What are laurels for, if not resting on?

I don’t know about you but I for one am completely fed up with politics.

Not particularly the Westminster variety, which has a certain grim fascination as all those insiders who knew all along that Ed Miliband was completely useless break cover to rain blows on his still twitching corpse.

No, I am thinking more of the everyday sort of political manoeuvring and conniving which seem to feature so strongly in the way many of us choose to conduct our lives.

Getting the edge over a colleague for that promotion or pay rise, taking credit for something you didn’t actually do, sneaking the children into a better state school, trying to catch the attention of those who dish out gongs at Buckingham Palace …

So many of the aspiring middle class seem to devote their entire lives to these games, and I find it really hard to understand. Both because it is not my own way and because it is ultimately pointless.

I have never raised my own sights particularly high. School friends will vouch that my only sporting ambition was not to be picked for the team. True, I was notably good at passing some types of exam many decades ago, but only in subjects that required no real effort.

Any work ethic I ever developed was firmly based on fear of pedagogic sarcasm or mild violence, rather than a personal desire to do well.

We called him "Beater" Bertram for a reason

I have drifted through my non-career motivated only by a desire to attain a certain standard of comfort and to die peacefully in my own bed. So far one out of two doesn’t look bad. And if it means so much to others to gain kudos for the few things I have got right along the way, good luck to them. They are welcome to it.

Only they do need to realise that ambition is a drug and the appetite for success can never be satiated.

I have one friend who started in life with literally nothing and, through decades of hard work driven by burning ambition, is now a billionaire. He confirms that the drive for betterment is an absolute and hardy perennial.

If you have that mindset it doesn’t matter whether your current obsession is getting your family out of your parents’ front room and into a modest house of your own, or looking with envy at the next plutocrat’s bigger yacht. There will always be something that gets in the way of sitting back contentedly and enjoying what you have already got.

A man who would surely have loved to see Ed as "Britain's first Jewish Prime Minister"

So if you are a go-getter intent on shinning up the greasy pole remember that you’re never going to be satisfied and there are many things more important than career success, like spending time with your family or visiting those places and doing those things you always really fancied trying one day. 

There’s no point waiting until you get the terminal diagnosis to start drawing up your bucket list, and you are a very long time dead.

Whenever I make the mistake of thinking I am at risk of screwing up something important, I remember a valuable saying of my mother’s: “It will all be the same in a hundred years’ time.”

100 years ago: Alnwick 1915, with my grandfather's garage in the left background

I offer that to Ed, Ed, Vince, Douglas, Danny and all the other political losers by way of consolation. Perhaps they might like to have it engraved on a monolith in their gardens as a handy reminder.

Of course, if I’m honest, I did once have a small list of personal ambitions. To get married and have children: tick, belatedly. To publish a best-selling comic novel: no chance. To win the lottery: ditto. 

Oh, and to have a column in the best regional daily paper in the country. I was immensely privileged to be given that honour many years ago now, but it was still great to have The Journal’s outstanding qualities recognised at last week’s Regional Press Awards.

Well done, all. Take a break, enjoy your success, and don’t obsess about where the next award is coming from.

In fact, do the precise opposite of what my teachers at the RGS were always warning me not to do, and have a really good rest on your well-deserved laurels.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Who is really the nasty party?

Laws have been passed to protect people from abuse on account of their race, religion or sexual orientation, but Tories are still fair game.

Hence it should be no surprise that so many voters clearly lie through their teeth about their intentions when opinion pollsters come calling.

To many on the always self-righteous left, anyone who does not share their views is inhumane to the point of being downright inhuman.

I particularly remember the venom of the privately educated rich kids with whom I watched the results of the two 1974 elections on a flickering black and white TV in Cambridge, as each contest failed to deliver the Labour landslide they were confidently expecting.

The howls when Cambridge stayed Conservative were partly offset by one particular Labour gain. “At least they have civilised people in Oxford,” huffed Georgina.

I imagine Georgina’s trust-funded children in the front line of that mob baying obscenities and scrawling graffiti on war memorials in their attempted anti-Tory putsch at the weekend.

Because the election was clearly rigged, right? And if it wasn’t, then the stupid electorate was misled by the Murdoch and Rothermere press with their lies and scare tactics. Because every decent, caring human being is a socialist at heart, aren’t they?

Well, no they’re not. And no matter how many times the history lesson gets repeated, the left never seems to learn that England is fundamentally a conservative country.

Heaven knows there are enough clues scattered around, like the enduring hereditary monarchy, our collective love for unspoilt countryside, and the fact that Labour’s only landslide successes in my lifetime have been under a leader who made the party’s pitch significantly more conservative.

