Multiculturalism in Britain

I must admit this calendar is quite cute, but I cannot help but comment on how blatantly it attempts to be multi-cultural, and how from several points of view it does not achieve this fairly.

I can't even be bothered to comment on multi-culturalism any more. Anybody who thinks it is wonderful can come to live in London to test it out. Of course, some of the most vocal proponents of multi-culturalism loathe what they believe to be their own culture. And then there are those who have gotten into a first generation inter-cultural marriage, and even though this is 2008, they still think they are pioneers at the frontiers of global intercourse. Oh Dog, I can't Bear these backward people any more.

British Monetary Economy and Mortgage Market

James Crosby was probably paid for this report, and that's what makes it shocking. If he hasn't found anything new or surprising about why Britain has landed in this mess, it means that we might as well have had Orangutans running the Bank of England and the Treasury.

Well here's my simple explanation for people who cannot count, let alone care about money:

Britain exposed its monetary economic control to global financial markets. It was borrowing money from global supplies, for example to sell mortgages. It thought it was keeping control of its money supply, through the Bank of England, but it didn't count how these inflows of global money were affecting its money supply.

Oh yes, could an anti-globalist wish for anything better? The global financial system failed in one part of its machine, and the whole damn machine broke down. Britain was so proud of being part of a global machine. Well globalists don't tell you the downside of globalism, do they? The bigger the machine, the bigger the breakdown when just one thing goes wrong in the machine. A bit like a whole Space Shuttle blowing up because one person used the wrong type of washer when they were fitting a bolt.

So now Britain's monetary economy has been left to recover on its own, and all they can manage to say is that:

The global system broke. There are no quick fixes. We will have to live without the global machine and learn to be self-sufficient again. This will take at least two years.

To which I add:

Stop eating mortgages. In fact, stop eating and wasting so much food, otherwise the global food system will break down too!

I hope the wide-eyed kids who studied politics in university who work at Westminster for our busy, simple-minded, Members of Parliament can explain these simple facts of Globalization to their bosses:

Global isn't always Good. Global always is dangerous. Take the collapse in World Trade Organisation Doha round talks for example.

De-Globalization is best managed, and not left to chance, or worse, to War. Everybody needs to have a Plan B, and people who walk around saying Globalism is Good never seem to give us a Plan B.

Can David Cameron bring back Capital Punishment for Bike Crime

I am 8 days ahead of the fashion for having your bicycle stolen, because today, David Cameron also had his bicycle stolen, from in front of a supermarket.

Yes, to him, his bicycle was priceless. Mine was priceless too, and the priceless bit was counted in the tears, the grief, and is still being counted in the effort of finding its replacement. He is the future Prime Minister of Britain. He probably had insurance for it, and can afford to lose his bicycle more than I can, yet he feels upset about it. If there had been a camera filming me when I found out my bike was stolen, you would have seen how priceless a bicycle can be.

It should be discussed whether Capital Punishment should be re-introduced for Bicycle Theft. Since the Sixties the concept of having capital punishment has met resistance even for crimes of rape and murder. This has resulted in Western countries having prisons overflowing with drugs and obesity, even while indigenous tribes in Africa and Asia are dying of starvation and malnutrition.

I think it would be much easier to bring back capital punishment now, and especially for bicycle theft and crime. The mood is right. The failure to bring this subject into discussion in the Houses of Parliament will only result in yet more people being keen to adopt Sharia Law. Yes, even I could be converted to supporting Sharia Law, since I have had my bicycle stolen.

So there it is - we either spend the rest of our years suffering the social results of namby-pamby Sixties liberalism, while seeing more of society converting to Sharia law,

or we discuss bringing back Capital Punishment. After all, there are so many humane ways of execution nowadays - an overdose of Prozac, maybe? Or being given as much alcohol to drink as is necessary to become unconscious, before a quick capsule of cyanide is popped down the gullet of the heinous criminal.

Watch out, bicycle thieves. Give back your stolen bicycles, or be sentenced to death!

Guess Who is the new chair of the National Trust

As if he needs any more publicity. This man has more opinions than references, was an editor of The Economist at the height of Thatcherism, and because all newspapers are just as bad as each other, is now a columnist at the Guardian, as well as the Murdoch.

Yes, I first noticed his writing back in the Eighties because he launched a pro-dioxin tirade which was clearly ignorant both about Nature, Science, and the selfishness of Humanity.

With age he has become more moderate, and has been most noted for his focus on the architectural heritage of English Churches. Nonetheless, he seems to know nothing about life, but is one of those people who spews out words endlessly, even more quickly than he consumes them. Is it not fitting then that he has taken such a shine to bricks and mortar conservation, which until now has been achieved in isolation from cultural conservation?

