Category Archives: Meanwhile in the UK

MEANWHILE IN THE UK

Meanwhile in the UK by Mick Hart, an expat Englishman living in Kaliningrad. A category of the blog expatkaliningrad.com

Meanwhile in the UK is a category of my blog expatkaliningrad.com. At its inception, I had fully intended it to be a minor category, allowing me to comment from time to time on UK current affairs but mainly to include innocuous pieces of a nostalgic or historical nature pertaining to life in the UK, possibly more as it was then than as it is now, and then along came coronavirus which, as we know, changed everything. At the time of writing (3 June 2020), thanks to coronavirus, this category would appear to contain as many if not more posts than some of  the categories that I had envisaged would be salient, with due deference to my Diary category (2019/2020) which, again influenced by coronavirus, has expanded through my ‘Diary of a Self-isolator’ articles, a series that focuses specifically on Covid-19 in the Kaliningrad region and how the legal rules and social obligations enacted here to better control the virus have impacted our daily life.

MEANWHILE in the UK contains too many entries to preview in this category post, but as of 3 June 2020, the contents of this category comprise the following articles, arranged chronologically:

Independence Day: Freedom from the EU

Talking Wollocks

Dad’s Army by Roger Corman

Being British is Bliss

Chastised & Locked Down

A Brother Calls

Claptrap ~ It’s Contagious!

Coronavirus & Rights: an Unholy Alliance

Coronavirus warning: Speech impediment could be new dastardly coronavirus symptom

I don’t believe in could anymore

Self-isolating/Lockdown: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

It’s a great time to be a hypochondriac

LOCKDOWN! ~ the game that everyone is talking about …

At least we can all die laughing

EXIT STRATEGY ~ a new bored game

How to tell The New Normal from your elbow

The Sorry State We Live In

Banners need a course in banners ~ and the rest

Clueless ~ a World Health Board Game

So, what are we to believe and how should we proceed?

Lockdown not working

[caption id="attachment_1339" align="alignnone" width="225"]Meanwhile in the UK Hello! Hello! Hello![/caption] [caption id="attachment_1228" align="alignnone" width="300"]UK LOCKDOWN new board game UK Lockdown ~ a new board game to take your mind off lockdown[/caption]

Meanwhile in the UK

I am aware that the tone and, indeed, the very composition of these pieces may not be to everybody’s taste. Quite obviously they are not supposed to be, so I shall not waste anybody’s time pretending that I feel in the least bit sorry about that. England is a great country ~ and the other chunks attached to it are not that bad either ~ BUT … (could this be an acronym for Britain Undermined Totally? Or is the only thing missing …TOCK?). He sang, didn’t he, ‘Let me take you by the hand I’ll lead you through the streets of London’. Well, yes, mainly London but also almost any and every UK city and town. Still, as the man who never deserved the Nobel Prize in Literature said (no, I am not referring to Obama, that was the Nobel Peace Prize, or Noble Appeasing Prize or something like that ~ but if the hoody fits, so to speak), ‘Times they are a-changing’. Let’s hope so, because for the UK at this present moment in time it is very much Paul McCartney, ‘Yesterday …’

Father Christmas doing something on a chimney pot

2023 UK Woke Hits an All Time High!

Bing Crosby’s White Christmas Symphony No. 9 in Morris Minor

20 December 2023 ~ 2023 UK Woke Hits an All Time High!

It was cold in April. It was cold in May. Come to think of it, it was cold in the UK, not to mention wet, from April to September. I was staying with a friend for some of this time, where I only had the gas heating on for two hours a day. Even so, the gas bill, together with electricity, ie one light bulb ~ my friend is a tight old sod ~ clocked up about 200 quid per month! I know, I know, it’s all ‘a certain president’s fault’.

We were in Aldi’s supermarket, the only place we dare shop nowadays without taking out a mortgage, when we heard a woman (I think ‘it’ was a woman. You never can tell these days.) behind us at the checkout complaining bitterly about the hike in food costs. Suddenly, my brother Joss, who never takes with him or buys a carrier bag at the supermarket (he’s saving his pocket, not the planet) but always transports his groceries in one of those open-ended, partially broken, sad and saggy inadequate boxes kicking around in supermarkets, on hearing the woman’s complaints, slaps the box upon his head and proceeds to vituperate: “I know! It’s all so terrible in this country. I’m going to hide in this cardboard box. Maybe they’ll go away.” He did actually say, ‘they’ll all go away’. I looked around the supermarket, and I think I know what he meant. However, we don’t know for certain what he meant, because with a cardboard box upon his head, he could have said virtually anything and could have been almost anybody. He could have rowed up the village brook in an inflatable rubber thingy with a Royal Navy escort, declared he came from the land of Cardboard Bongo and, consulting his list of rights and benefits, demanded of the police that they chauffeur him to the nearest hotel. None of your bed and breakfast, mind; anything less than 5-star treatment would degrade the red-carpet welcome.

Anyway, as the box in question had an open end, I twizzled it around on Joss’s head, an action which would have certainly turned his toupee back to front had it not been stuck down with UHU. Now the box was a  TV set, so Joss decided to read the news. “Here is the news from the BBC. Whatever it is, it’s all P….’s fault!”

Before leaving the supermarket, I apologised to the people gathered at the checkout for having mentioned Mr Ps name numerous times in the space of two minutes, but, showing them the roubles in my wallet, went on to explain that we have an arrangement with him, viz every time we mention his name in Britain, he pays us a hundred roubles.

I’m not one for confessions or for making and signing statements, but I must confess and state simultaneously that I cannot remember the last time I had so much fun in a supermarket, certainly not recently and possibly not since a childhood friend and I were nabbed in one by a store detective. I can see him now, this stocky, cocky, store detective, striding up behind us, just as we were about to clear checkout, his face wreathed in triumph. He thought he had caught a couple of shoplifters, but we were nothing of the sort. So, he had to let us go, never knowing how close he had come to revealing the identity of the notorious local stock shifters.

Before adopting a moral stance, you must make allowance for the fact that in those days, before the advent of Play Station and when enslavement to the smartphone was just a twinkle in Bill Gates’ eyes, we had, as the expression goes, to make our own entertainment, and how we used to do this in the supermarket was to amble around from shelf to shelf surreptitiously shifting things from one place to another. It was, indeed, a rewarding sight to behold jars of Marmite amongst the saucepans and a tin of baked beans or two sitting next to the Brillo pads. Just think what fun could be had today, now supermarkets sell condoms. The possibilities are endless (I’m sure there’s a Freudian reference here?).

But don’t you talk about supermarkets! Shocked, I was, and I said so to Mavis. Didn’t I Mavis? Didn’t I say I was shocked!  And it is shocking, not to mention inexcusable (But, of course, it’s all that ‘certain president’s’ fault!) — Britain’s escalation in food prices: Weetabix £4 a packet! A bottle of brown sauce £3.30! A packet of crisps £1.50 … Well, you know for certain you’re a hopeless old fart when you carry on like this. But what about the price of beer! If I carry on like this, I’ll wear out my exclamation key! There, did you see that! There it goes again!

2023 UK Woke Hits an All Time High!

My brother Joss won’t drink in certain pubs and in certain pubs he can’t because he’s barred. He won’t drink in pubs where he knows that the beer is priced at over a fiver a pint and in pubs where he doesn’t know and is taken unawares, he always complains. He also complains about the quality of the beer, ergo poor quality, and always rather loudly.

“It’s alright,” I said in a resigned voice, when the offended look on the barmaid’s face caught my eye and her eye mine (Were we wearing eye patches?), “I’m used to being ashamed of him”.

Summer in the UK

Since summer in the UK was such an abysmal washout, it enabled me to get down to some serious … beer drinking? That too, but I was going to say stuff shifting. In order to accomplish this gargantuan feat, I had to  resort to eBay. I hadn’t used the eBay platform for quite some time, but I soon got back into the swing of things, once I had complained my way through their two-step verification system.

Two-step verification, indeed! I told that globalist, that pseudo-leftist Gaters. “Gaters,” I said, I call him that, you know, “Gaters, what’s it all about then, ay, this two-step verification? If you ask me, it’s more globalist quick step than two step: the swiftness of the feet deceives the arse you’re kicking and whilst we are feeling the pain, you’ve snatched our mobile phone numbers and locked your global trackers onto our locations. It’s all grist to the surveillance mill, the keeping tabs on us all, the inverted 1984, where it’s not the fascists we have to watch out for, at least not in the traditional sense, but the fascistic sanctimonious, pseudo-liberal lefties led by the usual suspects (those well-known US rich families (really my boy, my boy) and their friends in the Davos set).  

Of course, I could have gone on saying this until the proverbial sheep came home (‘Merrr, I’ve had my jab!’), but as you, me and the gateposts know, the gateposts we have in parliament, it would not have made a ha’peth, or rather billions of quid’s worth, of difference, because already the globalist mob is no doubt plotting their next Plandemic and rubbing their hands in anticipation of the monstrous profits to come.  However, I would have said something to that effect had I not been deplatformed first, labelled a far-right extremist, been banned from tweeting on Twatter and suffered the near misfortune of having my bank account nobbled, as they tried to do with Nigel Farage. Now that wasn’t two-step verification, it was a step in the wrong direction! The goons who pulled that stunt were soon up on their feet doing the shithouse shuffle, as good old Nigel proved again, he is just too strong and too astute for the pseudo-libs to take on.

Woke Watch PC UK!

WOKE WATCH UK!

You know, being a conspiracy theorist and a far-right extremist is not as easy as might be imagined. It would be a lot less difficult to go with the flow, go down to Dover harbour with a bog roll in my hand and beg the third world and its wife (don’t want to be labelled sexist), please can I wipe your arses before the taxpayer-funded police chauffeur you to your waiting hotels and shower you with benefits. What a terribly ‘wacist’ thing to say!

I thought it a bit racist, although not entirely unapplicable, when I heard a bloke down Wetherspoons say … I think he was bloke?  (Once you could tell a bloke from a gal by the tattoos that he was sporting, but now that women have taken to tats and to shrapnel shoved in their lips and snouts, it’s difficult to determine who has and who hasn’t the meat and two veg. (By the way, how’s your memory? Do you remember Ena Shrapnel? Give me the hairnet any day (Corrr!) rather than tats and bolts.) Anyway, getting back to the point, which is? Well,  I heard this manly man, who may or may not have been a man, say: “Turn that telly off! If I wanted to watch the coonmercials, I would have stayed at home!”

Ah! there goes the theme tune to Love Thy Neighbour.

Britain’s social engineering programme has advanced quite spectacularly over the past five years. The Tories have excelled themselves. They have stolen a march on the Liebour party, beating them at their own game, and flushed with their success are leading with the initiative in sexual engineering. The adverts are a case in point. The next time you go to the pub, presuming that you still go to the pub with beer the price it is, see how many men you can spot who look as though together they have recently won the lottery.

Where’s Frankie Howard and Larry Grayson when you need them most? Now it’s no longer a Catholic sin, let’s hope that they are having fun bumming around in heaven. 

They’ve won the lottery!!

My particular favourite sexual engineering advert is the one where the les goes into the shop, says something to the girl behind the counter, the girl behind the counter replies, and the les, who misunderstands her, says, “I’m sorry, I already have a girlfriend!” And the nice black man behind her, who doesn’t look like a mugger at all and besides is a British citizen, titters away as though he knows that the advert he will star in next will see him relishing Sunday lunch around the family’s middle-class dining table.

