Trouble at the front

@vintagetrouble 

I’ve seen the future. The future is R&B. The future is Vintage Trouble. Just when you think that there is no longer any heart and soul in music along come the messiahs to deliver us from the wilderness of popular music.

Tonight Vintage Trouble played The Waterfront in Norwich and blew the audience away. Vintage Trouble is a beat combo that I feel sure is going to go places. Well they’ve already been places; since their memorable performance on Later With Jools Holland they seem to have been touring virtually non-stop. They play a mix of up tempo R&B, soulful ballads and good honest blues. The lead singer is hot, the bass player is oh so cool, the guitarist grinds and weeps while the Animal on the drums glues the outfit together. We were given nearly two hours of their distinctive sound delivered with enough energy to light up the whole of Norwich. You can’t keep still to Vintage Trouble; even the dead would get up and dance.

“Lord have mercy on my soul!”

The Blue Meanies are all scoundrels

As I’m sure you can imagine I have no truck with nationalists or patriots. I’m with Oscar on that one. The concept of a British identity is as impossible to define as a sense of Britishness is laughable. And, don’t get me started on the Bulldog-spirit or the retro-racist-speak from circa 1940. It’s all phoney. It has nothing to do with national identity or interests and everything to do with oppression.

It can never be said enough but I am no lover of capitalism. I don’t like it but accept that until a majority want it changed that’s the way it is going to be. Having said that if I had a choice between the partially-regulated (and one may say highly successful) capitalism of mainland Europe and the rape and pillage model that the Tories love, I know which one I’d plump for!

David Cameron is an even bigger tosser than I ever thought possible for effectively giving away any influence that we might have had in Europe. This is particularly foolish in my opinion because I’m convinced that the €uro will bounce back, aided by the new disciplines that will be put in place. This will put the €uro-zone countries in an even stronger position within the EU. The €uro-zone will be firmly in the EU driving seat. Cameron’s made us the fat smelly spotty lad that no one in the playground wants to play with. We are the Shit-Leg* of Europe

The company I work for is a manufacturer. Yes we are that rare commodity, a company that does engineering/manufacturing in the UK! Guess where the majority of our customers are? In the €uro-zone of course! If our economy is to survive and bounce back it’ll be companies like ours that will need to thrive. If a country doesn’t make things then it is lost. Even Switzerland has a manufacturing industry! The way the Tories are acting UK plc is rapidly going to become an offshore banking business, and nothing else; a place where only the rich can afford live permanently; a place where the non-rich servant-proles are bused in on a daily/weekly/monthly basis to do the menial tasks and are then sent ‘home’ again. If the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish have got any sense they’ll break away from the United Kingdom. For us English that aren’t millionaires I guess we’ll be forced to live in Calais and beyond. I suppose it could be worse, couldn’t it?

*a reference to a poor persecuted lad at my school all those years ago

Scrooge

So much of Dickens' writing has passed into everyday parlance and the term Scrooge is no exception. It has metamophosised from a noun to an adjective and is used to describe someone who is penny-pinching, miserly or a hater of Christmas. But is this the correct way to use Scrooge? Surely the story is about a repentant sinner therefore shouldn’t the emphasis be on the positive? So by calling someone a Scrooge you are saying that they have changed for the positive in your eyes. I commend this motion to the house.

People need to stand on their own two feet!

Amongst the narrow-minded rich and middle-classes there is a concept of the undeserving poor. The idea that those at the lower end of the income and wealth spectrum are all feckless and lazy continues to pre-occupy those that can only think in black and white. Sadly what most of them fail to grasp is that if we had some fairness in society, a level playing field that truly put us on the road to genuine equality, then less of what they see as government hand-outs would be necessary. Incidentally I've always thought that in the main 'those on benefits are living a life of luxury in abject splendour' is a myth that is as far from the truth than it could possibly be. And before you offer up examples about so-and-so who's never done a day’s work in their life base your utterances on pure fact rather than supposition.

 

If people are to work and ‘pay their way’ in the world society needs to get real. Those misinformed Daily Mail* readers et al need to understand that there are no quick fixes and that some fairness needs to be applied. There are far too many forelock-tugging cretins spouting things like “there’s plenty of jobs about, they just don’t want to work” etc. etc. For a start there are more unemployed people than jobs to go round and of the few jobs that there are so many are far too poorly paid. Society seems to accept employers exploiting many many workings with the same indifference with which it accepts the obscenely overpaid people at the top.

 

In principle I’m not agin the notion that people should provide for themselves economically. Although I would always be concerned that there were enough safeguards in society to provide for those unfortunate enough to not be capable of doing so. But if we are to enable more people to provide for themselves and not have to suffer the indignity of relying on the welfare state a very simple framework of provisions will need to be put in place. Those will include:

 

• Decent affordable housing for all (the most important foundation for a stable life-style)
• Affordable transport for all
• Free Numeracy and literary skills courses for adults
• Relevant training schemes for those looking for work
• A living wage as the very minimum for any job
• Enough jobs to go round

 

 

 

 

*the paper that supported Hitler

The knob Clarkson

We must thank Jeremy Clarkson. Not for his utterances but for awakening the spirit of right-minded people. Thousands complained to the BBC and Twitter went ballistic. This has to be good. The left need to learn from this. To win the hearts and minds of the majority we need to convey our reasoned arguments via every means possible, and in great numbers. We need to speak to the masses as if as one voice.

Don’t do that George

Tuesday’s Autumn Statement delivered by the chancellor the Right Honourable Knob-head George Osborne didn’t really come as much of a surprise to most right thinking people. The only astonishing thing is that he seems pig-headedly resolute to carry on with this failed strategy.

There is only one thing to say at a time like this and that’s Keynesianism!

Thinking out of the box

Up and down the land, in every pub, on every form of public transport, on radio phone-ins, in the workplace you hear the blinkered morons offering their opinions with a banal simplicity. They are the loud-mouthed brain-washed foot soldiers that halt progress; they stop this country from moving forward.

I don’t care much for ‘management speak’. I’m sure you know the sort of thing, the likes of, “run it up the flagpole and see who salutes” etc. etc. But there is one of these sayings that I would use in certain circumstances and that saying is, as the title of this post suggests, “thinking out of the box”.

“Thinking out of the box” is a commodity that is in very short supply. It is like ‘common sense’ which I find is rarely that common; an irony lost on most people.

Cause and effect are rarely linear. We live in a fractal world.

Narrow mindedness is an affliction that far too many people suffer from in this country. I'm sure you know the sort; the Neanderthal Sun reader, the middle-class Daily Mail* bigots; the sort of people who think all of the world's ills can be cured by a slogan. The sort of people who will blame the world's ills on health & safety, the smoking ban, immigrants, speed cameras, the EU, trade unions, the gay community, the CofE, the BBC, BB King, Doris Day, Matt Busby et al. They will be climate change deniers. They are people who would rather accept conspiracy theories and superstition over logic and learning. These people need to think out of the box. But how do we get them to do that?

*the paper that supported Hitler