The National Trust is so desperate for publicity that they think he will be a boon? The National Trust doesn't need publicity. It needs reality. It has been run by a host of affluent molly-coddled retired people who live in fantasy. Their fantasy has been to an olde worlde time of architecture and landscape. To a tourist, this is wonderful, compared to some other countries in the world. Indeed so. But where is the economy and culture of the people who lived with this architecture and landscape? Do you see it at Tesco, or on the M4, or in your office? Does it exist in London or Ludlow?

Back in the Eighties, Britain was accused of being like a giant Disney World. Never more so than now, when all its local culture has died out and been replaced by people who drive everywhere, watch TV or Youtube, and can't listen to anybody because of their Ipod.

What is the National Trust to do? Well, has Simon Jenkins grown up enough that he sees the error of his ways? Like the archetypal Tory Boy, when he was young and didn't care, he had no heart, and now that he is old and cares too much, he hasn't got a brain. For he will care and rhapsodize about the architecture of masonry, and because of his background in economics, he cannot see that the architecture of modern economics has killed the architecture of civilization and culture that needs to go with the masonry.

Boring Drab Weather and Entrenched Employment Protection

Anybody who came to England for the first time in 2006, when the El Nino was on full, would have thought they had stumbled on the perfect paradise to hide away if Global Warming was becoming true.

Well this summer, the El Nino and La Nina effects are gone at last, and the cloudy, unpredictable, sometimes chilly, grey and wet weather have reminded me that this is much the typical English summer. If you get a sunny day, you grab it, because it might be the last one you see for a long, long time.

A small local Chinese Grocery supermarket that opened up only a year ago is closing down and they say they're going back to China. Quelle surprise, as Julian Clary would say! It doesn't take people long to figure out now that there's no point in hanging around in England, when things are so much better at home.

Walking down one of the nearby major High Streets last week, I counted at least 5 shops that were closing down. Nearly every shop had a sale on, even though summer sales do not usually start until end of July.

The recession is on everyone's minds and lips. It may have taken 6 months longer for it to happen than in the USA, but it has gotten through to the man in the street. This time round, the property market went down before the retail business, and before the job market. I suppose that should have been predictable, since the property market has been the main engine of the UK economy over the last 6 years.

Oh yes, the job market is disappearing, and of course, the private sector has gone first. The public sector is protected by unions and endless employment law, and with a Labour Government in power, there is no chance that they will have to absorb cutbacks. Nonetheless, the unions will still fight for above inflation pay increases, even though they are lucky to have jobs, when all the people outside the public sector are losing theirs and have no new jobs to go to.

Yes, if there were an election in 6 months time, the Conservatives would sweep into power, and things would be sufficiently bad that they could probably do the one thing that nobody has dared to do for 30 years:

Remove enough employment protection so that it is quick and easy to remove unproductive and no longer required employees.

You see, despite all the reform from Thatcherism, this was never actually achieved in legislation. No, the only way to get rid of employees was to make them redundant, and this required organisations to re-structure themselves, or be slyly driven into bankruptcy, just to get rid of dead wood. The other ruses by which dead wood could be removed were much more roundabout, but became so common that they defined corporate business practice from the late Eighties to the early Noughties. They were of course, firstly Privatisation, and then secondly, Outsourcing.

Privatisation was essential to revitalising the European and especially the UK economy. Anyone from overseas who saw in the early Eighties, the European PTT (post and telecoms) organisations, for example, used to laugh their heads off at their backwardness, incompetence, inefficiency and lack of productivity.

Outsourcing was a far more ridiculous and devious solution to the need for organisational restructuring while keeping Seventies employment protection. It was also far less effective, because TUPE was upgraded to protect the rights of employees who were part of the organisation that was sold to an outsourcing company. What resulted was that dead wood ended up being transferred to an external outsourcing company, and only by extensive attrition and sidelining and eventual redundancies were useless and ineffective employees eventually removed from being paid to do nothing, or worse, being paid to do harm to the rest of their organisation.


None of the outsourcing would have been possible if Britain had not welcomed with open arms every illegal immigrant who was willing to work without being able to answer back to their boss in English. Yes, they took their pay, and didn't complain, which made them far more desirable than local employees. Of course, this eventually pissed off everyone in the country, because guess what? We have had a Labour Government since 1997, and this was what they were encouraging.

The French might only now be catching up with the UK, but the UK still has employment protection that defies economic sense. In this recession, I think the Tories when they take over the government, might be given the democratic power to remove the last nonsensical employment protection from the rulebooks. Is this a good thing? Yes, but it is sadly much too late. All that employment protection was the reason why British manufacturing stayed so uncompetitive that today, none of it is owned and managed by themselves, and what there is left of manufacturing survives because of factory robotics.