And what is it about British TV, I hear you ask? If Billy Cotton was still around he would not be shouting ‘Wakey! Wakey’ so much as ‘Wokey! Wokey!’

I threw away my telly many years ago, long before British broadcasting sank beneath the surface of degradation. Did you Mike? You do surprise me. And it wasn’t because of the BBC licence fee, as so much joy can be had from receiving their threatening letters. But this summer, probably because it was so inhospitable that we spent more time inside, the telly at somebody else’s house could not always be avoided. I saw, for example, a segment or two (and that was quite enough) of the Ukraine Vision Song Contest, some of The King’s Coronation on the Royalty Abolitionist Channel and couldn’t really miss the seeming perpetuality of big butch pony-tailed ladies charging around the football pitch, who seem to have no qualms at all about muscling in on what little remains of Britain’s emasculated working-class males’ last bastion of blokeyness.

I also allowed myself the wonder of watching  the news on the odd occasion, the wonder being whatever happened to the impartiality ethic? Time was when the news anchor (now re-spelt with a capital ‘W’) would simply read the news. Now they no longer report, they lead, invent and manipulate and for nebulous liberal ends. However, every unpaid licence fee has a silver lining, which is that as long as you know it’s not really the news, it can be entertaining.

For example, have you heard the one about the fire service chap who allegedly suffered a mental breakdown. He was interviewed in his home, looking all wan and lachrymose, by a young ~ I think he was male ~ reporter, who really did overdo it slightly on the ‘I’ve got to look so serious’ level. Perhaps he works for the BBC, where woke is a serious business.

Every now and again, between solemn interludes of conversation and OTT serious looks, the camera would pan, zoom in and focus on a broken mirror on the sitting-room wall, which looked, by my experience, as if someone had put their fist through it. Gritty symbolic stuff, ay! But try to remember that this is the ‘news’, or rather the news is what it professes to be, not a dramatised documentary.

Given the nature of the job, it is common knowledge that firemen suffer breakdowns (note the traditional use of the proper word ‘firemen’). Heaven knows how these men contend with their lot. In the course of duty, they are subject to unthinkable scenes of horror and human tragedy. Hardly surprising, therefore, that even the strongest men crack (Now, now, it’s not what you’re thinking!). But it was not danger or tragedy, tragedy in the accepted sense, or so we were asked to believe, that had caused this gentleman’s breakdown. According to the ‘news’, which was heavily biased in tone and format, his illness had been brought about by his having been ignored when repeatedly calling out the fire service for its alleged culture of systemic sexism.

2023 UK Woke Hits an All Time High!

WTF?! Call me old-fashioned (You Old Fart, you!), but my long-held belief has been that first, centre and foremost, the duty of the fire service is to put out fires and save lives. I certainly don’t recall anything in my primary school books, Janet and John (now Abdul and Lola), about sexist firemen running amuck with their choppers in their hands. I do remember the Village People sliding down a greasy pole not looking like chaps and in nothing but chaps, but that was the 1970s, when men were men and poofs were poofs, and never the twain would meet (so we were led to believe). But a fire service that lets off damp squibs for the sake of claiming compensation, why you’ll be asking me next to believe that public money is actually spent on funding wokist causes, for example something as unimaginably silly as black and pink police associations! It’s Monty Python’s UK Circus!

Ho!Ho!Ho! Hark! Which Santa is that who is coming down the chimney. I hope he’s wearing a condom. Sorry about that, and everything … around me … all over the UK … but as Frank Zappa once famously said, “I can outrage anybody, if they want to be outraged.”

Don’t try this at home, or if you live in Brighton!

More recently, I outraged myself ~ and bear in mind, please, that ‘outraged myself’ is not the same as ‘outed myself’. For years I have been at the forefront of the Smartphone Resistance League, so successfully I might add that my avoidance of the smartphone earnt me this saintly sobriquet: ‘The last man on Earth to own a mobile phone’.

Thus, it was with great sorrow and a distinctly uneasy sense that I was not only letting myself down but anti-technocrats everywhere, when I allowed myself to be dragged, proverbially kicking and screaming, along to the mobile phone shop, where, with a heaviness in my heart beyond the expression of indescribable, I signed myself away to that … to that, terrible, terrible mobile thing!

“Yet something else,” I grumbled, “to cart around in your pocket.” It will be difficult fitting it in [“It’s so big you’ve got to grin to get it in!” ~ do you remember the Wagon Wheels advert?], with all the street survival kit you need in Britain today ~ CS gas cannister, stun gun, beam-me-out-of-the-21st-century flip-top radio, mugger’s alley cloak of invisibility etc etc. Thank heavens my stab- and bullet-proof vest has pockets!

“This ‘aint very Christmasy is it?! Let’s see what’s on the other channel.”

A party-political broadcast on behalf of you can put your cross where you like, but it won’t stop mongrelisation.

Wherever you go in life, even in somebody else’s, there’s always a heckler. But what the heck, it might only be a linguistic device! Anyway, whilst you and your family are sitting around a blazing Christmas fire, with coal you’ve stolen from the next-door neighbours, wearing party hats, wondering why, and cracking your nuts. I shall be pulling my own cracker and … That’s odd? What is? Everything. I thought I just heard someone sing, “I wish it could be Christmas every day.” Those hats! Those nuts! Pulling your own cracker! For eternity! No fear. Ha! Ha! I can see the Christmas TV adverts now: More black than white and oh so extremely gay.

Right, bugger all that, I’m off to make a cup of tea. Ginger, the cat, is squinting at me, but only with his right eye. I think he wants a monachal for Christmas. This is something that’s easily fixed. It’s what Bing Crosby is dreaming of that isn’t.

Image attributions
Santa on a chimney: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Santa-Claus-on-a-Chimney/87236.html
Men with television heads: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Men-with-television-heads/71285.html
Vintage exotic dancer: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Vintage-exotic-dancer/73821.html
Football: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Soccer-ball-with-shadow-vector-drawing/14654.html
Men shaking hands:  https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Business-People-Shaking-Hands-Vector/2306.html
Merry Christmas: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Retro-Christmas-Text-Banner/87299.html

Copyright © 2018-2023 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.

The Weather Forecast ~ Britain a Nice Place to Live on the Telly

Britain a Nice Place to Live on the Telly

It never rains but it pours!

24 August 2023 ~ Britain a nice place to live on the telly

As coronavirus begins to look more and more like an unsolved crime, leaving many people wondering if they should really have had those jabs, and now that the conflict in Ukraine has passed its media sell-by date, thanks mainly to the British public’s notorious attention-span deficit, the climate-warming bandwagon has taken to the road again, strapped to which is a dubious sidecar, artificial intelligence. Billed by UK media as the greatest threat to humanity since Britain’s extended opening hours (licensed premises or the country’s borders?), an arguably greater threat to us all than artificial intelligence must surely be our national failure to use the intelligence with which we were born when defining our relationship with truth and what we see on the telly.

Britain a nice place to live on the telly

You might ask what I, the Chairman of the TV Temperance Society, is doing sitting in front of the telly, and you would be right to do so. The answer is simple: During my recent tour of duty here in the UK, my predicament is one in which I have found myself exposed, and not infrequently, to the TV set of a friend, who, for reasons only known to himself, insists on ‘catching the news’.

Catching the news in the UK is a little like catching coronavirus, catching the adverts is worse, the only difference being that those we never believed or trusted before the onset of coronavirus and anti-Brexit hype, and whom we believe and trust a whole lot less in hindsight,  have no desire to protect us from these twin pestilences with a vaccine false or otherwise. Thus, when we watch the news, or watch anything on British TV, it is our own immune system, our God-given common sense, in which we must rely, not Big Pharma.

I must say (why?) that having not ‘watched telly’ for a considerable period of time, 17 years in fact, from a purely academic perspective, the experience is quite an interesting one. For example, take the conmercials.

As well as attempting to persuade us to buy something and/or fork out for a service that we do not need and would better do without, TV adverts have become an integral part of the media’s, and by default the British Government’s, perpetual drive to convince us that all is hunky dory; that the UK has at last become the happy, harmonic multicultural melting pot that Enoch Powell predicted it could never be. To a lesser extent, yet creeping through the woke back door left open, LGBTQ is also ideologically embedded in British TV advertising, suggesting that all to a man are firmly behind the movement … so to speak.

Fundamentally, there is nothing wrong with this, in fact it is essential, dramatically essential, that however disingenuous the product they are pushing, we are willing to buy into it. As it happens (thank you Jim!), we really have no choice. Having made our multicultural bed without the permission of due democratic process, it is the job of our string-pulled political classes to make sure that we quietly lie in it … innit!

Britain a Nice Place to Live on the Telly

So, there is an awful lot more foreigners floating around in the adverts than there was when I last watched television 17 years ago. The people pecking order is blacks first, then Asians and here and there the odd oriental, which, again, is fine, in the sense that, like it or not, this is where we are at in modern-day Britain, give or take a few Albanians and also half of Ukraine.

At a cursory glance, for example over the top of your mobile phone, the inference could be that it is a red letter and rainbow day for the concept of inclusivity. But look again; all is not well. The British-on-paper-only folk, as distinct from Britons by lineage, are not stereotyped by characteristics universally associated with who they are and where they hail from, all of which would be jolly liberal if not for the ironic fact that the TV remodelled version is more like ‘us’ than we are ourselves.

Becoming ‘more like us’ is a strange, strangely controversial and also amusing phenomenon, why? Because nobody on our TV adverts and nobody’s lifestyle as portrayed on TV bears the slightest resemblance to ‘us’ ~ to our lifestyles, to what we think, to what we say and the way we feel, least of all to what we think and feel about our reconstituted, repackaged country. 

Britain a nice place to live on the telly

TV adverts would have us believe, and it is make-believe pure and simple, that everyone in the UK inhabits a star-spangled realm where, regardless of background and ethnicity, we are middle-class, upwardly mobile, swanking it up in des-res properties (warm and with the lights all blaring, and don’t forget incessantly grinning, irrespective of soaring utility costs ), united by shared cultural values and generally ‘’avin’ it large” together. Naturally unnaturally, this televised illusion of what and who as a nation we are is complete and utter fiction, but when all is said and done the fiction is a nice one.

‘Nice’ is something that in my absence, British TV has almost mastered. Not entirely, however, as it continues to churn out sleazy, violent, tacky programmes, front and centre of which are a plethora of films and dramas which, in the days before life went virtual, would never have got past the censor. But cut through the sleaze and primeval viciousness, the woke blancmange and PC tripe, and the overall impression is (please sing along together now) ‘we all live in a rainbow submarine’. It is finely tuned, perfectly balanced, well-adjusted and ~ this is the all-important bit ~ effortlessly inclusive.

This kudos, or a fair proportion of it, must be ascribed to the hand-picked newsreaders and the sterling performance they give. My favourites, but then I am bias because of my personal, historic connections with Norwich, are those nice people who present Anglia Regional News. A more affable bunch of English people you would be very hard-pushed to find, especially off the telly ~ think needle in a haystack. How could you not help warm to them, this rare and endangered species?

