Out Of Touch With Any Forms of Reality...

This week, there have been a few incidents that have convinced me that some people and some organisations have become so divorced from reality that the decree is now "absolute"; having moved on from "nisi" some time ago...

First Case:

Ed Miliband made a little speech today (28th June) calling for Bob Diamond to be hanged by the neck until dead (provided that that was the result of the "full force of the law" being applied, probably) for operating a cartel within banking that set interest rates in his and his mates, er...interest. During his speech, he mentioned all of the little people that work in banks and how they work very hard, just like lots of ordinary people in other jobs and that they shouldn't be tarred (or feathered, presumably) with the same brush that he'd like to stick up bankers' arses. And he makes a good point (for once). Well done, Ed (or your speech-writer).  Mind you, Ed has said today that he wants to see "...people that have done the wrong things...going to court". So that would include Blair and Brown then? No...didn't think so...

Lizard king tells other lizards to hold their forked tongues (maybe)
And isn't there a wee bit of Himmler about this image? Or maybe just Herr Flick...

The main point, however, is that the Bob Diamonds of this world no longer care about or have any real understanding of what they are doing in terms of how it affects the wider world and the ordinary people that dwell on it. It may be, of course, that that makes perfect sense if Bob Diamond and, latterly, Fred Goodwin, are, in fact, shape-shifting reptilian humanoids from Alpha Draconis, as propounded by everyone's favourite loony, David Icke. I would just so love that to be true...wouldn't you? Mind you, Icke believes that Queen Elizabeth II, George Bush and Beyonce (probably) are Draconoids, so maybe he is right...only joking; the man is bananas.

Not so long ago, bankers like Diamond knew who their customers were. They might even have met some of them from time to time and had a nice cup of tea. Of course, these people are not 'bankers' as we have understood the descriptor in the past. A new word should be used to describe them in order to differentiate between them and proper 'bankers', like the nice men and women at the Co-op that refuse to use money for unethical purposes, apparently, or those at the Credit Unions who serve communities rather than themselves. Either we do that or we retain the word 'banker' for the nasty people and invent a new one for the nice banky folk, like 'cash-cuddlies' or 'money-teddies', perhaps. I prefer the option of finding new descriptors for Diamond and his ilk; words that sum up their approach to life and business. Complete, Utter Numismatic Tossers might work, seeing as how much they love to describe everything they do in acronyms that they hope nobody else will understand, e.g., "Rights Issues Can Help", or "(The) People Our Operations Re-home".

Icke's view of 'W'
Not dissimilar?

Diamond's position as head of Barclays has to be untenable, hasn't it?. But he won't see that (through his green, lidless, reptilian eyes) as he has the indefatigable belief that what he does is "right". His job is to make money. He has to make money in order to justify his existence. Nothing else matters (ah! Metallica!) It doesn't even matter to him that it isn't real money, just so long as the people with whom he deals believe that it is real money. Maybe we should put Diamond in charge of De La Rue so that he can just print paper money and then take loads of banknotes and lie in a big box with them and wallow. I wonder if that would make him happy? I also wonder what he does with all of his money....actually, I don't. I don't give the tiniest shit what his life is like, but I do give a whole sewage farm full of shit about the lives of those people that he and his pals have crushed by varying degrees. People like Diamond have no conscience. They may have started with one but then they lost it. And yes...they are to blame. Not the system, not governments, not the lack of regulation...they have no fucking idea of right and wrong and they need to have (as Miliband and others have demanded) the full force of the law visited upon them. The trouble is that these Complete, Utter, Numismatic Tossers can afford the best lawyers, ones that will delay and prevaricate for as long as it takes for a Draconian Reptile Shape-Shifting being to die or go back to their planetary system. So just let the fucker resign or get sacked and let's move on...even if that course of action might have been suggested (obliquely) by Dave (the PM, not the TV channel)

Now...In another case of reality-divorce...

....The people that look after all things 'royal' in this country have finally proven - beyond all reasonable doubt - that they have absolutely no fucking idea about anything outside of their pointless, privileged existences; just like Bob Diamond, then. What is worse, however, is that the broadcast and print media think that the latest news from "The Palace" is actually worthy of report...