Yet still the cry will go up in some quarters that they lost because they weren’t left wing enough. Yes, that will be exactly why UKIP managed to hoover up so many of their traditional supporters on Thursday. Good luck with repositioning to offer even more red-blooded socialism. Oh, and next time maybe try choosing a leader who looks like a potential Prime Minister rather than the head teacher of failing comprehensive.

I have never understood what possessed Theresa May to acknowledge that characterisation of the Conservatives as “the nasty party”. True nastiness is found on the extremes of both left and right, not in mainstream Conservatism.

If the Tories really wanted to destroy the NHS don’t you think they might have done it by now, given that they have been in power for 40 out of the 67 years it has been in existence?

Left wing idealism rarely proves compatible with competent administration, as we have seen in a succession of Labour-run authorities over the years and most recently and strikingly in the now ejected Green council in Brighton.

The most interesting post-election Tweets I saw contained two maps. One compared Labour constituencies in England and Wales with the former coalfields, and the overlap was almost perfect, with the sole exceptions of London and Kent.

The other compared the political map of Scotland in 2015 with that of Ireland in 1918, when a Sinn Fein landslide swept the country outside Ulster.

Was last year’s failed independence referendum Scotland’s equivalent of the Easter rising of 1916?

Of course the parallels are not exact. Scotland already has its own parliament and the SNP’s MPs intend to take their Westminster seats, as Sinn Fein refused to do

I also think there is unlikely to be any popular demand to partition Dumfriesshire, Cydesdale and Tweeddale so that it can remain within the UK (though I am altogether less sure about Orkney and Shetland).

Even so, statesmanship of a high order will be required to prevent Scotland following Ireland through the exit door from the United Kingdom.

Do I see David Cameron as the great statesman who can pull this off? No, but I reckon he has far more chance than Ed Miliband ever would have done.

And who, a week ago, confidently saw Mr Cameron as an outright election winner?

Except in the Blair years, my lifetime experience of election nights has been of Tories exceeding expectations. Yet even I did not have the confidence to bet on it.

So have this one on me: “Typical stupid Tory”.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

A date that will go down in history?

If the opinion polls are right, and I hope they aren’t, the 70th anniversary of VE Day on Friday will also be Deadlock in Britain Day.

All round the country bleary-eyed candidates and would-be Prime Ministers will be surveying the wreckage of their hopes.

Just as Churchill did a mere two months after he was ecstatically cheered on the Buckingham Palace balcony on May 8th, 1945.

Spectacularly losing an election you entered with a personal approval rating of 83% is an achievement few can ever hope to emulate.

When Churchill’s wife Clementine tried to console him that his defeat might be a blessing in disguise, he retorted: “At the moment it’s certainly very well disguised.”

So where did he go so wrong? In popular memory Labour’s pledges of social reform overwhelmingly carried the day. Yet the Conservative manifesto of 1945 also promised “a nation-wide and compulsory scheme of National Insurance” and the creation of “a comprehensive health service covering the whole range of medical treatment from the general practitioner to the specialist”. This should not be altogether surprising.

The Beveridge Report of 1942, to which the post-war settlement owed so much, had been commissioned by the all-party wartime coalition Churchill led.

Personally, I put the Tory crash down to lousy PR. If only Max Beaverbrook or Brendan Bracken had said, “Winston, the thing to do is to carve your National Insurance and health service pledges on an 8 foot limestone obelisk and cart it around the country with you”, how very different the result might have been.

It is altogether more plausible that a post-war Tory government would have set up a National Health Service than that Labour would have instituted a “right to buy” for council tenants in 1959 – another counter-intuitive notion that has recently received an airing on the letters pages.

The unsuccessful Labour manifesto of that year does indeed contain a promise that “Every tenant … will have a chance first to buy from the Council the house he lives in”, but it was referring to privately rented homes that it proposed councils should take over.

Incidentally, imagine the furore that would ensue today if any party put out literature implying that all tenants were necessarily male. Well, maybe not in the case of UKIP.

The greatest counter-intuitive idea of all is that Margaret Thatcher was a Green pioneer because she closed so many coal mines (albeit not as many as Labour’s Harold Wilson) thereby anticipating the current left wing fetish for leaving fossil fuels in the ground.

If you rake through old manifestos you find Labour, now the staunchest opponent of giving the people a say on membership of the European Union, standing on a platform of withdrawal from the EEC in 1983.

Ideas pass back and forth between parties, and memories of past promises, successes and failures are selective. It is worth recalling that the revered socialist government of 1945 continued to award hereditary peerages, and pressed ahead with the creation of a British atomic bomb.