Admittedly, it does not harm Norwich any that its geographic location puts a fair distance between it and some of our country’s less salubrious cities and that the Norfolk and Suffolk regions are some of the finest examples of Englishness the nation has yet to lose. Thus, give or take the odd exception ~  since the country as a whole  is nowhere near as nice as the make-believe one served up on the box and certainly not as safe and stable ~ the news from rural regions can often be more palatable than the horror seeping daily out from those manky NO-GO Areas, which, we are officially told, do not exist in Britain. Stand by to ‘pull the other one’!

Britain a Nice Place to Live

Another feather in the media’s illusory cap (Do you recognise it? It hangs down limply with bells on.) are, without question, the weather forecasters. This little band of interluders, are such a welcome breath of fresh air ~ even when it isn’t windy ~ that they can make the weather in Britain seem nice when in fact it has not stopped piddling with rain since summer was announced.

Torrential rain, gale-force winds, perpetually overcast skies, temperatures like the arctic, however bad it may be, our presenters keep on smiling. Land heaves, earthquakes, asteroid apocalypse, whatever the state of play (Look up! It’s a nuclear strike!) the face of the British weather forecaster always wears a smile.

And this is as right as alright can be, because in a country the social stability of which grows more precarious day by day, a country in which it is virtually impossible to stay in a hotel without sharing a room with an Albanian drug dealer, a country where the political classes are more obsessed with woke than ensuring safety on the streets, a country in which its police force says ‘blame it on your politicians’, a country where no one dare switch on the heating since the cost of gas and electric has spiralled out of control, a country where millions of pounds are squandered on financing futile conflicts in faraway lands which are none of its business, especially whilst legacy Britons sleep rough on our streets and the NHS is imploding due to egregious immigration indifference, more than ever before we, as a nation, are in dire need of solace, comfort and reassurance from the traction-gaining realisation that it is all going terribly wrong and that if we continue on the present trajectory it can only get much worse.

Britain a Nice Place to Live

If television can work a miracle and make our country feel ‘nice’, then no matter how it does it, the BBC could honestly say, ~ if it remembers how to honestly say ~ that the risk of not paying your TV licence is worth the money it costs them to keep sending investigation letters that the world and its wife ignores.

I myself believe, however, that apart from being a very bad habit, lack of funds to do anything else and the exhaustion that naturally accrues from the daily lot of a wage slave, the flawed mentality of those who incessantly watch the box and take it all as gospel lies somewhere between ‘Don’t touch that dial!’ and TV’s shining, happy people.

Nice to see you, to see you nice, but anything more than that is so far from the truth as to make it powder-keg dangerous.

Here comes the intermission! Best go and make a cup of tea.

Other posts
Don’t Kill Cash
Have a good Victory Day, Russia!
Lies & Democracy: Are they now the same thing?
BLM Riots vs Capitol Media Reporting

Image attributions:
UK outline map: http://www.clker.com/clipart-14533.html {note this image has been edited/modified]
Worried Man: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Worried-man-clip-art/88534.html
Sad Little Cloud: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Sad-little-cloud/45177.html
Smiling rain cloud: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Smiling-rainy-cloud/55542.html
Thunderbolt: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Vector-illustration-of-cloud-with-thunderbolt-weather-icon/26840.html
Emoticon with Two Thumbs Up: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Awesome-face-smiley/36092.html
Whirlpool: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Whirlpool-silhouette/77889.html
Mushroom Cloud: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Whirlpool-silhouette/77889.html
People ride banana boat: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/People-ride-banana-boat/88891.html
Wolfman: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Wolf-in-a-human-body-vector-image/6105.html
Imploring Silhouette: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Imploring-silhouette/79967.html

Copyright © 2018-2023 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.

Don’t Kill Cash

Don’t Kill Cash!

Don’t Let Them Get Away with It!

Don’t Kill Cash. They have tried terrifying and jabbing you into submission, they have weaponized immigration and now the banks are putting the boot in.

24 July 2023 ~ Don’t Let Them Kill Cash

When the news broke about Farage having been turned into a martyr by the pseudo-liberal banking system, I kept an open mind. It was only when the BBC, that organisation to which you are forced to pay a licensing fee for stuff you do not want to see or hear, the same organisation for which Jimmy Saville used to work, was mentioned in the same breath as the bank in question and soon afterwards a flurry of responses appeared in the liberal-left controlled media refuting Nigel’s claim that he had been politically shafted, and the usual suspects on social media and the establishment media lackies claiming that Farage’s accounts had been closed as his wealth had dropped below a certain threshold, that I began to grow suspicious.

Then, on 10 July, Farage announces on Twatter that he has proof that the bank lied to him and that he, the man who had single-handedly wrested us from the grasping clutches of the Evil Union, was polishing up his crusade whistle in order to expose the machinations of a woke-oriented banking system, the same system, the same people, behind the covert operation to replace cash completely in favour of electronic transactions, which, as every schoolboy knows, is not just a means of financial control but a giant stride towards totalitarian tyranny, the perfect model, in fact, for tracking, surveillance, threat and extortion.

OTT? Think Justin Turdeau and the control template he gave to his globalist chums, when the only way he could stop his country’s patriotic truckers, whose gallant siege exposed him for what he was ~ a very horrible Turdeau ~ was to weaponise the banks.

Woke Watch PC UK!

WOKE WATCH UK!

Don’t Kill Cash!

I hadn’t heard of the Don’t Kill Cash campaign until I tuned into Farage’s bank debacle; in fact, I think a great many other people were most likely oblivious to it ~ so thank you the globalist banking system for victimising Nigel Farage and bringing this latest plot of yours to  everyone’s attention.

It’s bad enough to be incessantly told that we live in a democratic society where freedom of speech is sacrosanct, when every time we open out mouths we have to say in a whisper, whilst taking a backwards glance, “We’re not supposed to say that!” Imagine what it will be like if the globalist banking system gets you by the balls (LGBTQ Z It Others + ??? WTF included, where physically applicable.).

Don’t Kill Cash

‘I’m sorry we’ve closed your account because you did not “take a knee” (although we, the bank, will give you one!); because you resisted the globalist jab; because you used the expression bum bandit; because you complained about the State-facilitated third-world invasion; because you don’t believe a word the UK media says about Ukraine; because you won’t roll over and accept socially engineered multiculturalism, which would not be so bad if it worked, but it doesn’t; because you are not a fan of woke; because you like the expression ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’; because you suspect that the climate-change industry is just that ~ an industry; because you believe that the UK establishment is using ‘unstoppable immigration’ as an excuse to rejoining the Evil Union; because you oppose woke at every level; because you want to see law and order restored on the streets; because you ardently support the abolition of political brainwashing in the British education system; because you don’t want to pay the BBC license fee because the BBC is politically biased; because you cannot bear to watch television anymore, especially the commercials; because you don’t want to pay £4 for a packet of breakfast cereal, £3.90 for a bottle of brown sauce and thousands of pounds to greedy, profiteering utility companies; and, most of all, because you love the country you had and hate the mess that it has become. Er, did I forget to mention because up every glove-puppet UK politician you can see the hand of the super-rich?’

“I’m sorry, we’ve closed your bank account because you refused to wear a Zelensky T-shirt!”

“But I’m wearing Ukrainian flag-coloured underpants, and I changed my avatar to ‘I’ll stand where I’m told too’, rather than use my brain cell!”

“That’s not good enough! We need to see evidence of total compliance!”

Don’t KIll Cash campaign

The GB News Don’t Kill Cash campaign is said to be one of the fastest-growing campaigns in UK history.

‘Whether it’s confusing parking apps, educating children about money, giving a quid to a busker or leaving a tip in a restaurant, the rise of the surveillance society or just your local pub suddenly insisting on card payments only, more and more people are getting in touch to tell us why they’re infuriated by ‘cashless’ Britain and support our stand.’ ~ GB News Don’t Kill Cash campaign

Don’t let them get away with it! Add your name to the Don’t Kill Cash petition today: https://www.gbnews.com/cash

It is gratifying to see the BBC and other confederates of the lefty media not so much climbing down from their high-ground perches as being knocked off them yet again by Nigel Farage. Even more gratifying to hear Nigel Farage say that he is not going to let it rest there. The media, certain factions of it, is changing its underwear faster every minute as it struggles to free itself from the straightjacket inevitability of having to issue a formal apology to Nigel Farage, following its disingenous kneejerk response to Farage’s victimisation.

The following quotes have been taken from the Reform Party email letter.

Extracts from a newsletter from Nigel Farage as UK Honary President of the political party Reform UK
“Without a bank account you are a non-person in the digital age. Decent people are living in fear. I am going to fight this all the way.

Hundreds of thousands more people live in fear of cancel culture. Whether in their jobs or on social media, they might also begin to fight back against woke bullying. In fact millions of people around the country have had enough of being told what they can and can’t say.

The old mainstream parties have betrayed us. It is because of them that our most basic freedoms are being destroyed.

Labour and the Tories had no intention of controlling immigration or delivering on Brexit.  I despise what they have done to our country.

Reform UK are now the only party who are prepared to fight for our freedom and I am proud to be our party’s Honorary President. “

The task ahead is even bigger than Brexit. It is only just beginning, and we have an enormous opportunity to take our country back. I’m standing with you as I have always done, against an establishment determined to tear our country down. Together, I know we can Make Britain Great.”

Link to REFORM UK

😮 Woke UK Banks Need to be More Accountable

Image attributions:
Bank building: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Bank-vector-clip-art/6595.html
Devils’ face: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Devil-head-vector-clip-art/15602.html
No Exit Sign: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/No-exit-vector-sign/10341.html

Copyright © 2018-2023 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.

Woke UK Banks

Woke UK Banks Need to be More Accountable

Nigel Farage Warns Don’t Bank on it!

10 July 2023 ~ Woke UK Banks Need to be More Accountable

You don’t have to look very far in the UK to find another pitiful example of Woke, or political correctness as it used to be known. The media landscape has more examples dotted around its internet sites and corporate TV outlets than there are small boats of smiling immigrants disembarking on Dover’s shores. But you may have been surprised to learn that Nigel Farage, no less, has been singled out for special treatment by the western globalist banking cartel, which has withdrawn his banking facilities.

Woke Watch PC UK!

WOKE WATCH UK!

Now, picking on a high-profile figure like Nigel Farage at a time when trust in the UK political establishment is at an all-time low is probably not the smartest thing to do. Of course, we cannot say without a shadow of a doubt that Farage’s banking difficulties are ideologically motivated, but when you delve a little deeper suspicion begins to accrue. And if the smoke is not without fire, then someone in the world of banking has really gone and shot themselves in their ideological hoof.

Woke UK Banks

According to Mr Farage, the bank, with whom he had been a customer for years, suddenly and without explanation, closed down his account. So go and open an account elsewhere. Well, this is what he tried to do, but the first bank he approached refused him, the second bank refused him and so on and so on and so on … (Nigel Farage YouTube).

Katie Hopkins, who is very good at grasping the nettle of truth, because she has learnt the hard way, reviews the ‘noise around Farage’ in the context of her own experience and the experience of others like her (Katie Hopkins, YouTube).

It is obvious from Katie’s videos and the commentary that accompanies them that there is a firm and growing belief among UK legacy Britons, who are far from happy with the ‘liberal’ status quo, that the UK’s answer to the Chicago Outfit, the super-rich elite, syndicates with other globalist lynchpins ~  political establishment + corporate media + partisan judiciary + banking institutions ~ to exert their collective power, and whilst they casually talk the talk of democracy subvert it to its lowest level by robbing those individuals of whom they are afraid of the right to freedom of speech and by depriving and dispossessing them of their socio-economic existence.