I don't care if the royals wish to have some bonkers set of rules about who has to curtsey or bow to whom and when and where these silly bobs and bends should be done. They're all bananas, anyway, so it doesn't surprise me in the least that they have code of curtsey conduct, but I do care that the BBC and the newspapers feel that it's all worth telling us about it. It appears that if you're a 'blood relative' of the queen then, regardless of whether you're going to be a queen at some point yourself, then you have to curtsey to someone that won't ever be a queen. Sod the Euro-crisis, Afghanistan, Iraq and the Coalition's privatisation of the NHS and the dismantling of everything sensible in our Education system...let's all learn about royal etiquette, instead. The mistaken belief in the media is that the public wants to know, is interested and, laughably, thinks there is a relevance today.

We're supposed to imagine a situation where the "Princess of Hearts II" is ambling down some corridor in one of the royal palaces; she's all on her own, just whistling a happy tune (inwardly, so as not to break the royal whistling codes) because she is now a very royal person that one day will be a queen. What a fairy-tale land she inhabits, too...with smiling children all around to give her flowers and her husband's grandfather making calls to the woodsman to tell him to sharpen his axe. Anyway, the princess is about to reach the end of the corridor when who should come around the bend? It's the Princess of Silly Hats and her sister, Princess Overbite. Oh my God! What should she do? Should she curtsey or should she simply smile and nod. Can she say anything, or must she wait until spoken to by these blood-royal personages. Or should she just punch them both in the mouth? If only she had studied the new code of curtsey conduct last night (like her husband and father-in-law had said she should) instead of combing her beautiful princess hair for hours after dinner (one ryvita, one grape, two pine nuts = size 0).

Lizard innards attempt to exit the shape-shift body - Horror!

In a (pine) nutshell, we need to ignore this, for all of our sakes. Let's not forget that most of the royal family are Draconian, reptilian, humanoid-shape-shifters anyway so the curtsey might not be that easy for them. Everybody say "aah" or, when the aliens get all angry..."Aaaaargh!)

And finally....

Boris Coe and Lord Johnson (or is that Lord Coe and Sebastian Johnson? - I forget) have divorced themselves from the reality of the "Team GB" population, favouring rather the "Team GB" olympic enthusiasts (5% of the population, probably, those being the saps that applied for tickets for anything and got some for something else, along with the idiots that followed a torch around the country - Oooh! Look! Fire! A Flame in a Gold Thing!)

There's only one month to go. One month before we can forget entirely the ignominy of England's Euro 2012 departure from Ukraine and the inevitable defeat of Murray in the semi-finals of Wimbledon and ready ourselves for the a £9bn crapfest in East London in the shadow of Diamond's obelisk on Canary Wharf. One pointless, out of touch organisation overlooking the other.

People of the Week:

Jimmy Carr: The official scapegoat of tax-dodgers everywhere. I wasn't shocked about his financial arrangements; just by how much he can earn by not being very funny...

Chloe Smith: Sacrificial lamb of the Treasury. Bless...

David Beckham: Winning doesn't matter. What matters is that Becks is as close as we can get to a living god. Should have been picked. Send 'Psycho' Pearce to the tower!

Susan Allen: The acceptable face of RBS? Probably...Like Miliband said, there are actually some good people in our banks. She just happens to be one of them and, whilst this may fly wholly in the face of my usual blog stance - Hester isn't so bad either. I'd back Hester in a scrap with Diamond, anyway. I'd even pay to see it...

"Oy! You! Yeah, you, Diamond, y'bastard!
Over here son. Yeah. you, ya yank wanker lizard banker!
You're gonna get your fucking head kicked in...
Put your webbed dukes up then, or fuck off back to your planet...
Don't fuck with me, son...my dad's from Yorkshire..."

Michael Gove Is Useless

GOVE IN TROUBLE

Alright, sonny...you're nicked. I'm arresting you for crimes
against the nation's children. You're not obliged to say
anything, but whatever you say will be complete bollocks,
as usual. Get in the car, there's a good boy...

I woke up this morning in 2012 and then saw what Gove is up to and realised that I'd been transported back to 1970. As a product of the 60s/70s grammar school system, I think that I can be "wise after the event", as the saying goes.

It seems to me that Michael Gove wants a return to those days, whilst dressing up his approach to curriculum nazism as an aid to social mobility. That's just bollocks. Let's all do our times tables then, shall we? Moreover, let's all do them in a duodecimal system, like we need the separated joints of our fingers to count once again, because there are no calculators or 'apps' for that. And let's also ignore the fact that everything is now decimal, and more simplistic as a result. And let's all be able to quote some Shakespeare, or Browning, or Auden, because that will enable young people to impress potential employers along with being able to recite their seven times table.