And, while independence was swiftly granted to India, there were ambitious plans for the continuing empire in Africa, including the once infamous scheme to improve British diets through the extensive cultivation of groundnuts in Tanganyika. It failed disastrously because the climate and soil were both completely unsuitable for growing peanuts.

A lesser known disaster of the time was a parallel scheme to boost chicken and egg production in The Gambia, West Africa … with the aim not just of feeding Britain but of reducing the colony’s dependence on the successful cultivation of groundnuts.

No doubt we can anticipate more expensive cock-ups of this sort, whoever finally comes to the surface clutching a lifebelt after tomorrow’s election.

I shan’t attempt a prediction, even though my family are still reeling from the fact that I accurately foresaw the Duchess of Cambridge giving birth to a daughter called Charlotte Elizabeth Diana – and then failed to place a bet on it.

Sadly for us David Cameron is no Churchill, Ed Miliband no Attlee. In a world of politicians no one much likes or respects, deadlock may be inevitable. But it is not to be desired, as anyone who remembers the 1970s will vouch.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

For me, the election war is over

“For you, Tommy, ze war is over!” The Germans always said this to captured British soldiers in the war films that were such a staple of my childhood.

Of course they were completely wrong, as Tommy invariably joined an escape committee and made an ingenious exit from his prison camp a couple of reels later.

But for me the General Election certainly is over, because I cast my vote on Saturday.

It feels wrong, just sticking an envelope in a post box rather than making a cross with a stubby pencil in a rickety plywood booth, after joshing with the party canvassers outside, and being ticked off the register by an official.

Not that there were many canvassers to be found outside the long demolished Callaly Women’s Institute hut, where I cast my last vote in person in Northumberland.

The election after that I was away on business so I asked for a postal vote, expecting it to be a one-off, but it turned out to be a permanent arrangement.

Now, I can see in theory that voting 12 days before the polls open is completely wrong. One should hear all the arguments before taking a view on any debate.

But leave it too long and you start to worry about your vote missing the count due to postal delays. And you end up, as I did in 2010, driving to the nearest polling station to hand over your postal vote in person. Which seems frankly ridiculous.

In any case, personal acquaintance with one candidate, and the conviction that she will be an excellent constituency MP, made her my absolutely obvious choice. I’d like to think I would still have voted for her if she had not been standing for the party to which I owe well over 40 years of tribal loyalty.

Naturally I’m going to feel pretty sick if, in the last week of the campaign, someone uncovers a secret off-manifesto commitment to slay all first-born sons, ban the wearing of ties or make forehead identity tattoos compulsory.

However, the chances of this seem slight. And now that I have become a mere observer of the various campaigns, rather than a potential voter, I can watch the contenders slug it out with the same sort of relaxed detachment with which I always approach the Oxford and Cambridge boat race. (Because, although I went to Cambridge, I have absolutely no interest in rowing.)

This election bears some similarities to that race with its two evenly matched teams slogging hard for the finish line. Though for the comparison to work fully we would have to add an SNP speedboat weaving back and forth across the course, threatening to upset the Conservative and Labour eights in its wash.

Plus a UKIP cabin cruiser, well stocked with gin, a Green pedalo, a Welsh Nationalist coracle and a Lib Dem submarine (actually a sunken coxless four).

The one and only time I went to watch the boat race, because I lived in London and could think of no excuse, it did not happen because Cambridge sank before the event had even started.

At least there is no chance of being denied a fascinating and unpredictable spectacle on the night of May 7th/8th, for which I will lay in Champagne either to celebrate or to drown my sorrows.

I have sat up for every election since 1970, when I enjoyed my first “Portillo moment” as the outgoing Labour foreign secretary George Brown lost his seat at Belper. That was an election the Conservatives were not expected to win; I can vividly remember the BBC bringing on a signwriter to paint some more digits on the Tory side of their swingometer.

The election of 1992 was also a pleasant surprise for those of a Conservative persuasion, though I don’t suppose there is any hope of Ed Miliband holding a triumphalist rally in Sheffield and repeatedly yelling “We’re all right!” to repel wavering voters.

Still, once every couple of decades the pundits seem to get it wrong. Let’s see if the pattern holds next week, with an unexpectedly decisive result for either would-be Prime Minister.

As I always say at weddings, may the best man win.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The man in the bed next to the door

I have a fairly stony heart but even so there are times when I simply have to laugh, no matter how inappropriate the circumstances.