Katie Hopkins, who asserts that she was turned into a ‘non-person’ by the machinations of the powers that be, acknowledges the many unsung heroes of Britain’s growing Resistance, the ordinary people with no public voice, who have fallen foul of the cancel culturists and their ideological programme.

Woke UK Banks Need to be More Accountable

So how credible is it that Nigel Farage woke up one morning and found himself in bed with Katie and Tommy Robinson? Providing the closing of his accounts are ideologically motivated, which by all accounts ~ and closed accounts ~ it appears they may have been, then sadly the answer is incontrovertibly. We know stranger things happen at sea. Just think of the Royal Navy escorting rubber dinghy after rubber dinghy daily into Dover.

Now, as everybody knows, none more so than the liberal left, Nigel Farage is not a man to provoke. He is the man who took on the EU octopus and beat it single handedly. Look out naughty banks! Another irony is that closing down his bank account could not have come at a less propitious moment for the woke-obsessed establishment.

Breaking News!

For hot on the heels of the Farage story, came the sensational revelation that a clergyman living in Yorkshire had suffered a similar fate. The vicar’s (There’s something so delightfully English about ‘vicar’, don’t you think?) building society whipped away its welcome mat from beneath his reverence’s feet simply because he was straight talking ~ perhaps because he is straight? Believing naively in the corny old mantra that he lived in the land of free speech ~ hadn’t the political establishment and BBC been telling him this for years? ~ instead of holding back like many people do (We are not supposed to say that, are we?), he criticised the building society of which he had been a client for years, for promoting gender issues.

Woke UK Banks

For this unforgiveable sin, he was promptly given the bumsrush. He was stripped of his pieces of plastic. The bank pulled down his accounts and, finding himself in Queer Street, a very unpleasant place to be, almost as bad as Radio 3, he was given a proper defrocking, if only in the financial sense. When the Mail Online latched onto this, it and its readers went ballistic, and then, as usual, they made some tea and quietly went back to the crossword.

Seven across: Every shirt has a silver lining, even a lifted shirt.

The dual plights of Mr Farage and the vicar of Wake-up-Call, serve to remind us yet again of the financial tsars central role in pushing the pseudo-liberal agenda. 

It is bad enough that all of us are expected to change our avatars to the colours of the Ukrainian flag, when most of us have no idea where exactly Ukraine is or what we are changing our avatars for. What next? Compulsory membership of the Fudge Packers’ Union and mandatory Gay Pride jabs? Thank heavens for the prophesy that Pride comes before a fall and that still strong countries like Russia are determined to make a stand, acting as a bulwark against the rising tide of Western woke.

As the political elite and banking institutions push us towards a cashless society to achieve their tripartite goal of surveillance, tracking and control, the daunting realisation that it is no longer politicians but super-rich globalist bankers who run our western countries and who are sufficiciently confident and arrogant enough to go way beyond cancelling culture to rubbing you out completely, is a sobering thought indeed.

The time is coming fast when the only way to thrive and prosper in UK Plc is to sit on a sunbed for a week, wrap yourself in a blanket, grab the latest hi-tech phone, jump an inflatable dinghy and steam across the channel with the aid of the Royal Navy to be given a nice, free comfortable room in a top UK hotel.

No need to hurry; no need to rush; no need to have a bank account as the trip is all-inclusive. And the offer is ending no time soon.

Copyright © 2018-2023 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.

Oh Hokey Wokey Cokey
Woke and Hypocrisy: it really is God Save the King!
Woke Watch PC UK!
Colston Woke Statue 4 Scratch the Itch of History
Keep Woke out of Football!

Image attributions
Credit card: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Golden-Credit-Card-Vector/2843.html
Parrot: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Stylized-Parrot/44695.html

Further reading
British building society admits closing accounts …
Banks free speech blacklisted accounts …

King Charles III Big Day

Charles III Big Day Sees Rural England go Flagtastic

In England’s Green and Pleasant Land

6 May 2023 ~ Charles III Big Day Sees Rural England go Flagtastic

It wasn’t my intention to be in England during the coronation, even though I naturally received a personal invitation from the Palace to attend. I would have accepted, but I am rather busy at the moment sifting and sorting junk, or as I am often wont to call it, ‘highly desirable antiques and collectables’.

To tell the truth, as there is neither a telly nor connection to the internet in the gaff where I am staying, if it hadn’t been for BBC Radio 4 and the sudden inexplicable festooning of houses with Union Jacks and bunting, I may have been none the wiser. What’s that you say? Am I joking about my personal invitation?

Charles III Big Day Sees Rural England go Flagtastic

It has to be said that in spite of the British media’s best efforts to mar the historic occasion with programmes and articles devoted to the as usual tedious and typically predictable leftist bleating to abolish the monarchy, it was most satisfying and inspiring as we winged our way through the last bastion of Englishness, the English countryside, to behold and admire the enduring support for the good old English monarchy.

Whilst liberal lefties throughout the land will not be satisfied until they have ousted the monarchy and installed in its place something sun-tanned of suspect gender preferably wrapped in a blanket and have stuffed the remaining rooms of Buckingham Palace with 8 million-pounds-a-day grinning illegal migrants (How much does the monarchy cost us? I’ve heard it said a penny a day.) at which point in our country’s decline, we will be forced to rename Buckingham Palace by changing the ‘B’ to an ‘F’, the miserable machinations of the country’s self-culture loathers pale feebly into insignificance against the inspiring sight of flags and bunting streaming across the length and breadth of heritage-conscious rural England.

The Royal Mint, pandering to the liberal myth of harmonic multiculturalism, may have slapped something really ridiculous on one of their 50 pence coins ~ a piece of woke for your pocket ~ but the real currency of a united kingdom is unequivocally that which is visibly and tangibly expressed in the pride that we take in flying our flag and its relevance to our heriditary monarchy.

Yes, it is a pity that allegedly ‘King Charles has chosen the colours of the Ukrainian flag for his coronation’, (or so it has been Twattered) but the mentally stable amongst us (and there are still some left in the UK, honestly!) are quite capable of dismissing such folly as a 50-pence-piece worth of public relations. No doubt in the fulness of time it will also be revealed for the consumption of the liberal masses that throughout his coronation his royal highness’s royal underpants were LGBT monogrammed.

Whilst there are some things in life that do not bear thinking about, others exhilarate. Feast your eyes on the following photographs snapped by yours truly as I travelled recently through a small village in the heart of north Bedfordshire. What they could not fit on a 50 pence piece, they should inscribe on a note of more value.

Have a good Coronation celebration weekend. God Save the King! God save us all!

Charles III Big Day Flags
Charles III Big Day Flags in Bedfordshire
Bunting for UK Coronation
Bush with Coronation bunting
Celebrating Charles III Big Day
Historic Barn Historic Coronation Flag
Union Jack on Charles III Big Day

A linked post

Woke and Hypocrisy: God Save the King!!

Copyright © 2018-2023 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.

Lies and Democracy are they now the same thing?

Lies and Democracy are they now the same thing?

Wake up! It’s not the coffee you’re smelling!

14 March 2023 ~ Lies and Democracy are they now the same thing?

When I left the UK for Kaliningrad in 2018, friends, acquaintances and business associates, but not family, who have ceased to be surprised by anything I do, responded to my decision in various ways, often extreme. I chronicled their reactions in a previous post: Moving to Russia from the UK.

When I returned to the UK after a three-year hiatus, some months after the (what shall we call it?) situation in Ukraine, I fully expected to meet with a barrage of acrimony lend leased from US propaganda and regurgitated by the UK media but was pleasantly surprised to find that the gauntlet I was prepared to run never materialised.

Brits who knew me, or knew of me, and where I now hailed from, were either conducting themselves with diplomacy or UK media had moved their mindset on ~ as it easily does ~ away from Ukraine, which in terms of audience captivation was yesterday’s news, to such earth-shattering speculations as does Prince Harry have a rogue allegiance gene passed down from his mother’s side of the family?

Does Prince Harry have a rogue allegiance gene passed down from his mother’s side of the family?

Ukraine was still in the limelight, still is in the limelight, as the fate of the globalist West depends on  winning its war of attrition, but by the time I arrived in the UK it had already been put on the backburner to make way for more Woke and to annoy ‘far-right fascists’, ie the vast majority of white Brits who are genuinely concerned about the future of their country, with daily news and statistics regarding the state- and Sorryarse-sponsored cross-Channel immigrant invasion.

I agree that the UK’s immigration catastrophe is far more significant to my fellow countrymen than throwing taxpayers’ money away on a conflict which, if the western powers that control the UK government so desired, they could end as quickly as they started it. But UK politicians are in no hurry to do that in the same way that they are in no hurry to stop illegal immigration. Why the UK must lay out the red carpet for thousands upon thousands of Channel-taxied migrants and pay more than seven-million pounds a day to keep them in a style to which they are not accustomed, ie free bed and lodging in 5-star hotels (Ouch!), is beyond most people’s grasp, with the exception of the politically enlightened who understand only too well the moral and financial corruption with which the plan is funded. But why should we listen to them? According to the UK media, people who rebut pseudo-liberal machinations are not only right-wing fascists they are also conspiracy theorists.

Everything has a sell-by-date and even the British media, as skilled as it is in whipping up frenzies, cannot be expected to sustain an interest in Ukraine for long when other issues, like the immigration one, can be used just as effectively to foment controversy, up the sale of newspapers and harvest more clicks on their websites with which to con their advertisers. That’s why they call it the ‘corporate media’ folks.

Lies and Democracy and Social Media Spooks

The muted response from my fellow Brits to the situation in Ukraine when I last returned to England was in stark contrast to the overarching rabidity that broke loose in February 2022 at the time it was announced that Russia had taken the initiative out of the hands of the West. For UK corporate media this was ‘breaking news’, whereas on liberal-state compliant social media it was more like breaking wind, albeit on tornado scale.

Lies and Democracy spread by social media

Within minutes, not hours, my wife’s Facebook account was inundated with messages. Some of these, although panic fuelled and completely out of proportion to the events unfolding, were genuine messages, messages of concern: ‘Are you alright?’ But the majority, the mainstay, were liberal lefty, frithy-frothy and within this category, at the very epicentre, within the liberal eye of the storm, particularly and typically rabid and virulent.

Indeed, the repercussions were so electrifying that on the morning after the start of the mission in Ukraine, I wondered why I had started it? As the day went on, the vitriol on my wife’s Facebook account steadily accreted. I spent the entire morning batting back the incoming. At first it was all good fun. I can outrage anyone who wants to be outraged. But, after a while, I realised that if I was going to respond to every rant and rave, I would need to employ a PA (Personal Assistant) or at least an SS (Shit Stirrer).

Within three days of CSM (Crisis Social Media), during which more avatars were changed to funny little flags than had been changed to silly little rainbows two or three months earlier, and more underpants changed, I imagine, through the exigencies of cloned rage-fulfiment, my wife made the decision, before Mr P could ban Facebook, to close her Arsebook account. You know the expression, ‘you can have too much of a good thing’, well, three days of winding up the ranters was enough. It had to be brought to an end. There are more important things to do in life than play the liberal-left’s division game.