Well, robotics use oil, and human beings need physical work, so this is a silly state of affairs. This is the time to ask for a democratic mandate to remove obstructive employment protection laws. This can be done now because all the industry is gone, and because the welfare and social security system can be kept operational without the need to keep employees in jobs where they are producing nothing, or even less than nothing.

The Scarecrows of Whatfield Suffolk in the Global Food Economy

A week away from the internet, and most other media, is a refreshing joy which I intend to extend. But while the cat's here, let the mice seer.

As I wandered through the arable farmlands of Suffolk on my bicycle, I came into a village and was greeted by a large doll sitting in somebody's garden. It was brown-faced with woolly hair and probably 4 feet long, and I thought I had passed through a time warp into a gollywog-loving age.

As I progressed, I found that several more houses had large dolls in their front gardens, all in different clothing, constructions, and colours, in various attidunal poses and with props. I began to imagine that I had come upon some retirement village for an order of lunatic witches. One memorable exhibit had two dolls sitting on a tandem bike, but that memory is a reflection of the mental bias of a proper cyclist.

The village at this end was a few twee chocolate-box cottages, some with thatched roofs, evidently inhabited by affluent retired upper-middle class types. The more modern,dowdy, apparently council-built part of The Street was not participating in the doll display.

Eventually I came upon a doll of a publican with props such as a bar, keg, stool and towel. Everything became clear. There was a sign/advertisement:Make a scarecrow, any style and display it in your front garden, from 28 June onwards until this weekend.

For this was the weekend of the village fete, and surely enough, what remains of blue-rinse culture (for that generation has nearly all died off) was driving in cars to the village fete, on the green by the school, with the requisite marquee. It is wonderful to see a village where community exists at all, and see evidence of the Church of England helping it along.

But wonderment is seldom left alone on Love and the Planet. I could have just used a digital camera to copy some images of these modern scarecrows onto the Internet for some Americans to ape. This would be too common, too lazy, and not what blogs are about.

No, no, because, today Gordon Brown, our beloved and sage Prime Minister whom has been manager of the United Kingdom economy since 1997, finally told his country "to stop wasting food", and to "waste not want not". I shall not waste my vomit on his contribution (and that of many Guardian readers, I want to add) to the wasteful globalized economy that Britain has been party to, where all manner of waste has been sent to the dump, the tip, to landfill, and worst of all, to China and Bangladesh etcetera where they have permanently poisoned with pollution hitherto organic human ecosystems. So let me hurry along.

Scarecrows in Suffolk. Well.... my examination of the fields I saw in Suffolk revealed that they are 99% arable (no livestock), and most commonly growing, in order of quantity, wheat, oats, oilseed rape, broad beans, turnips/swedes/beets, potatoes. Almost all the fields are industrially farmed, with large fields worthy of tractor management. I never saw one person in any field I passed, although I passed at least one tractor on the road. Interestingly, by the end of June, the oilseed rape was already in finaly ripening stage - all the leaves were gone and the plants were down to taking what was left in the roots and stems and putting it into the seeds. Why is this interesting? Because with nearly half of the summer season (see my earlier posting for an understanding of how summer should obviously be defined according to day-length) left to go, vast acreages are already spurning the energy that reaches Britain from the sun.

Scarecrows? What crows? None of the fields had much sign of insect life or soil life. The broad beans were the most unblemished plants I have ever seen, with nary a blackfly upon them, let alone a ladybird. Most of the wheat fields appeared to be the same commercial seed variety. The hedgerows provided just enough tree cover to fool the ignorant into believing they were living in a conserved rural landscape. How many crows do you expect to find here?

So now Whatfield, which clearly was named after its Fields of Wheat, has perverted what was once a useful and necessary activity into a community-building aesthetically pleasing fun activity.

Waste not, want not? The wealthy and retired middle classes invaded the rural settings of England. They saw the rural economies transform into the Tesco Economic Model of production, distribution and consumption. But now the best that they can do (and believe me, most villages in England are ghostly shells compared to Whatfield) is to make dolls if ever the crows should come back.

People who don't know where food comes from, will never give a damn about saving it. It is considered rude to tell people not to waste food, because in Britain they consider wasting time to be a greater crime than wasting food. Yet all the time they save is spent sitting in their cars, or on their sofas, or on their office chairs, producing nothing, while consuming the earth.

So it is, but not so be it. For so shall it not be. Recession? Bring it on. A global economic system runs on a global financial system, and only a few people in the global financial system have already triggered a global banking crisis. Just a few farmers could trigger a national food crisis. Scarecrows were once the ultimate definition of food security. Now food security depends on global capital flows, GM seed, globally manufactured pesticides and fertilizers, and keeping the rest of Evolution at bay (lest a fungus, virus, bacteria or insect should suddenly arise that wipes out the mono-culture wheat or rice around the world faster than you can say "call an agricultural scientist").