And this week, Gove announces that he'll be "consulting" on a programme to change GCSEs into...something else. And for "consulting", read "telling". And for "something else", read "O-Levels". Every kid that's taking GCSEs at the moment can learn this week that all of their hard work was pointless, as Gove relegates GCSEs into the second division of examination awards because he doesn't see them as the "gold standard" that every child deserves to be measured by in order that they can get a job (that doesn't exist in reality, because Giddy hasn't fixed everything, like he promised to).

It's not even as if there was a hint of Gove being well-intentioned in all of this. It's more like he's just recalling all of the really shit things that happened to him at school (Robert Gordon's College, Aberdeen) and is making policy so that everyone else has to experience the horrors that he did, before he went to Oxford and began his unstoppable trajectory into the political class and gained his seat in parliament as the member for Surrey Heath, the constituency for the true scot that he is, of course. I used to detest Michael Gove just because he's a tory, looks and acts like one and appears to have no empathy with anyone...oh, and he's married to Sarah Vine and he's a convenient QPR supporter, allegedly. But now I have something for which it makes it easy (and right) to really detest him.

Having worked very briefly in secondary education, I have the utmost respect and regard for the majority of teachers. When I was at school, before computers, mobile phones and the ubiquitous social media (actually, it was almost before ball point pens), it was we, the pupils, that demonstrated that regard and respect for most of the teachers, even though a lot of that was based upon fear. These days, teachers have to fight their battles on a variety of fronts and a new one has opened up, led by Gove.

The battle lines are also drawn against the pupils (or is it 'students', now?) and parents. My parents were in awe of teachers whereas now, mummies and daddies treat them like the lowest form of public servant, and they are encouraged to do so by the likes of Gove, who wants everyone to have 'choices' and to hold the educators to account if little Johnny or Mary doesn't go to Oxford and get a first in classics become a CEO of a plc by age twenty-three. Education is, regrettably, a market - just like everything else nowadays. If you can pay, then there's a way. And if you can't, then you get what's left on offer, usually from lowest bidder. Idiotic parents are encouraged by the likes of Gove to believe that they can change all of this. Well, they can't. A significant minority of parents don't give a toss anyway and just see school as seven or eight hours of free daily childcare so that they can slob about watching Jeremy Kyle expose and berate people that are just like them. Their idea of social mobility is a state-funded electric scooter to carry their morbidly obese carcass to the offie and back.

Gove has some spectacularly daft ideas, and he's not alone. When we are governed by a cabinet of mostly privileged, rich members of the political elite who have never held down a job or known what it's like to even worry a little bit about money, then we're not going to get the sort of policy-driven change that will be any use to the majority of people in Britain. Most of it is knee-jerk stuff, anyway, in the face of the intense media scrutiny that makes it pretty difficult to govern anyway, so when you lay on top of that the inexperience within the cabinet it makes for a grim outlook. And the 'First Division' senior civil servants are cut from the same cloth so we can't expect the Sir Humphrys to advise any more sensibly. Take this silly business about Jimmy Carr's tax affairs. There'll be a knee-jerk into some kind of tax avoidance legislation soon enough, conveniently ignoring the fact that David Cameron can owe a lot of his present, personal liquidity to the proceeds of an offshore family fund. "Morally wrong"? Carr just hired an accountant like most of his peer-group but has been hung out to dry. I imagine he'll be able to turn it into some good material, though, if he's ever allowed back on the telly. Oh, I forgot, most of his stuff's on Channel 4... 

Gove's plans are not knee-jerk reactions, though. No! He's actually thought these through and decided that they still made sense; which makes it all the more worrying.

Instead of messing about with the examination system, the curriculums, academies and 'free' schools, Gove might be better off seeking to adapt our education system with a view to providing the skills that we actually need to make Britain a better place to live in and do business with. When the Chinese trade delegation come here looking for excellence in manufacturing and are presented with a bunch of graduate 'managers' that can't tell the difference between soldering and welding but can do a nice recital from Ovid, then we know we're fucked.

As for our democratic right to chuck Gove into the dustbin of history in 2015, then our alternative at present is Stephen Twigg MP, Gove's shadow in opposition. And guess what? Twigg's degree was achieved in PPE at Oxford (Balliol), and then straight into the political class. The only difference I can perceive between Gove and Twigg is that the latter was once president of the National Union of Students whereas Gove was president of the Oxford Union. Oh, and Gove is straight. Other than that...? 