Nevertheless, I have to say that I cannot remember a time in recent history when I have enjoyed myself so much. In many respects I felt sorry for my fellow countrygenders. I could not fathom, and I still cannot fathom, why so many people on a tiny island are so eager to believe everything and anything that the media tells them, particularly as those same people on that same small island had been well and truly led up the garden path and thereabouts shafted by the self-same media about a crisis that they, the media, had in considerable part created ~ I am referring, of course, to coronabollocks.

You would have thought by now that the UK media would be the most distrusted corporate conglomerate this side of a fairy tale and as for the governments they represent, who would want to believe or trust either Liebour or the Cons?

The Labour/Conservative lies and democracy process is like a seesaw: up and down but nothng changes.

See Saw Nobody’s Sure
If Brits will have a New Master
Democracy is a cross in a box
But it’s always a liberal Disaster

Think Brexit. Why did most of the UK, real legacy Britons, not those with pieces of paper in their sweaty mits that say they are British, vote to get out of the EU? Rhetorical question: because they were and are sick of mass immigration and EU implemented Woke. And what did the British people get after Brexit? ~ mass illegal immigration on an unprecedented scale and more Woke than can be spread on a field during a rural shit-spreading season.

And whilst we are it, why would you trust and did you trust the Liebour-Con pact before Brexit? Who asked you if you wanted multiculturalism? Who asked you if wanted widespread Woke?  And that’s just for starters. The urban shit-spreading season started long ago and is a lot fouler and smellier than anything that can be thrown up and about in the sticks.

So, for years, specifically since the crowning of Tony Blair (and wouldn’t you like to do just that!) your political parties, your government, your managed democracy, your corporate media have been lying to you, so why should you believe what they say about Ukraine?

The original Ukraine story (though not highly original) is this:

“The United States reaffirms its unwavering support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity within its internationally recognized borders, extending to its territorial waters. The U.S.-Ukraine relationship serves as a cornerstone for security, democracy, and human rights in Ukraine and the broader region.” ~ U.S. Department of State 😉

Obviously, given their ulterior motives, the US’ ‘unwavering support for … sovereignity and territorial integrity’ and ‘human rights [think cancel Russian culture]’ does not extend to Russia or to any other counry for that matter that is wise enough to reject the culture-crushing embrace of psuedo-liberal neo-imperialism.

The Brits, led by the Yanks and with poor old Western Europe dragged kicking and whining into the fray, and Turdeau joining in just because of what he is ~ a nasty piece of pseudo-liberal narcissism ~  cranked up the propaganda bandwagon and all aboard they went. First there was Vietnam, then Iraq, then Yugoslavia, then Afghanistan (for a comprehensive list see: US Interventions ) … so why should we believe that Ukraine is any different?

The US and its hangers-on are constantly flitting around the world looking for ‘places to liberate’. They are constantly bringing ‘democracy’ to people and to places who are doing quite nicely without it, thank you, at least without that liberal brand of democracy that has snake-oil written all over it. Moreover, they do about as much good as Christian missionaries did running around in Africa back in the 19th century; in fact they do much worse. Sometimes, often in fact, they let their intentions slip, exposing themselves like novice flashers. For example, when that little phrase pops out of the open flies of democracy ‘intervention and regime change’. In other words, we are going to intervene in the private affairs of sovereign countries and install a liberal puppet. Watch out! There’s a lot of them about!

In the old days, chaps like Napoleon would meet their adversaries on a piece of land somewhere, and there they would slog it out; for Biden and the Brits Ukraine is such a field.

It’s not cricket, old boy. No, it certainly isn’t. What it is though, is this:

“The West wants to divide Russia into different entities in order to … put them under its control.” [The West’s plans for the division of Russia are set out on paper, Putin said – RIA Novosti, 26.02.2023]

And in case you are determined at any cost not to believe what commons sense tells you, stop social media twiddling (leftist bias) get out onto the internet and cast your eyes around. There are plenty of political commentators, political analysts, journalists, authors, geo-political institutes and just plain old Joe Public out there who agree with President Putin and many of those in agreement are citizens of the West. ‘Huh! All far-right extremists and fascists I expect!’ {An Independent My Arse reader.}

Being all liberal lefty on liberal lefty social media is all well and bad if all you are interested in is mutual backslapping or worse, but if you really want to know what real people think you have to broaden your horizons. Do you remember your father telling you that? Sorry? Oh, I forgot, we don’t have fathers anymore, least not in the UK.

Lies and Democracy and the spin they put on your money

So, read nothing, view nothing, but ask yourself this simple question: When in the history of recent conflict has the West spearheaded by the US poured so much money into one country in order to (now don’t laugh) underwrite its continued democracy?

Billions of dollars in the United States are being diverted from homeland projects into the holey bucket that is Ukraine. In the UK, whose special place in the special relationship ensures that they always follow, millions of pounds have been and are being squandered on Ukraine, depriving UK citizens of much-needed funding for causes closer to home.

How many hospital wings could we build with the money that has been siphoned off? How many hospital staff could we entice to stay by increasing wages? How much money could have been devoted to cancer research and so on? Can the UK really afford this massive taxpayer drain on its already crumbling economy? If we are not careful, we will not have enough money left to pay for those hotel suites that migrants have been promised as they are ferried in VIP-fashion to a liberal fanfare at the Port of Dover. “Ooh, lovely tolerant Britain!”

The UK's Ministry for Lost and Bogus Causes

Questions beget questions. Here are some more you should ask yourself and then your political classes: How many more jabs for coronavirus? How many more immigrants? How much more Woke? How low the standard of living? How high the cost of living? How much more state-funded terrorism? How much more Black Lives Matter? How much more LGBT? How many more knife-ridden streets? How much more anti-social behaviour? How much more Stasi police force? How much more propaganda. How many lies, how many lies, how many lies, lies, lies …? 

Don’t forget to register to vote? Why?

The long nose of the UK's lies

Image attributions:

Muck spreading: Image by Pete from Pixabay: https://pixabay.com/photos/manure-muck-spreader-field-6135606/
Tornado: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Vector-clip-art-of-weather-forecast-color-symbol-for-tornado/18973.html
Seesaw: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Kids-on-a-seesaw/75311.html
Plaque: https://www.clipartmax.com/download/m2H7Z5m2N4m2A0i8_brass-plaque-clipart-brass-plaque-clipart/
Pinocchio: https://www.clipartmax.com/middle/m2i8H7Z5d3i8d3A0_cartoon-filii-clipart-pinocchio-and-jiminy-cricket/ <img src=”https://www.clipartmax.com/png/middle/53-537576_cartoon-filii-clipart-pinocchio-and-jiminy-cricket.png” alt=”Cartoon Filii Clipart – Pinocchio And Jiminy Cricket@clipartmax.com“>

Copyright © 2018-2023 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.

Bedford Embankment

Bedford more to like than not

A brief stay in Bedford UK

Published: 22 November 2022 ~ Bedford more to like than not

Rumours that I haven’t posted much to my blog recently have invoked theories ranging from a nasty reaction to not-working sanctions to being fitted up by the British unjudicial system for saying things that are not allowed. But that wasn’t me. Clue: Marvin Gaye, he ‘Heard it through the Grape Vine’. Whatever the rumours, they are greatly exaggerated.

 Alas, the explanation is far more mundane: I’ve been on holiday in the UK.

“A likely story,” says someone who accuses everyone else of conspiracy theories. “I suppose you will be telling us next that you had no access to the internet!”

Well, as it happens, where I was staying, no.

Travelling package-style by Hart’s Tours, which would have been a successful company had it not been inaugurated on the eve of the coronavirus experiment, the exclusive hotel in which I would be staying is renowned for containing more antiques than Britain’s got migrants (er, possibly not), but what it has not got is the internet. No point in taking my laptop, thought I; just extra weight to carry.

Verily, no internet connection and also no TV is an excellent way of detoxifying yourself from the insurgency of cyberspace and the brain-numbing mumbo jumbo thrust wilfully up you by mainstream media. If you are one of those, or even just one of those, who have become enslaved to your iPhone and are concerned about being controlled and tracked on a daily basis by the slippery Silicon Valley Mob, I recommend when visiting England that you opt for Towlson Towers. As a no frills hotel, complete with a host of truly irritating inconveniences, such as 40 watt bulbs where 100 watts should be, cold and cold running water, as many steps in unusual places as one could ever want to trip up, over and down and an invigorating absence of any form of heating (a luxury extra at this establishment even before Britain’s energy crisis took hold), TTs is the place.

My return to the UK did not take me to London: “Love the history, Fawlty, can’t stand the Woke!” No, I was headed to Bedford, a market town in Bedfordshire, of which C.F. Farrar wrote in his excellent book Old Bedford nothing happened for five hundred years. A lot did happen in the many years preceding the five hundred when nothing happened and a lot has happened since, but nothing for the better. Bedford town centre, like every other town and city in the UK, is a sad and sorry reminder of just how radically and irreparably our liberal masters have dismantled and infected what once, without a shadow of a doubt, was one of the greatest countries, if not the greatest country, the world has ever known.

Old Bedford by CF Farrar

If you buy into or simply pay lip service, because you are told to do so, so you think you must, to the political mantras about ‘enrichment’ and ‘vibrancy’ and all the other embarrassing slogans attached to the back of multiculturalism, which are rattled out like an old tin can tied to a frightened cat’s tail, then go ahead and love it! But for the majority, there is no doubt that there is more to be avoided in modern British society than there is to be enjoyed.

But this is not to single Bedford out. Many white British who live in the surrounding villages are very quick to assert, and are adamant with it, that they ‘never go into the towns!’ wherever those towns may be.

Acknowledging, therefore, the relevance of the old song lyrics, ‘Things ‘aint what they used to be’, let’s briefly escape from the modern-day tragedy of Bedford, representative as it is of the plight and prescient social upheaval that awaits the UK in the not-too-distant future, and dip a little into its past ~ into the real English beginnings and their making of the character of the place.

Bedford more to like than not

Bedford is a market town and the historic county town of Bedfordshire. Its name is said to derive from an amalgamation of the name of a Saxon chief called Beda and a ford that crossed the River Great Ouse. Offa of Mercia, the Anglo-Saxon king, was buried in Bedford in 796 but is probably no longer there, as his tomb on the banks of the Great River Ouse most likely ensured that he upped and floated away.

Bedford had a castle, which was constructed under the auspices of Hugh de Beauchamp, within 20 years of the Norman Conquest in 1066. “This was the time when it all went wrong!” a friend of mine is fond of saying. He is not necessarily or at least exclusively referring to Bedford itself, of which a lot went wrong in more recent times. He means to imply that it all went wrong with England. “It’s the fault of those bloody Normans!” he likes to cry, whenever we see a rabbit or driving along through country lanes espy a church with a Norman tower.

For Bedford Castle, it all went wrong when a robber baron, Sir Fulke de Breauté (there were a lot of robber barons about in those days), fatally overestimated not only his own importance and invincibility but the impregnability of his castle. 

He believed that by kidnapping a judge (as you do) and incarcerating him within his castle, he would prevent the Crown from taking the castle away from him. Instead, he succeeded in getting the castle sieged, bombarded, breached and blown up and a number of people killed, before he was eventually brought to ground himself and exiled to a terrible place where nobody wanted to go, not even in the middle-ages, across the Channel to France!

Catle Mound Bedford

Today, all that remains of what reputedly was a redoubtable fortification, Bedford Castle, is a large grassy mound. “A great place to sit and eat chips,” someone wrote in a tourist review. I would add to that, “a great place to sit and eat chips whilst pondering British history.”

