desperately chases the streaming dollar and dispenses with traditional methods of viewing, most of the best YT channels have resurrected the old appointment-to-view system in that they tend to air their new output on set days; for some reason the most boring day of the week, i.e. Sunday, seems to be when a fair few of them issue something new. For me, Sunday sees four or five of the channels I follow religiously all premiere fresh videos throughout the day, giving Sundays the kiss of life in that they finally have something to look forward to. The ‘niche interests’ some of these channels specialise in doesn’t necessarily mean their presenters/creators don’t make them addictive viewing; if anything, many have learnt a thing or two from the TV hosts of old and have the kind of endearing personalities on camera to make their specialist subject appealing to the casual viewer stumbling upon them in the ‘related’ or ‘recommended’ videos sidebar. I myself know little about cars, never having owned one and being guilty of four failed driving tests in the 80s, yet a couple of channels I’ve recently become hooked on are clearly the product of those in love with the internal combustion engine.

Previously referenced on here, the YT channel called ‘Auto Shenanigans’ is an unashamed car nerd’s love letter to all things automobile-related, particularly the road network of the UK. There are several playlists to be found on there, including specific series dedicated to the service station, abandoned roads, derelict racetracks, and the ‘Secrets of the Motorway’. The host has an engaging, self-deprecating sense of humour and is all-too aware of how boring his obsession with the seemingly every day and mundane might appear to the layman; yet, he nonetheless manages to deliver the goods in concise and compact little videos rarely exceeding five minutes in duration and often boasting laugh-out-loud asides to camera that elevate them above the subject matter and give them a far wider appeal. Another recent acquisition to my YT listings is a channel called ‘idriveaclassic’, hosted by a young lady with a penchant for kitsch 60s and 70s outfits, and who drives a different vintage motor each video; she’s evidently a regular on the circuit showing off lovingly-restored versions of these vehicles and has access to some of the most exquisitely odd – and most eccentric – cars produced over the past century, particularly the three-wheelers we rarely see on the roads these days.

Another subject that has a habit of generating passionate and borderline-autistic behaviour amongst (primarily) middle-aged men is music, specifically the golden age of rock & pop from the 60s and 70s; naturally, there are endless channels dedicated to this topic, though beyond the archetypal balding, bearded, black T-shirt brigade in their bedrooms there are a few slicker channels that dissect the output of this creatively-abundant period with insight and humour. Perhaps the two best of this bunch are ‘Pop Goes the 60s’ – hosted by a long-haired, bespectacled American called Matt, who routinely produces superb in-depth profiles of key 60s bands (such as his recent history of The Beach Boys) – and ‘Parlogram’, which is heavily Beatles-centric and hosted by an ex-pat Brit with a forensic knowledge of the era and its physical formats. ‘Yesterday’s Papers’ covers the same timeframe by focusing on the contemporary music press and revisiting fascinating articles and features from the time, whereas the compellingly obscure ‘Ringway Manchester’ shines a light on some of the more esoteric outlets that could once be located on the shortwave dial such as the infamous Numbers Stations. The viewing figures these channels display clearly indicate there is an audience for the subjects that fall under their radar, subjects that television in particular is not remotely catering for.

Over the past two or three decades, the rapid growth of multiple TV channels has invariably led to a ghettoisation of genres that terrestrial broadcasters would have once been forced to include in their schedules, leaving the likes of BBC1, BBC2, ITV and Channel 4 bereft of Arts or niche interests, thus not only leaving the field clear for minority channels but YT channels too. Arguably, it is the latter – with its democratisation of programme-making – that has best capitalised on this state of affairs; and as a viewer, I know where my loyalties now lay.

© The Editor

Website: https://www.johnnymonroe.co.uk/

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SHADOWLANDS

Sometimes a locality unfortunate enough to have an especially traumatic event imprinted upon it can find the passage of time has little effect on the lingering impact. Such places become like a real-life version of Nigel Kneale’s classic TV play, ‘The Stone Tape’ – wherein a team of scientists investigate the possibility that the stones of the Victorian building they’re working at have absorbed past events and are capable of playing them back on a loop as though a recording medium, thus offering a potential explanation for the phenomenon of ghosts. If one were to visit, say, an ex-pit village, mention of the Miners’ Strike of 1984-85 would still provoke a strong emotional response; certain quarters of Derry remain sensitive to the subject of Bloody Sunday; and anyone mentioning the name of Peter Sutcliffe in the neighbourhoods he terrorised shouldn’t be surprised at a heated reaction. No doubt living memory plays its part and judging by the way in which the Ripper’s Victorian predecessor has been turned into a fantasy bogeyman, I should imagine one day in the future visitors to Leeds and Bradford will be offered guided tours around Sutcliffe’s killing fields. Thankfully, we’re still a long way off that, though the fact it’s now over 40 years since Sutcliffe was belatedly caught makes no odds to the long shadow his murderous spree continues to cast in the locations where it happened.

That ITV chose to call its current dramatisation of that murderous spree ‘The Long Shadow’ was a shrewd move, as was the decision to switch attention to the actual victims rather than Sutcliffe himself, finally making the women fully-rounded human beings rather than leaving them as the haunted mug-shots media coverage reduced them to at the time. When I first heard about this production, part of me wished they’d just leave the subject alone. Although it’s the best part of 25 years ago now, a late 90s ITV drama about the case still felt fresh, and that one wasn’t exactly BAFTA-nominated material; I remember seeing some of it being filmed near where I lived at the time, and as that was just a stone’s throw from where the body of Sutcliffe’s final victim was uncovered, the whole exercise seemed tasteless, to say the least. Over the years there have been even more documentaries on the Yorkshire Ripper, though only one – a commendable BBC4 effort three or four years back – realigned the focus of the profile to the women he murdered. It seemed a long-overdue concession to the feelings of the victims’ families as well as the few survivors of brutal attacks by Sutcliffe, and it would appear the makers of ‘The Long Shadow’ decided to take a similar path.

Dramas on the likes of the Moors Murderers, Dennis Nilsen, and Fred West didn’t appear until decades after the event, with increased awareness of the living people whose lives were permanently scarred by such characters prompting cautious sensitivity on the part of the producers. When watching ‘The Long Shadow’, the viewer is conscious that every effort has been made to take this into account, and from what I’ve seen of it so far, this approach has paid off in terms of documenting developments from a human perspective. Many of Sutcliffe’s victims were mothers, and the orphaned children his actions left behind have had to live with their mothers coldly summarised as ‘prostitutes’ ever since, as though the work they drifted into through desperation was some sort of vocation that utterly defined them. The drama honestly captures the attitude of the police entrusted to solve the case whenever a woman not relegated to sex-work is attacked or murdered; the murder of teenager Jayne MacDonald in 1977 was a watershed in the distinction between a ‘good girl’ and a ‘good-time girl’ in the parlance of the time, and the blunt bullishness of the Ripper chief investigator, Assistant Chief Constable George Oldfield is accurately replicated in David Morrissey’s portrayal, as is the treatment dished out by the police to working girls reporting an assault.