UK Local Elections 2008 : Part 2

At last, the London Results are in. It took an extra day, because of all the high technology electricity consumption methods they were using to count the votes.

Is this worth blogging? So Ken Livingstone lost. Well, to his credit, at least he stepped down. To the Electoral System's credit, democracy in the UK is sufficiently intact that Ken Livingstone HAD to step down, because he lost. There is the difference between Britain and Zimbabwe.

And the next biggest news will have nothing to do with the Green Party, which achieved nothing by sporting a young bright Nice North London Luvvie. Yes, it is that Richard Barnbrook of the BNP, has through the system of Proportional Representation, gotten the first seat ever for the BNP in the London Assembly.

Well, the only problem with this is the amount of police security that will have to be paid for to protect him and the whole London Assembly process. Very Expensive for the taxpayer. For it is a fact that he will endure more ill will than Salmon Rushdie, as the mini-tornadoes of Anti-Fascism will be whipped up to stir the paranoia of the many sheep who have been indoctrinated with fear.

And how will any of this help the planet? None at all. Because it will distract everyone from Humanity's Duty of Care towards its Mother Earth. This is 2008, not 1938. There are twice as many people on the planet today, and the majority of them live in nations that can build the atom bomb. The danger to the world today has nothing to do with dangerous human ideas being taken up by the masses. The danger to the world today is that the masses are sleep walking into the future. A future of a Market Matrix in which notions of Democracy, Freedom, Consumer Choice, Humanism and Resource Appropriation are the hyphae that will smother the rest of the diversity of life species on this planet.

UK Local Elections 2008; Part 1

Here are the UK Local election results, except for the London Mayoral and Assembly Election (which will not be published for a few hours, but there is no need to compare Robert Mugabe with Ken Livingstone for they are so obviously similar).

Labour has died. Conservatives have risen. Liberal Democrats have sat on the fence.

Other rates of Change? Notice that the BNP is growing at twice the rate of the Green Party, and is the fastest growing party. Somebody will try to use this meaningless and misleading statistic at the next election to sell Labour Votes to the Guardian Readers Who Can't Do Maths.

Absolute numbers? Notice that the rates of Change are absolutely inconsequential. The combined size of the BNP and the Green Party make up less than 1% of the total number of councillors. Britain is not Zimbabwe. There is no such thing as radical change at an election, whether or not it is democratically legitimate.

Other useful notes:

1. The BNP was only ever useful for drumming up support for the Labour Party, but they barely serve that purpose any more.

2. The Green Party is still a joke in the UK, despite the enormous middle-class concern for Global Warming over the last few years.

3. Both parties are nothing but foils and distractions who have no effect, and will have no effect in my lifetime, on the real power or government in the United Kingdom.

And none of this is either good or bad. It is just a statement of calculation.

Biofools Day

Today is a sad day for the UK, for the Fools that run this Government still have allowed the RTFO to come into effect today, despites the fact that they know the world has a food shortage, and that biofuel crops have been carved out of virgin natural habitats.

Most of all, today is the ultimate Own Goal for the Green Movement, because the Monbiot ilk which pressed so hard for this type of sustainability, have been unable to halt what they set in motion.

The Green Movement of the Monbiot Wing have been obsessed with halting Climate Change. This obsession has been at the expense of protecting diminishing and precious Natural Habitats, which are suffering encroachment by the inexorable juggernaut of Human Development, regardless of Climate Change.

At no point in the history of this Green Nonsense did anybody ever suggest that people should give up their cars, give their roads, and walk, cycle, or ride a horse instead of switching to biofuels. No, for Man still Loves Cars, even though Cars are growing old and ugly. Cars are making the Planet, and all its creatures and living things great and small, extinct. Man is the worst lover that this Planet has ever had. It is time for the Planet to Dump Him.

The Planet must dump Man.
Yes, dump. Not re-use, or recycle. Dump Man.

Waiting for Ageism to die Out in the Old World

You might as well wait for God. The only Ism that will not grow old and die. In the New World, the battle against ageism is decades ahead of that in the Old World.

In Britain, the youth have always been favoured in employment, because:

- they are more likely to be physically fit (biological ageism)
- they are innocent and ignorant and no threat to their seniors (Machiavellian Ageism)
- they excite the hormones of those whom have not yet had their fill of youth. (sexist ageism)

But Free Tibet. Free Palestine. Free NHS Treatment Forever.

And most importantly,

Buy One Get One Free. Because even those who are all hearts and no brains can count up to one.

A Few of the Old own the World,
and they use Many of the Young
to keep them in the Lifestyles
to Which They are Accustomed.
Free The Economy of Machiavellian Ageism.