Bedford’s Castle Mound is still worth visiting as it is situated in what is easily the most attractive quarter of the town, The Embankment. Getting to it from the town centre enables you to say hello to the town bridge and opposite the Swan Hotel, a classic 18th century edifice built by the Duke of Bedford in 1794-1796, that is to say that the Duke of Bedford commissioned it to be built. I am not suggesting that he was out there at the end of the 18th century with a trowel in one hand and a stone in the other.

Swan Hotel Bedford

The Swan Hotel
As hotels go, you are not going to get anything as quintessentially 18th century than this outside of Oundle or Stamford! The current Swan Hotel ~ there was an earlier one ~ had the Duke of Bedford commission the well-known London architect Henry Holland to design and build it between 1794~1796. If you stand on the forecourt, you will notice, I know you will, that contrary to Georgian architectural paradigms, the hotel is asymmetrical. The right-hand gate is missing. It was sacrificed in the 1880s to make way for the The Embankment road, which dissected the hotel’s gardens. Inside the hotel is a curious mix of old Georgian and modern swank.

Had you arrived in Bedford before the 1970s, after appreciating the regality of the Swan you would next have been delighted by the magnificent sight of a large and impressive building of neo-Gothic persuasion. The Town and Country Club, as once had been its function and by which it had been known, was, alas, swept away with numerous other buildings of exemplary historical importance, as former Bedford historian Richard Wildman agonises, during a time in which town planning in Britain was the vandalistic equivalent of social engineering today.

Bedford Town & Country Club demolished in 1970s
Bedford’s Town & Country Club. One of many historic Bedford buildings destroyed in the 60s and 70s

Bedford is by no means the only town in the British Isles that bears the scars of the 1960s’ anti-heritage culture, but, as a leaf through any of Richard Wildman’s pictorial history books show, it has the dubious distinction of listing among the legions of the architecturally damned and demolished more than its fair share of victims.

Bedford more to like than not

So, we pass swiftly on and, as we do, we cannot help admiring the beautifully landscaped and typically English character of the scene as it unfolds. The Great River Ouse meandering calmly away from the city centre, leaving behind lack-lustre Kempston and no-go Queen’s Park, transports you to one of those timeless English vistas replete with sleepy meadows, avenues of trees, formal gardens with floral Victorian beddings, posh rowing clubs, happy swans and geese and some of the finest examples of Gothic Revivalist architecture that you could ever wish to behold in the residential category.

Bedford moe to like than not The Embankment
Swans and Canada Goose on Bedford river

The wealth, prosperity, order, security and dignity all of which was once England presents itself in the large, often vast, red-brick houses and imposing villas that sweep along the Embankment and radiate into the streets beyond. Built in the Gothic Revivalist style at the end of the 19th century, these infinitely desirable properties, with their impressive facades of carved stone, half-timbered gables and deep bay windows, are deceptively more extensive than even the grand scale of their stately frontages suggests. I won’t gild the lily by saying that they seem to go on forever, but some of them tend to go on considerably further than one might expect.

The Embankment Hotel Bedford Christmas Day 2019

Above: The Embankment Hotel
Unmissable, thanks to its wonderful and evocative medieval-style half-timbered façade, the Embankment Hotel and Restaurant occupies a prime place overlooking Bedford’s Embankment Promenade and the River Great Ouse. The 1891-built hotel boasts that it has no ‘stuffy resident’s bar’, which is all well and good, but what it does have, especially on a Friday and Saturday night, is a very noisy public bar, which does tend to dilute the otherwise genteel image. In its defence, however, try finding a pub in Bedford on a Friday or Saturday night that does not resemble a cattle market! Go there in the week!

The following photographs were taken on a bright, late October morning in 2022. We perambulated with the best of them along the Embankment Prom and then crossed over to the meadows on the other side of the river via the landmark Victorian Suspension Bridge.

Walking the dog along Bedford river
One barks the other bites!
Bedford more to like than not
Happiness is obviously an arse that fits!
Mick Hart and Dr Towlson Bedford Syuspension Bridge October 2022
Bedford Suspension Bridge
Bedford more to loke than not, Bedford history
Bedford Suspension Bridge with river view
John Webster plaque 1888 Bedford Suspension Bridge

Suspension Bridge
Bedford Suspension Bridge, a landmark architectural feature, was constructed in 1888. It provides access from The Embankment to Mill Meadows. The bridge was designed by John James Webster, the remit being to allow the passage of sailing boats.

Plaque commemorating opening of Bedford Suspension Bridge
Bedford more to like than not view down the river
View from the Suspension Bridge towards the town centre
Bedford Butterfly Bridge photographed by Mick Hart
Butterfly Bridge
Butterfly Bridge Bedford plaque

Butterfly Bridge
And please, don’t ask why do they call it Butterfly Bridge?! It opened in 1997 and was designed by Wilkinson Eyre Architects, reputedly as a late 20th century/early 21st century equivalent to Webster’s 1888 Suspension Bridge, each bridge landmarking the end and beginning of their respective centuries.

Bedford Butterfly Bridge

Unless you live in a vacuum, believing that this is how it is, how it was and always will be, me and my mobile phone, it should not be incredibly difficult to imagine what scenes of elegance were once to be found as the Edwardian upper classes strutted their decorous stuff along the walk at Bedford Embankment. And if you cannot imagine, use it as an excuse to call in at the Three Cups public house on Newnham Street, where not only will you find an exciting, changing range of delicious British real ales but also framed black and white photographs of Bedford Embankment as it looked at the turn of the 20th century.

The Three Cups pub, Bedford, October 2022
The Three Cups, Newnham Street, Bedford. Real Ales & Atmosphere!
Halloween the Three Cups, Bedford, 2022
Halloween evening the Three Cups Bedford

Above: A rare sight. The locals of the Three Cups looking more normal than usual on Halloween

Check out the style of the chaps in their striped blazers and boater hats (I am referring now to the pictures on the walls!) and the ladies of quality in their crisp, light dresses or perfectly turned-out dress suits, nipped in at the waist, embellished with lace and other feminine attributes. Yes, there really was a time when the people of the British Isles were not as they are today, less better dressed than a boat load of Navy-escorted grinning migrants.

Bedford, it’s not a bad place. Put it on your visiting list.

More about Bedford

War Memorial, Embankment, Bedford
WWII Commemorative park seat
War Memorial, Embankment, Beford

The Embankment War Memorial
The War Memorial on Bedford’s Riverside Walk was sculpted by Charles S Jagger and is situated opposite Rothsay Road. Made from Portland Stone and marble, it commemorates the fallen in three wars: the First World War, Second World War and Korean War.

The Boer War Monument
The impressive and detailed monument that stands in front of the Swan Hotel, Bedford, surmounted by an infantryman in full battledress, pays tribute to the 237 Bedfordshire men who lost their lives in the Boer War, 1899-1902.

Boer War monument, Bedford
Jon Bunyan statue, Bedford

John Bunyan statue
Every town is known for someone. In Bedford, it’s mainly John Bunyan, thanks to the large bronze statue of him that stands at the crossroads at the top of Bedford High Street. John Bunyan was about in the mid-to-late 17th century. He was an English Christian writer and dissenter, an occupation that saw him committed to Bedford County Gaol on two occasions. Apart from being locked up, Bunyan was, of course, famous for having authored the Christian allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress, most of which, it seems, was written during the two periods when he was languishing in gaol. The book was eventually published in 1678. This monumental work of literature, which has never been out of print and has been translated into more than 200 languages, influenced many a literary genius, among them Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. Bunyan’s Bedford connections and life history are celebrated in the John Bunyan Museum in Beford. The statue is magnificent; the museum a source of serious historical reflection. {photo credit: Simon Speed}

Glenn Miller bustCorn Exchange, Bedford
Glenn Miller

Glenn Miller
The legendary American big band leader, Glenn Miller, was billeted in Bedford, to be more precise in Bedfordshire in Milton Ernest Hall. He took his last fateful flight from Twinwood Airfield, now home to the biggest swing music festival in the UK. A bronze bust of Miller occupies pride of place in a niche in the wall of Bedford Corn Exchange, which was built and opened in 1874, still functions as a concert venue and plays host to the annual Bedford Beer Festival.

Bedford Corn Exchange
Bedford Corn Exchange
Cardington Sheds, Bedford

Cardington and the airships
Just outside of Bedford lies the old Cardington airbase, what is left of it. Like every other square foot in the UK, it has been covered in concrete and bricks. Because that is what the UK needs: more houses for more people! Nevertheless, the Cardington Sheds still dominant the skyline; the massive hangars in which the great airships of the early 20th century were constructed. It was from these ‘sheds’ that the fated, experimental R101 was hauled out to make its maiden voyage to France, where it crashed killing 48 passengers and crew on board. The remains of the dead are buried in a mass grave in Cardington Cemetery. A monument in the church opposite provides a roll of honour, naming those who lost their lives in this historic misadventure.

John Howard statue, Bedford

John Howard
Most people who are not as thick as two short planks (innit?) will know that the large bronze statue standing at the crossroads to Bedford High Street is John Bunyan. But who is that other chap overlooking the weekly market, holding his face in his right hand and staring pensively down at the ground? That’s Bedford’s second celebrity, the eighteenth-century philanthropist and prison-conditions reformer, John Howard, cast in bronze by the celebrated, if not occasionally controversial, sculptor, Sir Alfred Gilbert, creator of the Eros statue in Piccadilly Circus, London. Whenever I look at the pose and expression of John Howard, I cannot help but think that having watched over the centre of Bedford since 1894, he has accumulated serious doubts as to whether his reformation work was after all a misappropriation of time and effort. He is most likely silently advocating, “Bring back the birch!”. He also has a statue in Ukraine ~ not many people know that!

The Higgins Art Gallery and Museum
A short walk from Bedford Embankment in the area known as the Castle Quarter, The Higgins Art Gallery and Museum, known as The Higgins after Bedford’s prominent Higgin’s family and its connection with the museum site, is the culmination of a six-million-pound project that effectively united three cultural venues: Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford Museum and Bedford Gallery. Higgins, who was a brewer, so he must have been a good man, left detailed instructions in his will as to how the museum would be run and organised. Structurally, the museum is fascinating in itself. It links the old brewery buildings in Castle Lane with the Higgins’ family home and incorporates the Hexagonal Gallery, which was built in the early 19th century on the foundations of Bedford Castle. I like old breweries and social history, so both the industrial building and the Higgins’ family home are sources of wonder to me. The museum provides the opportunity to appreciate impressive collections of fine and decorative arts and highly accredited watercolours, so you can brush up on your knowledge of antiques whilst learning all you need to know about Bedford, its people and the history of the town.
Website: https://www.thehigginsbedford.org.uk/Home.aspx

Image attributions:
Glenn Miller Bust, Corn Exchange Bedford: Simon Speed, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GlennMillerBustBedford.JPG
Bedford Corn Exchange: Simon Speed, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BedfordCornExchange.JPG
John Bunyan Statue Bedford: Simon Speed, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:JohnBunyanStatueBedford.jpg
Cardington Sheds: G1MFG (talk) | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cardington_Sheds_9881.JPG

Copyright © 2018-2022 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.