The victims themselves are sympathetically portrayed, with many seen as women who simply fell through the cracks and were left with little option but to earn a few quid as best they could; the fact Sutcliffe targeted such vulnerable and easily available characters is a factor he shared with the likes of Shipman, Nilsen and Fred West, all of whom exploited the invisibility of – and indifference to – the luckless inhabitants of society’s murky fringes, trapped in a downward spiral they were incapable of escaping, and knowing all the while nobody beyond their small circles remotely cared. Indeed, the characteristically grubby ambience of the 1970s is evoked with admirable authenticity, with every garish strip of wallpaper bearing a nicotine sheen typical of an era when the world and his wife lit a fag every couple of minutes. Everything looks dimly-lit and drab, with the smudgy, bruised-fruit colours of the production giving rise to the oft-aired claim that a glimpse of Britain in the 70s seems closer to footage of an Eastern Bloc country of the era than the nation we’d recognise today.

The period detail also stretches to the casting; any non-white faces in the cast are there because the characters they’re playing were there; for once, they haven’t been shoehorned in to fulfil some tedious 21st century diversity quota. As many of Sutcliffe’s murders took place in the Leeds district of Chapeltown – which was known for its large West Indian community as much as its red-light area – this inclusion rings true. Some scenes were set in a recreation of The Gaiety, which was a slightly seedy bar-cum-club in Chapeltown that had been fittingly opened by none other than Stephen Lewis, AKA ‘Blakey’ from ‘On the Buses’, in the early 70s; it had something of a reputation, and was very much in synch with a very 70s idea of a nightspot for adults. Lunchtime strippers and topless waitresses were an attraction at one point – ‘tits in yer mash’ as it was described to me when still open for business in the 80s; I remember the Yorkshire Evening Post ad for the establishment even included a cartoon of a woman naked from the waist up to emphasise its dubious appeal – a source of cheap thrill sniggers when leafing through the paper’s small-ads as a child.

The last episode of the series I watched – and I haven’t seen them all yet – dealt with the red herring of the tape recording by ‘Wearside Jack’, the 1979 cassette of a north-easterner purporting to be the Ripper; despite advice from the FBI that the tape was a blatant hoax, so under pressure were West Yorkshire Police to catch a killer who already had 10 known murders to his name by this stage that all resources were redirected towards the Sunderland area; George Oldfield staked his reputation on Wearside Jack being his man, which meant the strong suspicions some police officers working on the case had when interviewing Peter Sutcliffe on several occasions were discounted due to him not having a north-east accent. Sutcliffe was thus able to carry on killing with the police investigation embarking on its wild goose chase. The man behind the hoax tape, John Humble, was eventually exposed and sentenced to eight years imprisonment for perverting the course of justice a quarter of a century later, but it was far too late. Three more women were murdered by Sutcliffe with the police distracted by Wearside Jack, and three other women survived attempted murders during the same time frame, including one – Upadhya Bandara – who was attacked on Chapel Lane, Headingley, a street I myself lived on several years later.

The idea of dramatising events that took place well over 40 years before may seem to some a reasonable distance that avoids giving offence; that the producers of ‘The Long Shadow’ have clearly been at pains not to sensationalise the case of the Yorkshire Ripper for vicarious entertainment is evident upon viewing. It’s a rare example of a subject that remains sensitive in certain corners of the country being handled with sensitivity, though one still hopes it’s the last word on the subject – in our lifetimes, at least.

© The Editor

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THE ROAD TO DOWNING STREET

Since the official resignation date of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister on 6 September last year, there have been nine by-elections in the UK and the Conservative Party has triumphed in only one of them – Boris’s old seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip back in July; and of the nine, five had been constituencies held by Tories. The roll-call of other winners reads seven to Labour and one to the Lib Dems – and one of those Labour victories was stolen from the SNP, at Rutherglen and Hamilton West earlier this month. All of the Labour wins are as much reflective of the state of the parties that lost their seats as they are of any sudden upsurge of faith in Keir Starmer’s collective, with the SNP’s own crumbling condition north of the border as perilous as that of the Conservative Party south of it. Three of the Labour wins, after all, were in safe Labour seats they already held, with the trio of by-elections prompted by resignations. The two triumphs Labour enjoyed last Thursday night, including the record-breaking win in Mid Bedfordshire (which turned out to be the largest numerical majority ever overturned in British by-election history), were provoked by the resignations of a pair of discredited Tory MPs who were discredited for very different reasons.

In Tamworth, Chris Pincher had stood down following revelations of his wandering hands – with an ill-advised endorsement by Boris being one of the final nails in Johnson’s Prime Ministerial coffin; and in Mid Bedfordshire, the terminally-cuckoo Nadine Dorries had reluctantly walked the plank when it belatedly dawned on her that all that licking of Boris’s arse wasn’t going to guarantee her the God-given peerage she imagined she was entitled to. Her sole achievement as a Member of Parliament appears to have been delivering the safest of Tory seats to the Labour party for the first time since the constituency’s creation in 1918; up until last Thursday Mid Bedfordshire had only twice been out of Conservative hands in its 105 years of existence, on both occasions falling to the old Liberals back in the 1920s. That’s some achievement, Mad Nad. Mind you, from all accounts she was something of an absentee, the definitively useless constituency MP with her eyes fixed on promotion to the Lords as opposed to her constituents’ concerns – which makes her failure to acquire a seat in the first-class carriage of the ultimate gravy train all the more sweeter.

One does wonder, though, if it won’t even take a miscreant like Chris Pincher or a deluded fruitcake like Nadine Dorries for this recent pattern to be replicated come the next General Election; the chronic unpopularity and absolute mistrust of the governing party has accelerated since Partygate, which might suggest we could be poised to see the demolition of the ‘Blue Wall’ next time round. The rise of tactical voting as a means of ensuring sitting Tory MPs are ousted, regardless of whether Labour or the Lib Dems end up being the victors, has paid off handsomely for the opposition, though it again implies it’s not so much a belief in Keir Starmer or Ed Davey as the men to pull us out of the ditch the Tories have dragged us into as it is an unswerving determination to simply get rid of the Tories, period. The Conservative Party suffered a double humiliation on Thursday evening, on the losing side of two of the most comprehensive defeats any party in government has ever experienced; and it’s increasingly difficult to see what the Tories can do to reverse this downward trend. A constant chopping and changing at the top doesn’t seem to make much difference, and even if General Elections traditionally see voters revert to their default choices rather than resorting to the bloody nose techniques commonplace in by-elections, a general exhaustion with the Tories feels incurable right now.

Understandably, Sir Keir made the most of his party’s pair of historic victories, claiming the Mid Bedfordshire win was a ‘game changer’ before going on to add, ‘I know there are people who probably voted Tory in the past who voted for a changed Labour Party this time because they despair at the state of their own party…Labour is the party of the future, the party of national renewal.’ I suspect he also knows any party in government for a decade or more always seems worn-out and devoid of ideas by the end, no matter how many times they try and paper over the cracks by changing their leader; an entire generation of first-time voters tends to fall for the freshness of the opposition in such circumstances, whereas long-time voters are so disillusioned by the broken promises of 13 years that they opt for the other side again. This weariness with an administration that will inevitably be held responsible for the notable decline in living standards – particularly since the pandemic – suggests giving Labour a go in 2024 (or ’25) is a fairly unstoppable trend now, despite the ongoing lack of enthusiasm for Starmer himself.