GOVE'S VISION:

THIS...

...OR THIS?

YOU DECIDE...

They Think It's All Over - Well, It isn't...

00.01 hrs, Wednesday 6th June 2012: Post-Diamond Jubilee misery sets in throughout Britain...

If you thought it was all over, then think again

Some of the British people have had a "Right Royal Weekend". The euphoria of celebrating the fact that an old woman has managed to stay alive and keep the job that she can't be sacked from is over and done. Except it isn't. Here come the souvenirs, for starters. There'll be millions of commemoration plates and mugs; for different types of mugs to buy and 'cherish'. The DVDs will be out soon so we can listen - all over again - to fawning, sycophantic BBC hirelings telling us how remarkable the queen is by, er... remarking on that. We'll be able to buy it in 'Blu-Ray HD', so that the tiniest details of the back of celebrity heads can be discerned through the mirk and gloom of a sodden Thames day, sensibly sitting inside their barges getting pissed while all the time, this remarkable old lady stood up - on her own legs!

The hyperbolic vox pops on the other hand, now they were truly remarkable...

"Oooh! Did you see her? She was standing up!" Something that that observer had clearly never seen anyone do, even on a barge.

"Isn't she marvellous, at her age, in the cold!" Ignoring the fact that around twenty-five per cent of octogenarians in Britain live in fuel poverty in 2012 and are constantly "in the cold".

"I don't know why some people don't like her. I'd rather have the queen than a dictator!" That isn't the only choice, you arse.

"Without her on the throne, then the country would just fall apart!" Too late, dear; it has already.

"Look at Germany! They don't have a queen. Who'd want to be a German?" Hmmm. Well, right now, who wouldn't? Anyway, the Germans do have a queen - ours. Then again the Greeks have one of our princes. Maybe the whole Euro shambles is all our fault after all...

As post-jubilation depression descends on the country and Government sends the lucky few that have jobs back to work, there is a brief period of relative calm until the next outpouring of jingoistic, national pride - The 2012 European Football Championships! The worst thing that could have happened during the run up to, and the actuality of the jubilee celebration would have been if the queen had died. On the upside, it would have been a terrific week or so of national grief to bury some really crappy news about Osborne's latest misreading of...well, everything. 

No such luck with the Euro Footie, though. In the highly unlikely event of England winning, then I suppose there will have to another Thames pageant only this time with Wayne Rooney and John Terry in the big barge while Roy Hodgson still has to explain why he didn't select Rio Ferdinand. (He didn't, largely because Rio is now a lumbering old git that can hardly play nine minutes let alone ninety but the unspoken accusation is that Hodgson couldn't play Terry and Ferdinand together because Terry might call Rio the 'N' word, what with him being family and all.)

Of course, England won't win the Euros, which means that the Coalition will have to wait for the Olympics to restore National Pride, possibly even the 2012 games. 

Back at "The Palace", in the meantime, there will be rumblings. (BTW, why do they say "The Palace" when there's more than one in her property portfolio? Maybe they should just say "A Palace") Anyway, the scenario planning will have begun already...

"Will she make it to seventy-five years? She'll be almost one hundred years old, so an opportunity for a double jubilation stunt. Will she be gaga, though? Could she stand up on a barge? Will she be a widow? Could she do a jubilee thingy in black? Who might be Prime Minister in 2027? Surely not that ghastly Johnson buffoon? Or George Galloway? It's all too awful to contemplate. Drastic action is required. She must retire. Good pension scheme, nice retirement house (but better not in Scotland with all those independent types). Can't put Chazza on the throne, though. Not with Queen Camilla having to nip out for a Capstan Full Strength half way through the State Opening of Parliament. No. It'll have to be Wills (William, not WD & HO). That's a thought! Part of the programme will be a proper royal birth - maybe live on the BBC, with Nicholas Witchell and Jennie Bond manning the entonox? Schedule that for 2014, then. Then another in 2016. Then her majesty can retire at ninety, just as an example to all the lazy oiks in the working class that have been whining about having to work until they're sixty-eight. How can we pass over Chazza, though? Can't change the constitution that easily....Yah! Got it! Little motoring accident in some foreign city, perhaps?"

Don't think it couldn't happen.