And that’s not all …
UK Identity Crisis & it’s Impact on Patriotism
Woke & Hypocrisy. It really is God Save the King!!
Thinking about moving to the UK? Think again!
April Fool’s Day Mandate for NHS Workers!

UK Identity Crisis and its Impact on Patriotism

What’s the difference between a country and a camping site?

Published: 7 October 2022 ~ UK Identity Crisis and its Impact on Patriotism

In 2014, Russia ditched daylight-saving time and switched to permanent wintertime, which is good in some respects as it negates the need to remember when clocks should go forward or back one hour. How many times in the UK have you forgotten to apply this rule and as a result have woken up either an hour too early or an hour too late? Admittedly, some people seem to revel in the confusion, possibly believing that by gaining an extra hour in bed they have become the master of time, rather than time the master of them. For we who are lifelong insomniacs, however, that extra hour in bed is something to be abhorred: arrggh, another hour of torment! 

Permanent wintertime removes this obstacle but replaces it with another, which is no less disorientating for my circadian rhythms.

In summer, should I have forgotten to put the blackouts up, at 4am the sun blares through the window as objectionable as Tony; in winter, especially in the depths of winter, it is as though we have been plunged into eternal night. It is dark until 10am and dark again at 4pm, and the filling in between is like the illusory light of white privilege (or should that be the illusory white of light privilege?).

This is not something that our cat, Ginger, unduly worries himself about. No matter what time I stagger out in the morning, he’s there to greet me … rolling around, stretching, purring away. He doesn’t have to worry about getting up for work, driving home at night, paying the gas and electricity bill, Liz Truss devaluing the pound, virtue signalling by changing his avatar or wearing a tight green T-shirt. And if you happened to mention mobilisation to him, he would possibly think you meant that it was time that he took a turn on the balcony.

Ginger Mick Harts cat Kaliningrad doing the twist 'Bet you can't do this!'
Bet you can’t do this!

It was presumably for this reason that a when a friend from the UK, who would no doubt be a friend of Gingers if he did but know him, attempted to engage me in a discussion on mobilisation, Ginger did not to take part.

Our conversation on this topic prompted speculation about the reaction of the UK populace should a similar situation ever arise in Britain. And it was then that we went all historical goosebumps.

UK Identity Crisis and its Impact on Patriotism

At the outbreak of the Second World War ~ and, incidentally, I am using this purely as an example and not trying to pre-empt events with predictions of a third world war, as I would be expected to do if I worked for the UK media ~ conscription was introduced and was, by all accounts, successful. By the end of 1939 more than 1.5 million British men had been called up for military service. Times change (don’t they just!).

A survey undertaken by YouGov in 2018 revealed that only 20 per cent of male Brits said that they would volunteer for service and as many as 39 per cent said they would avoid conscription. Not surprisingly, the highest percentage of males within the avoidance bracket, 34 per cent, fall within the millennial category (ie, the age group which the media likes to refer to as the ‘entitled generation’).

Now, as an oldie, I am not in a position to pass judgement one way or the other, or I could end up sounding like one of the elder generation from the First World War: “By George, If I was your age; I’d be going with you!” But I suspect that the abstention figures from an updated 2022 survey would cause even greater concern in the corridors of power (or, knowing our government, perhaps not) and among the British military establishment’s chief of staff, when it comes to evaluating Britain’s ability to raise the manpower needed to respond to a major conflict. (Oh, I’m sorry! Tut, tut: and the women power, and deviant power, etc)

In trying to define this seismic shift in attitude, we have to look beyond the response of the entitled young millennials, who could be seen by some as the enlightened entitled young millennials, as there is more to the changes in Britain than living at mum’s and breakfast in bed.

Back in 1939, Britain still had a sense of who it was. It drew for its identity on its history, its traditions and the glories of its past. Its people were largely united ~ or as united as a country can be, given its class divisions ~ and the need to defend the realm, should that need arise, was questioned, when it was questioned, by the relative few.

Fast forward to the 21st century  

In case you’ve missed it, twenty-first century British society bears little or no resemblance to the social and values composition of its 1940s’ forebear.

Today’s Britain is, to put it bluntly, a cosmopolitan catastrophe, a place of muddled multicultural mayhem, a country divided and fragmented along exacerbated fault lines and manipulated sectarianism, the proponent manifestations of which are diversity, race, religion and gender transmutation. In short, the UK of the twenty-first century is in a terminal state of identity crisis.

UK Identity Crisis

This in not to say that if the balloon went up, there would not be any number of English men who would volunteer for national service. I can clearly think of some who would be champing at the bit to go and do their bit, but what about the rest ~ the liberal anarchists, the illegal migrants ferried into Dover each day by the Roya Navy taxi service and the entitled enlightened young millennials, who demonstratively have what it takes to take but not, it seems, what it takes to give.

Then there is the question of the ethnics, which is one that is easily answered. The Black Lives Matter mob are hardly going to rally around the flag, are they? They are far too busy defacing and pulling down statues and rallying around luxury goods, such as widescreen tellies and the latest iphones, which always seem to go missing during ‘largely peaceful’ demonstrations. Terrorists don’t as a rule rally around the flag, do they? In fact, they usually burn the flag of the country to which they have run for sanctuary.

Black muggers and Albanian drug dealers are a category apart. These groups can be said to have reserved occupations: the first, to relieve the useful idiots, tolerant whites, of their ill-gotten privilege, especially the privilege of walking the streets in safety (Where’s a policeman when you need one? Arresting Englishmen for mean tweets, of course!); the latter working hard to get themselves on the waiting lists for a nice comfy cell in UK prisons. And even if these two factions, and the many others like them, were not gainfully employed as described, would the British flag mean anything more to them than an accommodating table cloth for a line of doctored snort?

It is not just the ‘take me to your free hotels’ and bless-me-with-benefits freeloaders that fall into the ‘useless’ category; homegrown liberal lefties are hardly likely to lower themselves to rise in defence of the realm when their entire life has been devoted to parasitically trashing it.

But I hear, you say, somewhere among this rag bag of worthlessness surely there must be patriots? Patriots? Yes, we do have patriots, but since patriotism became a dirty word in the lexicon of the left, what patriots we do have are supressed by an ideology that they vehemently despise and a virtue-less society which they do not recognise, never asked for and certainly do not want.

Ask yourself this: Would you rally around the flag to ensure that the UK’s liberal elites continue to live and rule in the woke and globalist manner to which they are accustomed?

Ironically, for the past thirty years or more our political classes have been actively engaged in rebranding the British flag as a racist symbol, disposing us to guilt, even imposing fines, should anyone in an illicit moment of patriotic pride hoist it up a flagpole and by doing so commit the cardinal sin, as enshrined within the religion of Woke, of impinging upon the delicate blossom of ethnic sensibilities. (All sing: “Oh, show them the way to go home …”). And yet, a second and saving irony is that ideological dictates such as these are just what the doctor ordered for patriotic verve to flourish and perpetuate.

As good or bad, depending on your point of view, as today’s nationalist disenfranchisement is, the defiance and indifference from which it takes its lead was cultivated and curated during the Vietnam war of the sixties, as epitomised by the then controversial, fabled and now dated but eternally seductive slogan ‘make love not war!’

UK Identity Crisis and its Impact on Patriotism

Doomed to perish prematurely, but not before deflating the fortunes of rubber plantation owners whilst sugaring the pharmaceutical industry’s promiscuity pill, it was what sentiments of this nature were not putting into the perennially voracious coffers of the transatlantic industrial military complex that would eventually ensure that the 1960s’ pacifist movement would be rendered virtually impotent.

Notwithstanding, nineteen sixty was a very significant year in British social history. It was the dawn of a new, new decade and, although no one, with the exception perhaps of the fashion industry, the music industry, the brewers and the dope dealers, fully realised the extent to which it could be exploited, the country was on the threshold of a social revolution.

Affectionately, nostalgically, we refer to this era as the swinging sixties, but as innocent as the sobriquet sounds the fundamental truth is that the pendulum of change that provided its momentum was a force that was far from benign. Each sweep swept away years of traditional norms and mores. It slashed through the fabric of British life and what it left behind, which it left in tatters, was the beginning of the end of civilisation as we knew it ~ a headlong fall into the murky abyss of a post-conservative world.  

UK Identity Crisis the Pit and the Pendulum
Illustration shows a man labelled “Consumer” tied to a bed with cords labelled “Graft Tariff”, watching as a pendulum labelled “Cost of Living” with a sharp blade affixed to the bottom swings over his body, coming closer to cutting him in half.
~
My caption: 21st century Britain

It may or may not be coincidence ~ the old guard would argue not ~ but 1960 was also the year in which National Service officially ended in Britain.

National Service had been introduced in Britain in 1916 and remained operational until 1920. It was revived in 1939 and continued until 1960. In its latter iteration, physically fit males between the ages of 17 and 21 were duty bound to serve in one branch or another of the British armed forces for a period of 18 months, and then placed for four more years on the reserve list. 

I, and my generation, were subsequently excluded from it, although my father wasn’t. His National Service stint coincided with the Korean War, but Lady Luck smiled on him. Possession of a spotless HGV (Heavy Goods Vehicle) licence and experience of driving some of the then largest flatbed trucks, diverted him from overseas deployment to the not unenviable job of collecting damaged tanks and other battle-scarred military hardware from their disembarkation point at Liverpool Docks and transporting them, depending on their condition, either to repair shops in different parts of the country or, if they were beyond repair, to breakers and salvage yards.

For post-1960s’ Britons, however, the closest yoof came to National Service was watching Get Some In!

On the flip side, I do know people who have been in the army, left the army but never left the army. Case in point: A few years ago, I was strolling peacefully across the English countryside with a friend who had served in the special forces, but, like me, had reached an age where anything more demanding than enlistment in the Home Guard would have been nigh on impossible.

The sun was shining, the birds were singing, it was a perfect day in early autumn, when we approached a large grass meadow that rolled down hill quite steeply, reached a point where it dipped and then travelled back up as steeply again to a gate on the far horizon.

As we entered this field, my ex-military friend espied a pile of stones. They were big, round and heavy. Suddenly he stopped. Came to attention. Glared at the stones and said, in a sergeant-majorly fashion, “I bet you can’t put one of those stones under each arm, Hart, and run across the field with them!” And without waiting for an answer, a stone apiece leapt under his armpits, and he was off across that field like nobody’s business. I stood and watched him go in awe, glad that we hadn’t put money on it.

Furthermore …

Woke and Hypocrisy. It really is God Save the King!
Thinking about moving to the UK? Think again!
Sunak or Truss? Who will end Globalism, even the World?

Image attributions
Black & white jigsaw: https://www.freepik.com/free-photo/white-puzzle_6543626.htm#page=2&query=missing%20puzzle%20piece%20UK&position=5&from_view=search&track=ais >Image by Racool_studio</a> on Freepik
Flag and country outline of the UK: https://clipartuk.com/#link
Looking in mirror: https://www.vecteezy.com/vector-art/2695355-cartoon-ugly-man-looks-in-the-mirror-and-thinks-he-is-so-handsome-vector-illustration <a href=”https://www.vecteezy.com/free-vector/looking-in-mirror”>Looking In Mirror Vectors by Vecteezy</a>
Condom: https://freesvg.org/skotan-condom
Rocket: https://freesvg.org/skotan-condom
Pit & Pendulum: https://picryl.com/media/the-pit-and-the-pendulum

Copyright © 2018-2022 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.