The ‘incident’ that occurred during his speech at the Labour Party conference and briefly usurped the latest Israel/Palestine conflict from the leading headlines was one whereby an archetypal posh boy activist probably called Toby or Tarquin or Ptolemy had a suspicious amount of time to shower Starmer in glitter before security got their hands on him; claimed by some to have been a staged stunt intended to give the Labour leader a more ‘manly’ image, Starmer certainly didn’t panic – though he avoided resorting to a John Prescott-type response, something which would undoubtedly have improved his masculine credentials if presenting a few problems in our more squeamish era. Actually, it had the unintentionally amusing effect of momentarily making Starmer resemble an awkward hybrid of Gary Glitter and Alvin Stardust, what with Sir Keir already in possession of an expertly-quaffed barnet straight from the Glam Rock salon; true to form, Starmer didn’t then regale the audience with a quick burst of ‘My Coo Ca Choo’, which I guess would have put a smile on the face of a few floating voters if nothing else.

Perhaps it’s telling that this incident is the one thing anyone will remember from this year’s conference season, rather than Starmer delivering a speech peppered with ear-catching buzzwords and sound-bites of the kind Tony Blair copyrighted at the 1996 Labour Party Conference, his last as Leader of the Opposition. I remember watching that speech live on TV at the time and it did really feel as though he was destined for office the following spring. I’m not sure anyone watched Starmer’s speech this year and felt the same on the strength of the speech and the leader; but they maybe feel Sir Keir will be residing at No.10 sometime soon solely because hatred towards the Government is so intense, and he is the only realistic alternative as Prime Minister when it comes down to it. The incumbent resident of that address was out of the country doing his bit for peace in the Middle East when his party crashed and burned in Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire, but he returned home to be confronted by further evidence of the Tories’ unpopularity. Sunak arguably faces a far stiffer task than Starmer, despite his own absence of charisma being mirrored in his opponent.

BOBBY CHARLTON (1937-2023)

Hard to believe, but sadly true now. Of the eleven men who won the World Cup for England in 1966, only one of the team is still with us – Sir Geoff Hurst. That other remaining knight who had clung on for so long despite his evident frailty in recent years has passed away at the age of 86, Sir Bobby Charlton. Unlike many of his team-mates that day, however, his achievement 57 years ago didn’t completely overshadow his other considerable achievements on the pitch. As a teenage prodigy breaking into the celebrated ‘Busby Babes’ in the mid-50s, Charlton swiftly became an integral member of that legendary side and one of the lucky few to survive the devastating Munich air crash that wiped out half the team in 1958. Older brother Jack, who would eventually join Bobby in the England line-up, often claimed his kid brother was never quite the same person after Munich, which is understandable, but Bobby went on to form the core of a second great Man U side in the 60s, playing in a peerless midfield alongside Denis Law and George Best. After the emotional capture of the European Cup in 1968, that team – which had twice won the League during the decade – embarked on a slow decline and Charlton played his last game at Old Trafford in 1973. After a brief spell in management at Preston, Charlton spent many years as a TV pundit and global ambassador for the game. He was only the second man to gain a century of caps for England, played at three World Cups for his country, and held the record as England’s leading goal-scorer for 45 years; he was probably the most gifted player of his generation and certainly one of the finest ever to pull on an England shirt. And, lest we forget, he more or less gave his name to an unforgettable haircut.

© The Editor

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INTERNALLY YOURS

Anyone who’s ever joined a ‘Facebook Group’, those internal collectives of shared interests often requiring the recommendation and endorsement of an established member, will be familiar with the novelty factor initially accompanying them; daily updates on posts are looked forward to in the first few weeks and the new member eagerly issues comments, adding his opinion to the discussion. Within a month or two, however, interest begins to wane when the limitations of focusing exclusively on an isolated topic reveal the repetition inherent in the system. Occasional return visits after lengthy absences often show the same old subjects being debated on a never-ending loop. I think I myself am a member of around a dozen Facebook Groups and there are only ever two or three I check with any sort of regularity; some I haven’t looked at in years. One of the few I still like to pop over to is called ‘Radio Times Collectors’. As the owner of several vintage issues of the granddaddy of listings magazines (mainly from the 60s and 70s), I find the scans of front covers and inside pages documenting what was being screened on BBC1 and BBC2 X amount of years ago today fascinating – not to mention highlighting the fact less was more when compared to the multi-channel miasma the magazine is required to cover in 2023 (in increasingly miniscule text).

A couple of days ago one of the scanned listing pages was lifted from an October 1974 RT issue in the aftermath of that month’s General Election – when Harold Wilson’s Labour defeated Ted Heath’s Tories for the second time in less than a year. Somebody posted a comment below that claimed Heath was the last Prime Minister to be voted both in and out of office by the electorate – that is, he’d never been PM prior to winning the 1970 Election and it was the public who evicted him in February 1974, not his own Party; he didn’t fall on his own sword either, having to be finally forced out by an internal leadership election a year later when he had reverted to being Leader of the Opposition. I thought about this and figured the comment must be mistaken; surely we wouldn’t have to go back half-a-century to find a Prime Minister whose promotion and relegation had been entirely in the hands of the electorate, i.e. how it actually should be in a democracy? So, I quickly zoomed through all of Sailor Ted’s successors.

Harold Wilson followed Heath for the second time in October ’74, but resigned in March 1976; Jim Callaghan succeeded Harold via an internal election and then lost the 1979 General Election; after a trio of Election victories, Thatcher famously quit in 1990, superseded by John Major in another internal election; he fought and won in 1992 whilst already installed at No.10; Blair was voted in, but not out, by the electorate, resigning in 2007, replaced by Gordon Brown – who ascended to the post of Prime Minister unopposed before losing in 2010; Cameron quit amidst the fallout from the EU Referendum result in 2016; May got the job through an internal election again and quit three years later; Boris also took the internal election route – and quit; Liz Truss did likewise (albeit in…erm…record time); and Rishi was once again elected by his own Party rather than the wider electorate. So, whoever posted that comment about Heath was spot on after all. Who’d have thought it would be as long ago as almost 50 bloody years since the public had their say in such a way?

The British electoral system received a series of long-overdue reforms in the 19th century, beginning in 1832 with the abolition of rotten boroughs and the gradual drift of power away from the hands of wealthy landowners and aristocrats controlling largely rural constituencies towards the increasingly prosperous urban middle-classes. The expanding industrial towns and cities many of these self-made men loomed large over may have finally gained Parliamentary representation, but qualification for voting remained rooted in the ownership of both property and a penis. It wasn’t until another significant Reform Act – that of 1867 (one heavily influenced by the efforts of the Chartists in the preceding years) – that saw millions of voters enfranchised as long as they were the recognised heads of their respective households; an additional Reform Act in 1884 extended this right from town to country (where old forelock-tugging traditions had held firm), though the considerable swelling of the electorate still didn’t adhere to the concept of Universal Suffrage; it would take the notoriously militant actions of a certain women’s movement to alter that with a further Reform Act in 1918 – though only women over 30 and in ownership of property valued at a minimum of £5 got the vote (in other words, the middle-class Suffragette leaders). Another decade passed before all women over 21 were eligible to vote; this change actually made women a majority, 52% of the electorate, bestowing the title ‘The Flapper Election’ upon the 1929 General Election. Since then, perhaps the two most important moves to the composition of the electorate and the electoral system have been the abolition of plural voting and university constituencies in 1948 and the lowering of the eligible voting age to 18 in 1969.