"The RVI": Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle upon Tyne

A prime example occurred at visiting time at the RVI 25 years ago. I was trying to cheer up my late mother, who had just lost her second leg to Type 2 diabetes. Next to her, in the traditional bed next to the door, lay another old lady who patently wasn’t destined to witness another sunrise.

Her entire extended family duly trooped in to say goodbye, two by two, only they did no such thing. Each new arrival attempted some uplifting line like, “Eeh, you’re looking so much better, nan!”

The only one who spoke the truth did so with the splendidly ambiguous words, “Mind, you’ll soon be getting out of here!”

As for the rest, I am ashamed to say that their lack of realism was so ridiculous that my mum and I both got the giggles. We had to draw the curtains around her bed to avoid giving offence.

I am reminded of this melancholy saga – and, yes, there was another lady in the bed next to the door on the following day – by the succession of senior Labour figures turning out to confirm that Mr Miliband really does have what it takes to be Prime Minister.

Some, perhaps, are speaking the truth by not being too specific about which Mr Miliband they are talking about.

We are fortunate in having the dignified part of our nation’s leadership in the practised and capable hands of Her Majesty The Queen. But surely few of us can seriously imagine that it would be a good idea to put our key economic levers, never mind the nuclear codes, in the hands of Mr Bean.

Yes, of course we shouldn’t devalue a person because he looks a bit weird, and speaks strangely, and can’t manage normal things like eating a bacon sandwich or giving some change to a beggar without inviting ridicule.

She's not the only one in need of change

But I’ve been waiting for four years to find out what on Earth convinced Ed Miliband that he had a mission to be Prime Minister so overwhelmingly strong that it was worth knifing his own brother to achieve it, and I am still completely in the dark.

An energy price freeze, was that it? Possibly a mansion tax? Pushing the top rate of income tax back up to 50%? Committing never to take Britain out of the European Union, regardless of the future path it may take?

Harold Wilson famously asserted that: “The Labour party is a moral crusade, or is it nothing.” Well, if those are the only alternatives, I am really struggling to see the moral crusade right now.

Reminder: this is what a crusader looks like

I have waited in vain to hear a compelling vision of how Mr Miliband would change this country for the better, and it seems increasingly reasonable to conclude that he hasn’t got one. In which case, surely the Labour Party should bring an end to the admittedly entertaining farce of his leadership and install someone who can project one with greater credibility.

I don’t write this out of self-interest. I’m a natural Conservative, though no great fan of the party’s present leadership and direction. I certainly have no desire to see a majority Labour government next year. And there is no better chance of avoiding that outcome than by leaving the present Mr Miliband in place.

But British politics is already discredited and disillusionment can only grow if we are denied a credible choice between parties with grown-up leaders who can make a convincing fist of presenting themselves as potential Prime Ministers.

On current form, Ed Miliband would struggle to win a mock election in a school debating society.

I know that writing this will win me no new friends in the North East, which started voting Labour a century ago because it felt deprived and neglected. And never seems to question why it still feels exactly the same in 2014 despite its staunch and commendable loyalty.

But please be aware that those of us outside the ward are struggling to suppress our mirth over your man in the bed next to the door.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

What if we were capable of running our own country?

The “what if?” game is a favourite among those of us who have spent some time studying history.

The end product of six years studying history, and a reminder of how I looked before old age and dissolute living took their toll

What if someone had said in late June 1914: “You know, Franz Ferdinand, I think it might be better if you didn’t visit Sarajevo today”?

Or what if Britain had decided to let France, Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary get on with it in August 1914, and sat aside whistling nonchalantly?

The rationale for intervention has always been that Britain cannot allow the Continent to be dominated by a single power that might act against our vital interests.

In which case our finest minds have done an absolutely cracking job, through 50 years of international politics and diplomacy, in creating a power bloc on our doorstep that seems to be almost uniformly hostile to our notion of who should run the European Union, and how it should develop.

This should not be altogether surprising. The Continental countries’ experience of revolutions, dictatorships and military occupations during the last century is vastly different from our own.

If they wish to forge an ever-closer union with a common currency and uniform laws largely handed down from Brussels, bully for them. But I sense that a natural majority of the British people shares my reluctance to join them.

Hence at some point we need to stop lying to each other, admit that we want different things, disengage and move on.

There are many respected economists willing to vouch that the net economic cost to Britain of withdrawing from the EU would be marginal at worst, and that the oft-bleated refrain of “three million jobs at risk” is a number simply plucked from the air.

Only one thing gives me pause about embarking on an unreservedly enthusiastic campaign for our early withdrawal from the EU, and it is not the potential impact on business. It is doubts about the calibre of those who would have to shoulder the burden of running a properly independent country.