God Save the KIng from Woke!

Woke and Hypocrisy, it really is God Save the King!

Nancy boys and proper Charlies

Published: 25 September 2022 ~ Woke and Hypocrisy, it really is God Save the King!

If any of you were in any doubt about the extent to which Britain has lost its way on the navigational chart of respect, decency, morality and decorum, a brief look at the media coverage of the death of the Queen during the official mourning period should be enough to vouchsafe your suspicions.

I was wrong. Wrong when I opined that no sooner would the Queen’s funeral be over than the liberal lefties would be calling for the abolition of the monarchy. They started long before the funeral had taken place. Almost overnight, Arsebook and Twatter became a hot incestuous bed of anti-monarchist rants.

And I was right. Right when I predicted that before the funeral was over, by hook or by crook the lefty media would have found a way of introducing examples of bedwetting woke.

God Save the King! from woke!

WOKE WATCH UK!

Who read the article about the ‘young republican’, ie one of those who constantly fantasizes about substituting the monarchy for an Obama head of state, who complained that during the official mourning period following the death of the Queen he was so very, very frustrated that he could not speak out on his favourite topic, abolishing the monarchy

I am sure there are many in the UK who empathise with him; who know, only too well, just how frustrating it is not to have a voice; who know how frustrating it is to live in a society in which globalist politicians and their neoliberal chums pontificate incessantly about the value of free speech but are painstakingly selective about what can be said and who does the saying. For example, try saying on Arsebook or Twatter, ‘multiculturalism not in my name’ and ‘we do not need or want any more third-world migrants’, without falling foul of foul-mouthed preachifying liberasts or even a visit from PC Plod in his role of political policeman.

Obviously, the frustrated young republican ~ along with a handful of anti-monarchy protestors who were arrested under breach of the peace laws ~ are woefully lacking in social propriety, particularly with regard to the maxim, ‘There is a time and place for everything’.

Mind you, it is hardly surprising. British schools these days are far too busy venerating Black Lives Matter and grooming the young in woke to teach fundamental traditional values such as respect, decorum and decency.

Traditional Values Crucifix keeping Woke at bay. God Save the King!

Liberals fear tradition like Count Dracula feared Van Helsing’s crucifix, which is a pity for them because British society and the British way of life are founded on tradition; expunge it and all you have left is a void, an echo chamber of pithy parroted phrases, of which freedom of speech is the most vacuous.

Simply put, in a language that even ‘young republicans’ should have no difficulty in understanding (He will, when he gets older, as this is the way of the world; when he is old enough to know that world and wise enough to think for himself.) all that he needed to do to thwart his mewling frustration was to put a latch on his gob until such time as it was deemed acceptable and polite to do otherwise.

In Victorian times it was de rigueur that young children should be seen and not heard, and who could argue with this good sense! Likewise, how beneficial it would be if young republicans were seen and not heard, at least until we could bear to listen or, even better still, if they were neither heard nor seen full stop!

To be looked upon with less intolerance, wet-behind-the-ears wanna-be republicans and anti-monarchist banner bearers could do worse than take a leaf out of the Queen’s good book and conduct themselves with the grace and dignity which during her long reign won her so many plaudits, unequalled enduring respect and enviable acclaim that stretched from John o’ Groats to Timbuctoo and, with the exception of Loony Liberal Land, lots of places between.

God Save the King!

Young republicans apart and ignored, it was inevitable, and hypocritical, that the state funeral for the queen would also attract a cabal of highly vocal whingeing, whining would-be armchair economists, who railed against the cost of the funeral.

Indeed, the same article ~ the one that revolved around the poor ‘young republican’ ~ also cited a young woman (I need to be careful here, since the photograph of the person concerned left me in considerable doubt as to gender identity. It happens more and more, does it not?) who, describing ‘herself’ as ‘staunchly anti-monarchy’, professed not to understand how anyone could defend the financial commitment to the Queen’s state funeral and the forthcoming coronation at a time when the UK’s cost of living is soaring out of control.

It’s a great pity that she, and people like her (her?), do not feel it incumbent on themselves to ask how anyone can justify the cost of the state-sponsored migrant invasion and/or raise Cain about the unbearable drain on the UK’s public purse resulting from the indefensible policy of shipping arms to Ukraine whilst the NHS falls apart at the seams and every average person in the country ( I don’t include the political elite.) is scared to turn the heating on.

Uk Public Purse Arms Shipments Ukraine

Between you and me and the gatepost (Ukrainegate), it is my considered opinion that it is not so much the monarchy as an institution or the cost of running it to which liberal lefties object, it is more to do with who the monarchy are in terms of their class, breeding and ethnicity. Or, to put it more succinctly, because they are white, have class, are properly educated and ~ guess what! ~ talk the Queen’s English, not wot and Innit and high-five man!

God Save the King!

Sigh, I don’t believe that the lefties will be satisfied until they have installed something in Buckingham Palace (which will then have to change its first letter from ‘B’ to ‘F’) that is lesbian, feminist and preferably darker than the Blackwall Tunnel at midnight during a total eclipse and power outage. Meanwhile, in Number 10, I suppose toxic white masculinity, if ever such a Herculian thing should occur there (no chance!), will have to give way to a mermaid.

Permit me to inform you that this glorious vision has inspired me to press on with my 21st century re-write, in accordance with the agenda of liberal-left revisionism, of the classic tale Robin Hood. Renamed Robin Hoody and set in Lambeth, it is a soap-operatic epic about Its and Others in rainbow tights (what else!) flouncing through Sherwood Forest (sink estate) giggling and squealing excitedly whilst hotly pursued by that most famous of 13th century celebs (given a mermaid makeover) the shirtlifting Sherriff of Nottingham. Hope you don’t mind the plug. The Sherriff doesn’t, but then he’s liberal.

God Save the KIng! from Woke Robin Hoods

A well-known TV personality not exactly known for his positive affirmations of British society, or of anything come to that, struck an unusually optimistic note in one of Britain’s tabloids, when he said ~ and I paraphrase ~ that until the death of the Queen it felt as if everything in Britain was turning to sh*t, but when the news of the Queen’s death broke, and in the days to follow, according to him, Brits turned away from the UK’s negatives and focused on the positives. 

PM perhaps you should be our PM! It’s a nice thought, and nicely put, but you forget that the media that pays your salary simply blinked for a moment. Once they remember to turn the fan back on, the sh*t will take flight as usual.

But let’s not sully what this same man from the media described as the ‘most extraordinary, remarkable and moving event’ that he had ever seen. He was, of course, referring to the Queen’s state funeral, not the ill-timed and completely inexcusable anti-monarchy demonstration or the shirtlifting Sherriff of Nottingham transgendering around in his fibre-fit tights.

And he was spot on. Not only was the state funeral executed with incredible dignity but with a choreographic excellence which had me breathing a sigh of relief when it was all over. It was simply astounding to calculate how many things could have gone wrong and didn’t, and that includes the weather

Nature, too, came out on the side of the Queen. It is reported that when the congregation emerged from the service at Westminster Abbey, the clouds parted and the sun shone through. Taken together with the double rainbow that appeared above Buckingham Palace just one hour before the Queen’s death was announced, a more symbolic and befitting tribute is difficult to imagine.

There are a great many people from all walks of life ~ statesmen, actors, entertainers, poets, authors, singer-songwriters, even politicians ~ whom my generation and generations immediately prior to mine have been privileged to share our lifetime with. Sadly, most are gone. All are irreplaceable, none more so than the Queen.

‘God save the King!’ we cry, “especially from mindless woke.”

Meanwhile in the UK Posts …
The Death of the Queen: the Last Light Out
Thinking about moving to the UK? Think again!
Eastwards Expansion of the West ~ the real reasons
WWIII The lastest media plandemic

|||| Tucker Carlson: Wokeness is not just a political ideology, it’s a state religion |||

Image attributions:
Merman: https://www.clipartmax.com/download/m2H7G6G6A0i8A0Z5_scene-drawing-little-mermaid-cartoon-merman-png/
Downing Street sign: https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/free-download.php?image=downing-street-sign&id=7723
Crucifix: https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/view-image.php?image=247332&picture=backlit-glowing-cross
Black money bag: https://www.kindpng.com/downpng/iomiwb_money-bag-hand-coins-symbol-icon-black-white/
Tap: https://openclipart.org/detail/315616/tap-2
Robin Hood: https://www.needpix.com/photo/download/964749/street-art-londond-shoreditch-eastend-art-mural-brick-lane-street-urban-art

Copyright © 2018-2022 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.

Queen Elizabeth II dies Mick Hart Russia

The death of the Queen the last light out

Britain loses its lifeline to its past, identity and tradition

Published: 9 September 2022 ~ The death of the Queen the last light out

An email to my family yesterday evening (8 September 2022) regarding the death of the Queen:

Hello Carolyn/Joss

An hour ago, I tuned into the internet and discovered that the Queen had died. My immediate reaction was to feel sad for the Royal Family, but not incredibly sad, after all at the age of 96 the Queen has had a ‘good innings’ and, moreover, in a reign that spanned several decades miraculously survived ~ no thanks to the tabloids, which sought to turn her life and the life of the Royal family into a cheap and tacky soap opera ~ with her dignity and regality intact.

I did feel sorry for mum, however. One of my earliest recollections at the age of four was the framed sampler of the Queen’s Coronation that hung on Nan’s wall between the TV and the ‘chocolate’ cupboard. The Queen was mum’s role model; she idolised her as you idolised the Beatles, I idolised Mel Smith and David and Joss idolised all the wrong people because they were born too late.

Someone commenting on one of the Russian media websites said, echoing my own sentiments, “I suppose if I just confirmed Liz Truss as the new PM, I would give up on life too.” A little harsh, I think, but understandable.

I have never been a Royalist myself, and I have never not been a Royalist either, but, as many commentators have said and written, the Queen was a symbol of the UK’s past, its history, heritage and our ancestral home. To me she was the last living connection among ‘the ruling classes’, who connected us and our country to a time when Britain and its people were proud and united, a time when Britain deserved to be called ‘Great’ Britain. How I mourn the passing of that last great generation of British people, who we were fortunate enough to have known in our lifetime ~ those who lived through World War II. How different it all was then!

The death of the Queen the last light out

When the Titanic was launched in 1911 (something I do not personally remember!), Britain believed it was the dawning of a new era. It was; but not the one envisaged or wanted. I cannot help feeling, with the foreboding that comes from hindsight, that the death of the Queen draws ominous parallels with the opening years of the twentieth century, and that history is about to repeat itself.

Our poor old country: ‘Whither Goest Thou?’

I never thought after all those years of ducking and dodging the Queen’s Christmas Speech when we were young that I would shed tears on hearing that the Queen had passed away. But I did.

Yet consolation has a habit of springing from the most unlikely of sources. I remember when I was a teenager asking Uncle Son why he never accompanied us on our visits to England’s stately homes, a question to which he replied with typical brusque level-headedness:

“They [the royalty/aristocracy] wouldn’t pay to look round my house, so why should I pay to look round theirs?”

He’s absolutely right, of course. Dry eyes and stiff upper wotsits. Anything else at a time like this simply would not be English!

Goodnight and xxxxx to you all

Mick

PS: Thank you to my friends in Russia who offered their condolences regarding the death of our Queen.

>>>>>>Sunak or Truss: Who will end Globalism even the World?