So, if we are to regard the General Election of 1950 as being the mould from which all subsequent General Elections in the UK have been cast (bar the lowering of the voting age from 21 to 18), it’s interesting to see how much of a say the electorate had in who got to make 10 Downing Street their home. Incumbent PM Clement Attlee remained at No.10 that year, but gave way to the address’s previous tenant Winston Churchill the following year; Churchill resigned in 1955, handing over the reins of power to his long-time second-in-command Anthony Eden; Eden quickly went to the country to gain his own mandate and was rewarded with a reasonably comfortable majority. Less than two years later, Eden quit in the wake of an ill-advised, infamous Middle Eastern adventure and was succeeded by his Chancellor Harold Macmillan, whose premiership wasn’t endorsed by the electorate until 1959.

Supermac resigned following the Profumo Scandal in 1963 and an internal election (plus the controversial intervention of Her Majesty) saw the job pass to Alec Douglas-Home. Macmillan’s Foreign Secretary was still the Earl of Home in the House of Lords at the time he inherited the job and decided to renounce his title and stand for Parliament, ensuring the governance of the nation rested with the Commons. Having said that, there was still an odd period of 20 days prior to the Kinross and West Perthshire by-election whereby the Prime Minister was neither an MP nor a Peer. Home’s brief occupancy of No.10 is also notable for the fact he remains the last Prime Minister to have been invited back into Cabinet after the loss of office, when Heath made him Foreign Secretary again in 1970.

Harold Wilson’s narrow victory over Home in October 1964 saw the electorate vote in a new man, whom they also voted out of office in June 1970. Wilson, of course, returned in February 1974 – something no former Prime Minister has managed since; but no such luck awaited Ted in October of that year, so he does indeed hold a record that one would assume to be the natural order of things in a Parliamentary democracy in which the electorate is supposed to have the final say. In theory, perhaps; but post-war history has shown us most Prime Ministers are either internally elected by their Party members or quit before they are forced to go to the country. The last seven years have seen an acceleration of this process, and whilst both Theresa May and Boris Johnson may have won General Elections, both did so as sitting Prime Ministers having been first put in No.10 by their Party members. Indeed, the last four Prime Ministers have all gained the job without the electorate having any part to play whatsoever. No wonder the electorate appears so incurably cynical when it comes to the political process.

© The Editor

Website: https://www.johnnymonroe.co.uk/

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THE IMMORALITY POLICE

Although rapidly becoming as polluted by the BBC’s tedious agenda as the majority of other shows produced by the Corporation, the Saturday lunchtime institution of ‘Football Focus’ I can still just about stomach if viewed a little later as a recording I can skim through 90% of. Last Saturday, I paused this process to watch a feature on Eddie Parris, the first black (or mixed-race) footballer to play for the Wales national side; although not the first non-white player to turn out for one of the Home Nations (Scotland’s Andrew Watson beat him to it by an impressive 40 years), Parris was nevertheless still an unusual sight on the international stage in these islands at the time, and his story was undoubtedly interesting. What was characteristic of such a story when aimed at the BBC’s imaginary audience today, however, was the presenter pointing out how newspaper reports on Parris when he played his one and only game for Wales in 1931 placed particular emphasis on the colour of his skin, as though that was somehow symptomatic of a less enlightened age – yet this feature was part of the BBC’s contribution to ‘Black History Month’, a celebration based entirely on the colour of…well…and they used to say it was only Americans who didn’t get irony.

Mind you, this is the same BBC that cannot bring itself to call Hamas a terrorist organisation. One would imagine massacring innocent men, women and children in their hundreds with breathtaking barbarity should be adequate qualification for the label, but we wouldn’t want the BBC to be branded Islamophobic by daring to call these ‘freedom fighters’ out for what they actually are, would we? And how true to form the Football Association was in declining to fly the Israeli flag during England’s international against Australia last Friday – the same virtue-signalling charlatans who think nothing of plastering Wembley with Pride banners or BLM logos (and vigorously promote taking the knee) decided the national stadium was no place for political gestures; only if these gestures endorse a neo-Marxist collective standing in solidarity with Hamas, presumably. And how true to form our wonderful Police Force was, arresting a solitary waver of the Union Jack at a pro-Palestinian London demo awash with illegal Hamas flags, a demo euphorically celebrating the slaughter of Jews. I guess this is what happens when the divisive bigotry of Identity Politics imported from the US gets into bed with the divisive bigotry of religious sectarianism imported from the Arab world. There’s been a lot of reaping after years of sowing this past week on the streets of Britain.

The post-war policy of actively encouraging immigrants to integrate into the already-existing communities they abruptly arrived in may have been a protracted – and often painful – process; but it largely paid off in the end, in that the kind of openly racist opposition expressed by some back in the 50s, 60s and 70s is now rightly condemned to the history books. With the majority of immigration at the time hailing from Commonwealth countries, and its citizens brought up to believe wholeheartedly in traditional British values as the only ones to live by, acceptance was eventually achieved and the first few waves of immigration from nations that had been encompassed by Britannia’s wide reach can now be viewed as the way to do it.

Tony Blair’s open border policy, on the other hand, enabled citizens of EU countries with no emotional, sentimental or historical ties to Britain to settle here without concessions to the native culture whatsoever; moreover, those still arriving from the Indian Subcontinent were equally dissuaded to blend in and to remain true to the mores of the cultures they had physically left behind, relocated to effective ghettos severed from the British mainstream. Importing less enlightened attitudes at odds with the ‘inclusivity’ mantra has resulted in grooming gangs on one hand and the kind of anti-Semitic rhetoric on display at some of the recent demos on the other. Is this the distinction between ‘multiracial’ and ‘multicultural’?

One may as well ask when is a pogrom not a pogrom – when Jews are the victims of one, according to so-called ‘progressives’, it would seem. But Israelis cannot be true ‘victims’ in the eyes of the Identitarian crowd – no, Jews are way down the league table in the Oppression Olympics; they’re essentially rich white people hiding behind an ethnic sheen, according to Woke logic. By launching their assault on Israel, Hamas are ‘decolonising’, apparently – and blood will have to be shed for the greater good of victory over imperialism; so, the same clueless cretins who held up flags bearing the legend ‘Queers for Palestine’ are cheerleading for an organisation that wouldn’t think twice about slicing their heads off given half the chance. The skewered morality and absolute first-world detachment from the cause in question has been utterly exposed this week in a sickening show of ignorance and double standards. When combined with the backward bigotry of those Islamic immigrants raised to regard Israel as an evil aberration or a blot to be wiped from the Middle Eastern map – and not encouraged to think otherwise by a cowardly British State – events on British streets over the last few days shouldn’t really have come as a great surprise.