Surely those with the privilege of voting in the forthcoming Scottish independence referendum must similarly consider the leadership of the SNP and think: “Really? All on their own?”

Wheezes pour forth from all sides in the year-long campaign for the 2015 general election. The Conservatives offer us HS3 to cap the monstrous folly of HS2, plus the alluring promise of elected mayors, even though the idea keeps being rejected whenever people are offered a say on the issue. The evident moral here must be: don’t ask the people.

Any sane person’s heart must surely sink when George Osborne proposes to merge the tax and National Insurance systems, given that the three words even more likely to induce despair than “England football team” are “Government IT project”: a guaranteed recipe for waste and chaos on a truly Brobdingnagian scale.

Meanwhile Labour’s own policy chief Jon Cruddas denounces the “dead hand” at the party’s centre that prevents it from proposing anything similarly radical, and Nick Clegg …

Well, there’s probably no point wasting ink on anything the LibDems have to say, given their electoral prospects next year.

Are any of our prospective national leaders really up to the job of leading a nation of 64 million people alone on the international stage?

Our Queen certainly is, but she is 88 and on a job share as head of state of 15 other countries at the same time.

Ed Miliband? Don’t make me laugh.

Nigel Farage? I refer you to my previous answer.

David Cameron is undoubtedly a bit of a lightweight. A former PR man, for heaven’s sake, and I can tell you from decades of direct experience just how useless they are.

But our “friends” in Europe have surely done him a massive favour in appointing as their supremo a man who apparently likes a drop and whose crowning achievement to date has been leading a country with a population around two thirds that of Tyneside.

Jean-Claude Juncker of Luxembourg, congratulations. You are officially the man who makes even David Cameron look like a proper statesman.

Now, what if Dave actually calls that EU referendum I am sure he would really rather avoid, and cannot wriggle around to recommending that we all vote to stay?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

You've let me down again

Like every right-thinking columnist in the country, I am extremely disappointed with your performance in the European and local elections.

I should perhaps clarify that I mean “right-thinking” in the sense of “correct” (though not, heaven forfend, politically correct) rather than as an indicator of my own allegiance.

Unlike many, I am not annoyed that 27.5% of you who voted chose a party led by Viz comic’s “Man In The Pub”. That is your prerogative.

But I am beyond furious that 66% of you could not be bothered to vote at all.

What on earth was so utterly riveting that it prevented you from nipping out at any point between 7am and 10pm last Thursday and marking a simple cross on a piece of paper? A journey that you could have avoided, as I did, by requesting a postal vote.

Don’t say “It doesn’t change anything” and “They’re all the same”. Because they’re not, as the triumph of The Man In The Pub demonstrates.

I keep hearing radio interviews with people banging on about how we need to increase numbers on the electoral register and perhaps extend the franchise to 16- and 17-year-olds, but surely this pales into insignificance compared with just persuading the two thirds of the electorate already on the register to get off their backsides and at least feign an interest.

Our former third party used to be fond of arguing that we would all be more engaged if we made every vote count by abolishing the unfairness of “first past the post”. In the circumstances, it would have taken a heart of stone not to laugh at the almost complete destruction of the Liberal Democrats under a system of proportional representation.

It had all the appeal of watching a famous big game hunter being trampled to death by an angry elephant.

Not so long ago “I agree with Nick” was the political catchphrase on nearly everyone’s lips. Now the only person likely to utter it is Mrs Clegg, and he probably can’t even count on that.

The ejection from the European Parliament of that other Nick from the BNP was another bright spot, burnished by his explanation that the electorate had “voted for UKIP’s racist policies instead”.

Meanwhile Labour are furious with what remains of the white working class for daring to vote for The Man In The Pub rather than their union-appointed leader, who has performed the great feat of making Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock look like top Prime Ministerial material.

Among the erstwhile major parties only David Cameron seems to be avoiding serious questions about his leadership by keeping his head down and praying that his natural supporters will now return to the fold after registering their “protest vote”.

Over the coming months we will grow very weary indeed of hearing “Vote Farage, Get Miliband” trotted out as the entirely negative argument for voting Conservative.

Where are the positives? I am a natural pessimist, but even I am weary of the endless doom and gloom that passes for political debate in this country today.

Britain is a great place to live. (Clearly it must be, or immigration would not be such a big election issue.) The North East is the best place to live in Britain (as I am reminded every time I have to leave it to earn a living).