Those who spearhead cancel culture – which actually does exist, contrary to the denial myths they propagate – will seemingly condone any atrocity if they believe the ends justify the means. When a letter signed by students at Harvard blames Israel for the attack by Hamas and effectively declares the Israeli people deserved everything they got, the moral rot at the heart of what passes for the Left on campus is self-evident. This is apparently not Hate Speech – nor is the anti-Semitic chant of ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ that could be heard at the grotesque carnival in central London the other day; no, despite centuries of persecution and prejudice, Jews are fair game, failing to qualify for the Oppression Olympics – just as TERFs (AKA Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists) can have misogynistic rape threats hurled at them if they’re coming from a man in drag; he’s the victim, you see, not the natural-born woman whose safe space he’s requisitioned – and designated victimhood trumps all other considerations today. The twisted definition of Hate Speech will dispatch a dozen Bobbies to your door if you dare to misgender a male rapist who suddenly proclaims he’s now female on social media, but celebrating a massacre doesn’t count.

Genuine Hate Crime aimed at Britain’s Jewish community has escalated ever since Israel had the gall to retaliate against the paramilitary wing of the world’s favourite victims. At least two Jewish faith schools in the capital have closed in order to secure the safety of their pupils, following the smashing of a kosher restaurant’s windows and its till being stolen in the long-time Jewish enclave of Golders Green, where ‘Free Palestine’ has suddenly become commonplace graffiti, nowhere more prominent than across a railway bridge. In the seven days leading up to Saturday’s so-called ‘Day of Rage’, there were 109 anti-Semitic incidents recorded in Greater London; these sit alongside 22 in Greater Manchester, eight in West Yorkshire, seven in the Midlands, four in Hertfordshire, and a further 40 spread across 12 different areas of the country. Such incidents increased 324% compared with the same period last year in the space of just four days after the initial attacks by Hamas. Yes, these are familiar occurrences whenever conflict flares in the Middle East, but with the current conflict having captured the imaginations of those who thrive on hate and division, chances are we haven’t seen the worst of it yet. Something to look forward to, innit.

© The Editor

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AN UNHOLY WAR

A few years back now I remember covering one of the endless violent episodes in the never-ending battle between Israel and its next-door neighbour on here by telling the story of a long-gone family member whose stint in the Palestine Police during the dying days of Mandatory Palestine took place in the bloody thick of the Jewish Insurgency leading up to 1948. I put forward the theory that ‘Uncle’ Joe’s occasionally extreme anti-Semitic comments later in life were primarily a consequence of his first-hand experience of Zionist terrorism, which made sense without condoning his somewhat insensitive views on the Holocaust. But he was a very small pawn in an extremely expansive game of cerebral chess. The creation of the State of Israel saw a reneging on a promise made by the European powers following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire – i.e. the formation of two separate, autonomous nations sitting side-by-side, distinguished only by divisions in religion; and the moment the British made their exit from Palestine with the same ungracious haste they’d employed in India the year before, armed forces from Egypt, Jordan, Syria and other Arab countries exploited the power vacuum by seizing territory earmarked for both the new Israel and the new Palestine, which made any attempt to stick to the promise made decades earlier considerably more difficult.

All now claimed sovereignty over most of what had initially been intended as part of the Palestinian State as well as sizeable chunks of land reserved for Israel. This remained in place until the Six Day War of 1967, when Israeli forces reclaimed the land held illegally by Egypt and Jordan, land neither of whom had allowed native Palestinians to govern, preferring to keep Palestinians interred in refugee camps, thus solidifying their international status as victims. Interestingly, when Israel planted its flag in the areas that would collectively become known as ‘The Gaza Strip’ in 1967, it didn’t slaughter the Palestinian inhabitants as befitting the monster Western liberals are fond of portraying Israel as, but instead extended several rights to its citizens that entitled them to water and electricity supplies as well as medical care and the ability to earn a living in Israel itself. The standard of living for those residing in the Gaza Strip was higher than it had been prior to Israel’s invasion, and despite Egypt and Syria launching the Yom Kippur war of October 1973 in attempt to regain their lost territory, the signing of the peace treaty between Sadat and Begin five years later suggested an end in sight to a long-running problem, with hopes that briefly remained intact until feelings were stirred anew following the overthrow of the Shah in Iran and the installation of the Ayatollah in 1979.

This was the point at which the Palestinian independence movement altered from a purely nationalist crusade to a Holy War against the State of Israel and the Jewish people, with the two rendered indistinguishable by the illogical logic of religious bigotry. Israel’s eventual withdrawal from the Gaza Strip removed most of the rights its citizens had enjoyed under Israeli rule and the Islamic overlords that now governed it gradually descended into civil war; Israel built barriers between itself and Gaza that had not been in place before, but with Hamas launching regular missiles at their neighbour, it’s no wonder. Any hopes of an autonomous Gaza Strip enjoying a relatively peaceful coexistence alongside Israel had been dashed by the emergence of Hamas and their twisted Radical Islamic agenda, putting the natives of the region in a far more perilous position than they had experienced under Israeli rule. Amazingly, Israel had continued to provide Gaza with electricity and water supplies even when it no longer officially ruled over the region, though this has now ended thanks to the latest intervention of Hamas – allegedly on behalf of the Palestinians.

The fact that this significant issue had been overlooked by Hamas when deciding to effectively declare war on Israel last weekend is no great revelation. The truth is that Hamas doesn’t give a flying f**k about the State of Palestine; that’s just a Trojan Horse to pull the wool over the woolly eyes of useful idiots around the world wearing a pseudo-nationalistic cause as a fashion accessory, one that has no connection whatsoever to the Radical Islam mantra of Hamas, one which was grotesquely exposed in the space of 24 hours with some of the atrocities of last weekend swiftly revealed online, atrocities that no one in their right mind could possibly condone. The so-called ‘rules of war’ are not rules observed by Hamas, who exhibit all the gory pride in their bigoted butchery familiar to their bastards-in-arms like ISIS, Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, something that makes the outside apologists for their actions look even more pathetic and unforgivable.

Apologists for man’s inhumanity to man are commonplace on the side committing these atrocities; the enemy has already been dehumanised, with little or no value placed upon their life in order to justify taking it. Any outside group considerably distanced from the fanaticism of the frontline and spared a lifetime’s indoctrination into the philosophy of nihilism that fuels the actions of an organisation like Hamas should therefore be able to receive reports of 700 innocent lives lost – including a shocking 260 massacred at a music festival – and be appalled and disgusted by the degree of inhumanity present in such actions. For Iran to celebrate the unprecedented assault on Israeli soil by a Radical Islamic death cult is to be expected; Iran practically sponsors Hamas and is as committed to the extermination of Israel as any Jihadi combo that effectively has the intended genocide of the Jewish people enshrined in its constitution. But Hamas always has an ace up its sleeve that can appease deluded Western apologists in love with the idea of the little man engaged in a permanent struggle against the war machine of the likes of Israel.