In my view we all have much to be grateful for but, if you don’t agree, you have the power to change it. Thanks to the Fixed-term Parliaments Act of 2011 we already know that the next General Election will be on May 7, 2015. So you have nearly a full year to practise going out of the house or to get a postal vote lined up.

If the two thirds of you who did not bother to vote last week could be persuaded to do so, all the polls and calculations will go out of the window because literally anything is possible. Surely that thought must excite you just a tiny little bit?

If not, please remember that those who do not bother to vote automatically lose all entitlement to that most cherished of benefits: the right to moan about the result.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Miliband's Labour is to politics what the Co-op is to retailing

I spent the appropriately joyless socialist May Day bank holiday wading through piles of accumulated correspondence, including the candidates’ addresses for the enthralling Euro elections.

UKIP’s was all about immigration and taking back control; while the Conservatives focused on their economic record and “fighting to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with the EU”. At which point the cynic in me wondered why I had observed such limited progress on that front during their four years in power.

I cannot comment on the Lib Dems because they have not bothered to write to me, no doubt correctly concluding that one (and most probably both) of us is a lost cause.

And then there was Labour, which appeared to be fighting a completely different election from the others, focused entirely on domestic issues like “the cost of living crisis” and the NHS.

Easy to see where he gets his "intellectual self-confidence"

It is certainly brave of them to have picked another five word catchphrase for endless repetition, bearing in mind what became of the last one: “no more boom and bust”.

You can certainly argue “they would say that, wouldn’t they?” about the various interest groups who claim that Labour’s evolving programme would spell disaster. Turkeys rarely enthuse about Christmas, so energy companies, landlords and rail franchise-holders may all be expected to say that price freezes, rent controls and increased state involvement in the railways are all thoroughly bad things.

But that does not mean they are not right.

No one old enough to have experienced the Stalinist anti-service culture of the old state telephone, gas, electricity or rail monopolies would ever wish them back.

Furthermore, all experience suggests that free markets will ultimately deliver better and cheaper products and services than anything dreamt up by politicians and implemented by civil servants.

If you doubt this, consider the food retail market where, without any encouragement at all from Mr Miliband, the major players are making their contribution to alleviating “the cost of living crisis” by slashing prices.

Not content with spending hours of TV airtime and acres of newsprint telling us about it, one of them even tastelessly blazoned its message across the Angel of the North.

The reason for this is simple: the exponential growth of the discounters Aldi and Lidl, privately owned by German billionaires. Their great triumph has been to undermine the age-old British conviction that “you get what you pay for”.

I know thoroughly upmarket (even titled) people nowadays who boast that they rarely shop anywhere else for food and household essentials. Well, apart from Waitrose, naturally.

The market share figures bear out this polarisation, with the cheapest and poshest chains flourishing, while those in the middle are squeezed.

Retail experts predict falling profits from Asda, Morrisons, Sainsbury’s and Tesco. Already two of these cannot be mentioned on the business pages without use of the adjective “troubled”, and some suggest one may even go bust.

At which point there will no doubt be much wailing and gnashing of teeth about job losses and abandoned property, as there already is when village shops and other long-established independent retailers close their doors in the face of relentless supermarket and internet competition.

We could try to stop this perpetual retail revolution through Government intervention, or consumers could just be allowed to vote with their feet and purses.

Labour will always be on the side of intervention. Witness their policy review document, leaked at the weekend, spelling out some of the options to deal with our burgeoning obesity. Suggested measures included bans on shops selling cheap alcohol and restrictions on fat, sugar and salt.

Inviting the question why, if there really is “a cost of living crisis”, so many of us can clearly afford to eat and drink more than is good for us?

One of the more appealing Tory maxims is “trust the people”. Mentally competent adults should not need perpetual nagging about their choices on what to feed themselves, how to fill their leisure hours, or where to buy their groceries.

Luckily Labour already has its own model for how the people ought to shop. It’s called the Co-op.

With this grasp of maths, it's lucky they're not running a bank

Maybe its brilliant success story could be replicated in the handling of their national economy?

Oh, I forgot. That’s already happened.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Labour: my old man's party

If we know anything at all about Labour, it is surely that it is the party of the common people, and the staunch opponent of hereditary privilege.

How strange, then, to find Tony Blair’s eldest son Euan apparently being lined up for the ultra-safe Labour seat of Bootle, on the home turf of his mother Cherie.

This follows hard on the heels of Neil Kinnock’s son Stephen being chosen to defend the 11,000 Labour majority in Aberavon, south Wales.

Meanwhile Jack Straw’s son Will has been selected to contest the marginal seat of Rossendale and Darwen, next door to his father’s Blackburn constituency. Dad is retiring at the next election but his successor was inconveniently chosen from an all-women shortlist.