In the case of Hamas, being able to exploit the permanent victim status of Palestine both in the Middle East itself and amongst the West’s Left-leaning ‘liberal’ intelligentsia means last weekend’s operation was not greeted by the level of outrage one should expect beyond the borders of the Arab world. Outrage only showed its face when Israel understandably retaliated; then, right on cue, out marched the apologists with their Palestine flags, denouncing evil Israel, shrugging their shoulders over the slaughter of hundreds of Israeli civilians and more or less declaring Israel – and therefore its people – deserved everything they got. Not a squeak of support could be detected from these guilty parties when Iranian women bravely removed their hijabs in public and risked death by doing so; but reinforce the cherished victimhood of the Palestinians and you suddenly can’t shut them up on the subject of the Middle East.

300,000 Israeli army reservists have been called-up to assist Israel in its retaliatory assault against ‘Palestinian militants’ and the government in Jerusalem has promised to instigate a blockade of Gaza that will undoubtedly result in even more innocent deaths than Israel has already caused via strikes in response to the inhuman aggression of Hamas. While nobody would doubt Israel under the loathsome Benjamin Netanyahu is far from being the most tolerant democracy one could envisage – and the astonishing absence of awareness that this was coming by the supposedly-on-the-button Mossad is perhaps a reflection of Israel’s current malaise – the fact is both Israel and ‘Palestine’ remain locked in a perpetual cycle of mutual bloodshed capitalised upon by parties with a vested interest in its continuation. And, just as the conflict of exactly half-a-century ago impacted heavily upon the West, don’t expect this current instalment to burn itself out without some effect on the wider world being felt.

© The Editor

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ROOTS

Considering it aired as far back as 1959, the ‘Hancock’s Half Hour’ episode entitled ‘The Oak Tree’ is an extremely early example of the nascent conservationist movement penetrating popular culture. The likes of Nicholas Pevsner, John Betjeman and Ian Nairn were encouraging appreciation of the nation’s vulnerable architecture at the time, whereas this episode looks beyond manmade structures and turns its attention to the natural world under threat. Anthony Aloysius begins the episode as a man in love with his back garden (particularly the oak tree at the centre of it) and waxing lyrically on the beauty of Albion; when he encounters a council official who announces the tree must go, making way for a concrete lamppost, Hancock’s ire is roused and he embarks upon a campaign to highlight the issue. An intended march to Downing Street is a predictable disaster, so Hancock instead resorts to forming a human chain around the oak when the council lumberjacks arrive to chop it down. Resistance is successful until a timber merchant turns up and offers a handsome sum for the tree once it’s been felled. This is when Hancock’s fair-weather passion for nature evaporates and he takes the money. ‘After all,’ he says at the end, ‘It’s only a lump of wood, innit.’

In the 64 years since the episode originally aired, people’s passion for the natural environment – and awareness of the factors threatening it – has multiplied considerably, especially if situated in a largely urban area; any green oasis in town or city that suddenly faces redevelopment triggers the swift formation of a protest group, with online campaigns, petitions and marches organised before the quantity surveyor has even turned up with his theodolite. The overnight felling of 119 trees under the cover of darkness in Plymouth earlier this year sent shock-waves way beyond the borders of the city itself, becoming a national talking point as the high court was forced to issue an injunction to prevent Plymouth City Council taking a chainsaw to the few trees that remained. The carnage was committed in order to clear the way for one of those vanity projects local councils tend to inflict upon their city centres – the kind that always had ‘millennium’ in the title 20-odd years ago; but the outrage that greeted the arrogant hubris of Plymouth City Council reflected a general need for green spaces that transcends the narcissism of fanatical activism and resonates with a far wider section of the population.

This was apparent a few weeks ago when an historic tree near Hadrian’s Wall was victim to an act of inexplicable vandalism, hacked down after standing in the same spot for at least 300 years. A local landmark, the Sycamore Gap tree was felled by someone with evident knowledge of how to do the job, someone who clearly imagined he’d get away with it because Britain’s ancient trees have no automatic right of protection; there is no equivalent law in place for trees comparable to the one that gives important archaeological sites Scheduled Ancient Monument status, though it’s hard to think of a more ancient monument than a tree that had survived for centuries until encountering a lumberjack who evidently doesn’t sleep all night and work all day (the tree was apparently felled in the middle of the night). Northumbria Police made two swift arrests on suspicion of criminal damage as the Chief Inspector heading the investigation sought to reassure those expressing anger at the incident, saying, ‘I hope this second arrest demonstrates just how seriously we’re taking this situation, and our ongoing commitment to find those responsible and bring them to justice.’

The arrest of a 69-year-old in that line of work followed the earlier arrest of a teenager, though the senior of the two, recently evicted from his home, vehemently denies he was responsible. Whether he wears high-heels, suspenders and a bra as well as chopping down trees remains unknown. Joking aside, however, the attack on the Sycamore Gap tree was an appalling victory for the same philistine forces that imagine emptying a tin of tomato soup on a work of art in a gallery is a legitimate statement to make in the name of their favoured cause. Whichever way one looks at it, we’re still talking about the desecration of beauty, whatever the motivation behind such an assault. The local village pub, a hostelry which has no doubt benefitted from its close proximity to one of the most photographed trees in the country, has even offered a £1,500 bar tab to anyone who can provide information leading to the arrest of the guilty culprit. As for the little that remains, some are hopeful all is not lost. The general manager of the National Trust believes the tree could grow again from the stump. ‘It’s a very healthy tree,’ said Andrew Poad. ‘We can see that now. Because of the condition of the stump, it may well re-grow a coppice, and if we could nurture that then that might be one of the best outcomes, and then we keep the tree.’ But as the head gardener at the nearby Alnwick Garden says, ‘It won’t ever be the same shape or as good a tree as it was.’

Sadly, Northumberland is not alone when it comes to the kind of vandalism that brutally dismisses the significance of trees to our landscape. Barely a week after the Sycamore Gap was hacked down, a 40-foot high yew tree with a lifespan estimated to have stretched back to before the Battle of Hastings was discovered to have been uprooted, situated a mile from the actual location of events in 1066. A tree surgeon who stumbled upon this latest tragedy whilst out walking his dog says he contacted Rother District Council, but they apparently claimed as the tree was on private land it had nothing to do with them. ‘Yews are quite remarkable and ancient trees in their own right,’ said Paul Lawrence. ‘To me they are as important as any ancient monuments; there has to be protection put in place. I would like to raise awareness of how many of these ancient trees are being lost. They are being lost by the swing of a digger’s arm. This (the tree in question) is an ancient marker of an old woodland; this keeps happening and no one seems to do anything.’ Emphasising the personal meaning trees can have, Mr Lawrence added, ‘The tree means a lot to me; my granddad’s ashes were sprinkled there. I have a personal connection to the tree.’

Trees do loom large in pastoral poetry and literature both as symbols of continuity that keep a locality connected to its past and as living edifices imbued with somewhat mystical properties by some. Indeed, when Britain was a largely rural island, there would usually be a particular tree in each community that served as the central landmark of the village – a shelter from the elements, a meeting place for gatherings, or a spot from which to hang a suspected miscreant. The story of Charles II on the run from Parliamentary forces following his defeat at the Battle of Worcester in 1651 includes the legendary episode when he hid in an oak tree in the grounds of Boscobel House in Shropshire as the property was being searched by soldiers, an incident that seemed to enhance the somewhat benign qualities trees possess – even if there is a salient aftermath to the tale in that the tree itself was effectively destroyed over time by tourists hacking off branches to take home as souvenirs.

We only have to think back to our own childhoods, when there would always be a tree somewhere nearby that called out to us to climb it and swing from its branches, and it does often feel that we have a deep, subconscious emotional attachment to something it’s so easy to take for granted. Therefore, it’s no wonder passions are stirred when one is removed from the landscape by such violent means. The devastation inflicted by Dutch elm disease in the 1970s – when Britain lost a staggering 25 million elms – perhaps brought home to many just how important trees are to our sense of place and how that place changes for the worst when they’re gone. WH Auden once said, ‘a culture is no better than its woods’, and as the UK has suffered more deforestation than any other country in Europe bar one, what does that say about us?

© The Editor

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LOSING THE ASHES

I smoked my first cigarette in 1979 and I smoked my last in 2017; yes, that’s just two years short of forty – which, coincidentally, was the amount of fags I was getting through a day by the time I switched to vaping. Although I’ve successfully resisted the allure of cigs since then, whenever I find myself watching any movie or TV show from the past, when it seemed as though one could literally light-up anywhere without any objections being raised, I can’t deny there’s a part of me that yearns to have lived my entire life in such times, when being a smoker didn’t equate with pariah status on a par with a sex offender. The fact is I loved smoking, even though I knew from that first day behind the bike sheds that it was frowned upon as unhealthy and dangerous by what was then a vocal minority. Back then, however, the opposition appeared to be more a case of a child venturing into an adult arena that most thought it shouldn’t have been anywhere near; perhaps the prospect of such pure and unsullied little lungs being polluted by nasty nicotine was the prime factor in adults cracking down hard on kids having a go at something exclusively earmarked for grownups – with the dishonourable exception of those nefarious newsagents who’d secretly sell individual cigs to kids en route to school for a few pence under the counter. As for disapproving pipe-smoking teachers, any pupil who stepped into their staffroom cocoons would be confronted by a veritable London pea-souper, which emphasised their double standards.

Smoking at school defined which group one belonged to as much as being good at football did; if one could handle a fag, one was accepted by a particular clique and – as this clique would often include its fair share of knuckle-heads – it could act as a preventative aid in avoiding a kicking. ‘Oh, no he’s alright – he sometimes has a fag with us; let’s move on to that swot over there’ and so on. If you smoked, it said you were not a swot and – however pathetic it sounds now – in the blackboard jungle it was a vital survival tactic. The parallel lives children often lived, whereby life at home could contrast sharply with life at school, meant clandestine puffs were restricted to the latter, though the mass availability of cigarettes then could occasionally lead to the odd ‘borrowing’ from a packet of cigs on open display in the household for use behind the aforementioned bike-sheds the following day. By post-school adolescence, there was no longer any need to hide one’s fondness for fags; it may have been greeted by a disapproving shake of the parental head, but no amount of warnings about cancer made the slightest bit of difference when they could be perceived as hypocrisy on the part of the parent issuing caution with a cig welded to their lips.

In my teens and twenties, virtually everyone I knew smoked – and they could smoke almost anywhere. Even in the 1980s and well into the 90s, the amount of indoor locations where it was permissible to smoke was still pretty much unchanged since all those old movies and TV shows which portrayed every (usually male) character with a fag in either his hand or his mouth; smoking was the norm, and non-smokers were looked down upon as a bit odd in the same way vegetarians were. If smoking outdoors and needing to call at a shop, I’d simply stroll in and carry on smoking whilst waiting to be served without any objections from the shopkeeper; cinemas retained a smoking section and the top deck of a bus was fine, whereas where cafés, restaurants and pubs were concerned, the idea of informing customers they couldn’t smoke would’ve been inconceivable. Although the no-smoking sign gradually became more widespread as the 90s progressed, as relatively recently as the fag-end of that decade – okay, if you’re under-30, I accept it’s not so relatively recent – most indoor public spaces remained amenable to smokers; and then it all changed with remarkable rapidity.

The evangelical zealousness of the Blair administration bled into all of its myriad departments and that included Health. By the time the New Labour era had dawned, the fanatical puritans of the anti-smoking lobby were emboldened by finding ideological allies amongst Tony’s cronies and swiftly acquired the kind of clout the Green brigade and the cycling fraternity enjoy today, able to dictate government policy so that it chimed with their own worldview and then imposing it upon the rest of society without society having a say-so. Come each budget, cigarettes always appeared to have a disproportionate raise in price compared to other recreational items and the amount of places where one was allowed to smoke began to shrink with unprecedented speed; the propaganda campaign against cigarettes and against the smoker intensified and reached a crescendo under Gordon Brown when the previously-unimaginable day arrived when it was no longer possible to smoke in pubs; even though some pubs had banished smokers to a special room of their own a few years before, it still meant all patrons were being catered for; suddenly – following, as ever, in the footsteps of the USA – the Great British tavern was smoke-free; and many of them lost over half their custom as a consequence. For pubs up and down the country, this was the first blow that led to last orders.

Whereas once upon a time smoking had been fashionable and the non-smoker had been regarded as a strange anomaly, by the first couple of decades of the 21st century the position had flipped completely and smokers became aware they were being deliberately marginalised. The revolutionary onset of vaping for some smokers offered an alternative that was considerably cheaper as the cost of a packet of 20 cigs soared, and for a few it presented them with a means of being weaned off fags for good. Initially, vapers were able to flaunt their habit before the anti-smoking lobby, but they were only able to get away with it for so long before vaping became lumped-in with smoking as a social disease to be eradicated. Vaping was added to the non-smoking signs, and indoor locations that had been immune to vaping in the beginning were able to ban that too. Despite confirmation from many in the medical profession that vaping wasn’t ‘a gateway to smoking’ but the most successful method yet of getting people off cigarettes, the anti-smoking lobby wasn’t having any of it and continued to pressurise government into marginalising that as well. Anyone would think they had something against people enjoying themselves.

Taking its cue from the famously libertarian administration north of the border, the UK Government has now unveiled its latest click-bait headline-grabber on the subject of smoking. Talk is of the age one is allowed to buy cigarettes rising even higher in an attempt to manufacture a generation that has never smoked a fag – though Rishi Sunak doesn’t seem to have grasped the fact that if teenagers can access illicit substances falling into the Class A category, they shouldn’t have any problems getting hold of cigs; governments never learn that the minute something is outlawed its allure amongst the young merely intensifies. But it’s something that taps into the mood successive governments have generated – that the smoker is a malignant boil on society’s backside that needs to be lanced; and it also comes in handy with a General Election round the corner, so there you have it.

I suppose it is ironic at a time when some think it perfectly acceptable for 12-year-olds to be administered puberty-blockers and undergo surgical butchery – or vote at 16 – that personal choice re smoking can be regulated with such severity and adolescents well above the age of consent can be infantilised by such proposed legislation. Yes, kids, you’re welcome to go under the cosmetic surgeon’s knife and cast your vote before you reach 18, but if you happen to have been born after New Year’s Day 2009, you ain’t gonna be able to purchase a packet of fags from your local newsagents. Okay, so the advantages – particularly the lingering stench of smoke on clothes and household furnishings (not to mention the astronomical price of cigs and…er…the health benefits) – were apparent to me personally once I packed it in; but I still find something uniquely illiberal about this whole crusade.