The only real disappointment among the ranks of the Labour elite has been suffered by John Prescott’s son David, who has so far sought two Labour nominations unsuccessfully.

Should any of this surprise us in a party led by a millionaire whose millionaire Marxist father was not a Labour MP himself, but was most certainly a grand panjandrum of the Left; and who secured the leadership in a pitched battle with another millionaire who also happened to be his own brother?

Lest we forget, this is the same party whose shadow cabinet contains twin sisters and whose shadow Chancellor and Home Secretary are married to each other.

All perhaps suggestive of recruitment from a rather narrower gene pool than the old House of Lords, reform of which was surely one of Tony Blair’s few undisputed triumphs, in that at least no one died in the process.

I happen to be acquainted with one of Labour’s few hereditary peers under the old dispensation. He voted enthusiastically for his own abolition. Yet within a year he was back in the House of Lords, having been granted a life peerage because they missed him so much on the Labour benches.

So a really valuable step forward in creating a more equal society there, then.

The pattern of hereditary privilege and connections trumping talent and hard work is by no means confined to politics. Take a look at any of the traditionally left-leaning occupations like broadcasting, journalism and acting, and you will find them teeming with the offspring of parents distinguished in those fields.

It is the most natural thing in the world to want one’s children to follow in one’s footsteps, particularly if one has found a comfortable niche in life. And even, it would seem, if one has not.

Every week brings letters to this paper filled with bile against “Thatcher” because she denied a generation the hereditary privilege of following their fathers into the famously dirty and dangerous job of coal mining.

I do not write this column to make a party political point. The only person I knew quite well at university who has scaled the heights of the Conservative party was himself the son of an MP (and later a life peer).

But then that is what one would expect of the Tories, isn’t it? The hidebound reactionaries who elected a woman their leader in 1975 and made Benjamin Disraeli Prime Minister in 1868, 146 years before Ed Miliband expressed the hope of becoming “Britain’s first Jewish PM.”

(To be fair, Disraeli was only a Jew by birth, not by religious practice; but then up to now Mr Miliband has always presented himself as an atheist.)

Few things in politics turn out as you might expect. Mrs Thatcher shamefully closed or merged more grammar schools than any Labour education secretary; Harold Wilson’s governments closed more coal mines than Mrs Thatcher’s.

All one can say with confidence, on surveying the contemporary political scene, is how true today’s Labour party is to the observations of that great socialist George Orwell in Animal Farm: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

And as we look at the choice before us in this year’s European elections and in the General Election of 2015, we may well feel like this: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Party conference season: an ideal time to accept reality

So far the annual party conference season seems to have been dominated by issues of energy.

Whether those be Labour’s promise of a short-term gas and electricity price freeze, or the Tories’ efforts to energise the long-term unemployed back into work.

A cynic might observe that a key driver of the high energy prices charged to consumers has been the generous subsidies introduced for basically uneconomic forms of electricity generation like wind turbines and solar farms.

All founded on a policy of “carbon taxation” that was powerfully reinforced on the watch of a certain Labour Energy Secretary called Ed Miliband.

But it would be unfair to make this a party political point. Because everyone outside the always entertaining UKIP circus seems to take huge delight in pointing out what a brilliant job Britain has done in reducing its carbon emissions; while conveniently forgetting to mention that we have only achieved this by exporting most of our manufacturing industry to China.

Which may, in turn, have some bearing on the numbers of long-term unemployed.

In the overall scheme of things, taking credit for this makes about as much sense as a man boasting that he has eliminated his overdraft, while omitting to mention he has put it in his wife’s name instead. 

Reading the acres of coverage of last week’s UN report about the 95% certainty of manmade climate change, I found myself reminded of a friend who kept going back to her doctor with a debilitating chronic ailment.

Fed up with the lack of action to cure her, she finally asked in no uncertain terms why medical science was letting her down so badly. At which the doctor outlined in great detail the courses of treatment potentially available to her.

“But those sound even worse than my disease!” she protested.

“Exactly,” her GP calmly replied.

We can all observe that the climate is changing, as it always has, and we may accept that human activity is a factor. But where is the evidence that requires us to spray money like an unmanned fire hose in a futile attempt to cure the problem?

Every farmer and landowner in the country with an eye for a financial killing, and no appreciation of beautiful landscapes, is being powerfully incentivised to whack up ugly great wind turbines on their property, though these will make a minimal contribution to our overall energy needs.