© The Editor

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DEATH WARMED-UP

Not bad timing, really – as the Conservative Party Conference takes place in Manchester, news breaks that the intended Manchester branch of HS2 has been cancelled; whatever one’s opinion of this particularly pricey railway journey to nowhere, the vast amounts of public money squandered on it already somehow seem to be a fitting obituary for a governing Party that has been led by five different donkeys for the past 13 years. Not to worry, mind – charisma-free Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has made a speech that reverted to the default Tory tactic of putting the boot into those least able to fight back, playing to the gallery with the same tired old attack on the unemployed, which is always a safe bet for a standing ovation. Never mind that the Tories and their outsourced henchmen have an appalling human rights record when it comes to disabled people with no option but to claim financial assistance from the State; wheel out hackneyed phrases like ‘those who choose to live on benefits’, which echo Gideon’s ‘lifestyle choice’ smear from a decade ago, and once again expose your absolute ignorance of the grim realities of surviving on meagre handouts – even if this is something that is pretty much an across-the-board issue when it comes to the entire political class. Then again, the ruling Party has one dishonourable member – Deputy Chairman Lee Anderson – who claimed a nutritious meal could be made from scratch for 30p, blind to the fact that a school lunch in his own constituency costs £2.95 a day.

Well, okay – if the Tories are serious about ‘getting tough’ on the unemployed, why not start by scrapping the House of Lords? After all, nowhere else in the country is there a bigger collection of professional scroungers housed under one roof – not even on them grubby council estates with all those families which certain tabloid newspapers are so fond of profiling, y’know, the dole-ite couples with 14 kids and so on. Then again, this is a Party expert at failing to deliver on promises – and lest we forget, responsible for sending millions in the direction of Universal Credit during the pandemic. Oh, yeah; and immigration – how’s that going, then? As was pointed out in a video I caught on YT yesterday, the population of London (just to use the most extreme example) has leapfrogged from around 6 ½ million 30 years ago to 9 million today, yet there has been no comparable increase to accommodate this upsurge of residents in the areas of public transport, GPs surgeries, hospitals, or schools; such services are at breaking point because they haven’t expanded to match the population growth. The capital’s example has been replicated in other large towns and cities, of course, and unchecked immigration has undoubtedly played its part in a sizeable swelling of the urban conurbations. This is something our incumbent Government has repeatedly proclaimed it will deal with, but with every hotel (or boat) that has been refurbished for asylum-seekers via the taxpayer coffers, there’s been precious little evidence of progress.

The Conservative Party approaches this year’s conference with the prospect of electoral annihilation a year or so from now, so it’s no wonder populist slogans are in vogue for 2023 – straw-clutching is a familiar policy for any government in office for more than a decade and clinging on for dear life. Election analyst Professor John Curtice, who studies form with all the precision of a dedicated patron of a turf accountant, said recently that ‘the Party finds itself on average 18 points behind Labour in the polls – little better than the position 12 months ago after Liz Truss was displaced by Rishi Sunak…the Conservatives appear to be heading unwaveringly on a course that leads towards heavy defeat in an election that is now at most little more than a year away.’ Prof. Curtice calculates that, regardless of the marginal narrowing of polls courtesy of Sunak’s U-turn on Net Zero, the Tories’ only way of avoiding a wipe-out in 2024/5 was to focus on the economy as opposed to here today/gone tomorrow issues that keep our 24-hour MSM in business.

With Liz Truss’s camp ‘doing a Boris’ by not ruling out their gal running for the Tory leadership again in the wake of a General Election defeat, not to mention the ongoing HS2 farce, the continuing controversy over Suella Braverman, and calls for a ‘Minister for the North’ – a post that actually existed in the 18th century, prior to the formation of the Home Office as we know it (some progress) – the Conservative Party seems to be stumbling from one messy PR disaster after another, hence the likes of Hunt punching down because he knows it will at least appease backbenchers and the Daily Telegraph alike – if not confirming to floating voters that his Party isn’t capable of running the proverbial piss-up at the proverbial brewery. Andy Burnham, Labour Mayor of Manchester, has responded to the announcement of the cancellation of HS2’s Manchester branch by saying, ‘What gives them the right to treat people here in Greater Manchester and the north of England as second-class citizens? This will be remembered as the conference when they pulled the plug on us.’ Shadow Transport Secretary Louise Haigh replied to the latest HS2 development with ‘This shambolic conference is showcasing precisely why working people cannot afford five more years of the Conservatives.’

Tax is another issue that appears to be grabbing the headlines at this conference; Liz Truss is crying for tax cuts (especially corporation) from her current residence in the wilderness – along with demands to build more houses and resurrect fracking, whilst the Chancellor is concerned with raising the minimum wage from £10.42 an hour to £11.00 (woo-hoo!) as he emphasises there are no shortcuts to faster growth and lower taxes, declaring, ‘We know taxes are too high and want to bring them down’ without outlining precisely what he intends to do to achieve this. Hunt also announced his intention to cut the number of people working in the civil service back down to pre-pandemic levels. ‘We have the best civil servants in the world and they saved many lives in the pandemic by working night and day,’ he said in a manner that mirrored the vote of confidence a football club chairman gives his team manager before terminating his contract. ‘But even after that pandemic’s over, we still have 66,000 more civil servants than before. New policies should not always mean new people.’ This planned freeze on civil service expansion could allegedly save £1 billion.

At the moment, the National Debt stands at around an incomprehensible £2.59 trillion and is back to the kind of levels unseen since the early 1960s, when another Tory administration in its death throes was borrowing heavily to maintain the proclamation that the British people had never had it so good. When Harold Wilson’s Labour narrowly won the 1964 General Election, outgoing Tory Chancellor Reginald Maudling famously left a note for his incoming Labour successor Jim Callaghan that read ‘Good luck, old cock…sorry to leave it in such a mess.’ The Government borrowed £128.4bn in the 2022-23 financial year, £5.5bn higher than the financial year before, spending £111bn on debt interest – exceeding the amount it splashed out on for education; the current level of debt is more than double than what it was from the period spanning the 1980s up to the 2008 crash. Jeremy Hunt naturally blames the pandemic, though he’s also thrown in Ukraine for good measure.

This being the Party Conference Season, we’ve got the Labour one to look forward to next, and then the participants will be heading back to their constituencies to prepare for government – or opposition. As things stand, the Tories have a definite whiff of death about them, no matter how many crowd-pleasing treats they toss into the audience from their lofty conference podiums and no matter how many soft targets they aim at with all the contemptible gutlessness of a school bully’s sidekick. The prospect of a Government led by Keir Starmer is not exactly one that fills my heart with joy, though it does evoke John Lennon’s sardonic counterpoint to Paul McCartney’s chirpy optimism on ‘Getting Better’ – ‘It can’t get no worse’. God help us.

© The Editor

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