The new view from St Cuthbert's Lindisfarne, courtesy of Tony Meikle

Last year my local council installed cavity wall insulation, completely free of charge, in the house I rent in Cheshire. Even though, if it actually worked (of which I have seen no evidence to date) it would clearly have paid me to do this at my own expense.

In the long run I and everyone else will be paying for these “green energy” developments and “energy saving” initiatives through higher bills, whether from our power companies or in local or national taxes.
There is never any such thing as a free lunch. No, not even for those primary school children Nick Clegg is so keen to feed. Why on earth does he want to supply free meals to the offspring of middle class parents like me who are perfectly capable of paying for them? Particularly when the coalition only recently (and reasonably) abolished my child allowance.

But then one might equally well ask why Ed Balls is now promising to reintroduce the 10p rate of income tax his mentor Gordon Brown abolished in 2008.

We appear to be going around in ever decreasing circles of political unoriginality, culminating in the ultimate dumb idea of reverting to the sort of price controls that failed so spectacularly in the 1970s.

Even reactionaries like me, whose ultimate goal in life is to put the clock back, would never choose to stop it there.

Every party should stop striving for the next news soundbite and pause to reflect on what really matters, whether for their cherished “hardworking families” or lazy so-and-sos like me.

They might well conclude on energy costs and climate change, as my friend did on her illness, that it is best to stop looking for non-existent miracle cures and simply accept reality, then adapt to it as best we can.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Life in Britain today: a never-ending episode of The Thick Of It

It is increasingly difficult to discern any difference between the real political world and that presented in my favourite Saturday night TV viewing, The Thick Of It.

That great word “omnishambles”, which so aptly summarises the Government’s performance most days, was coined not by Ed Miliband but by The Thick Of It’s fictional (yet, in most respects, horribly real) Labour spin doctor Malcolm Tucker.

Tucker: not a misprint

Two Saturdays ago the plot of The Thick Of It centred on the Government slashing funding for school breakfast clubs; this weekend it was about the creation of a new business bank. On both the following Mondays, real ministers popped up to announce that they were doing just that.

This revelation of the programme’s astonishing predictive powers will no doubt boost its audience next Saturday, as we eagerly wait to find out which minister will be guilty of some fresh act of blinding stupidity or duplicity, and will issue a grovelling apology for the same (with or without a musical accompaniment).

He's sorry, he's sorry, he's so so sorry ...

The one thing that puts me off unreservedly recommending The Thick Of It to everyone is the unremitting foulness of its language, which is calculated to offend a certain sort of pleb.

Not a prole, who drives a white van, enjoys the Page 3 girl in The Sun and wants to bring back hanging.

Nor a toff, who will also swear all the time, as Government Chief Whip Andrew Mitchell so ably demonstrated last week.

Those f***ing gates again

But the sort of aspirational pleb who thinks that swearing is unacceptable and is also well educated enough to know that anyone who calls him or her a pleb almost certainly intends it as an insult.

The most staggering thing to me about the whole Mitchell Gategate saga is that, in our supposedly intrusive surveillance society, a location as massively sensitive as the main gate of Downing Street apparently does not possess CCTV cameras and recording equipment to put a swift end to the unedifying saga of who actually said what to whom.

Clearly Mr Mitchell and the police officer he insulted cannot both be telling the truth. So soon after the results of the Hillsborough inquiry, it would be foolish to assert that the police never tell lies. On the other hand, it is abundantly clear which party in the altercation has the greater incentive to be economical with the actualité.

The fundamental problem here is a lack of respect. Virtually none of us respect the toffs in charge of us, though it is scarcely their fault that almost the only way to get on in British society these days is to be born in its upper echelons and to receive a private education.

The toffs, in their turn, have little respect for the rest of us; though curiously they tend to have more for the proles at the bottom of the heap than for us plebs in the middle. The alliance between the squire and his forelock-tugging cottagers and servants is as old as England itself.

But at least no one has to die due to our lack of respect. The worst thing our transport minister has done in recent times is seriously annoy Sir Richard Branson by handing the West Coast main line franchise to someone else.

Compare and contrast the situation in Pakistan, where the railways minister, presumably stepping a little outside his usual brief, has promised $100,000 to anyone who kills the director of that American film displaying a lack of respect for Islam.

Respect again: it’s what we all want for ourselves, our work and our beliefs. But if you are running an omnishambles, insulting public servants, breaking election pledges or inciting murder there seems precious little reason why those concerned should get it from any of us.

The best that can be said for living in an ongoing episode of The Thick Of It is that it gives most of us a few laughs along the way. I wonder whether the team behind it has considered exporting the format to Pakistan? Now, that might make for a really interesting news story.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.