Great Frog skull ring wins prestigious inaugural ThusMagazine Quality Award

January 12, 2011 – 12:49 pm

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to shape up, smarten up, put on a serious face and get back into the corporate world. But then I woke up. The benchmark test involved redeeming my daughter’s credit note from The Great Frog and buying a suit in the sales. I am now the owner of a Cyborg skull ring.

    One ring to rule them all . . . a blurry photo of my Great Frog Cyborg ring, inaugural item in the ThusMagazine Quality Roll of Honour

    I rate the skull ring as one of my best and earliest business decisions of the new year. It will certainly enhance my status at the Brick Lane burger stand and in the soon-to-be defunct robot shop, and would give me a much-needed edge in a mano a mano with the petrol bombers, the middle classes or the Belgians. Though some have advised discretion in wearing the ring when pursuing my parallel existences as a Quality/Knowledge Management/Foreign Affairs/Publishing guru, I address these doubters to the wise words of  the Great Frog him/herself:

    “Somebody had to be first to make Skull Rings, someone had to originate Skull Rings and that crown sits proudly upon The Great Frog. Since 1972, for nearly 40 years The Great Frog has been finely hand carving, crafting and casting Skull Rings in UK Hallmarked Sterling Silver. And not only has someone got to be first at creating Skull Rings, someone has got to be the Best at creating Skull Rings and once again after you’ve seen and felt the craftsmanship of The Great Frog’s collection of Skull Rings. It’s undeniable The Great Frog were not only the First but they are the Best.”

    On the basis of that breathlessly, amphetaminely compelling self-citation alone, I proudly declare my Cyborg skull ring as the inaugural item in the Thus/Robot Shop Quality  roll of honour. Throughout the year (or until I get bored) Thus will dedicate itself to researching and showcasing examples of great British, European and indeed global, quality thingies which I/we/you feel have enhanced the human experience and demonstrate excellence, innovation and . . . you fill in the rest . . . .

    More objects will follow as sure as night follows twilight. Right now I’m off to inspect some American Naturist postcards – with a view to selling them, I hasten to add. I bought them from my friend Lou in Oakland, California. If they pass our stringent criteria, they may well join the skull ring in the Thus/Robot Shop  Quality Hall of Fame. Your nominations are also welcome, but please, no blatant product placement. I paid for my blemming skull ring, I’ll have you know.

    John J Kelly

    By John Kelly | Posted in Celebrity, Culture, consumerism, consumers, retail | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (6)

    Sex and Terror in the Robot Shop

    January 8, 2011 – 6:38 pm

    Sex on legs: Venus, a rare ladybot, with telltale tin boobies and paperclip earrings

    If my previous post gave the impression that any fool with an unhealthy knowledge of vintage robots and space toys, brightly coloured tin, Mexican death symbolism, a penchant for loud, obscure, smoking rhythm and blues, religious kitsch and clockwork automata could become a retail czar, then I apologise. Robot shopkeeping is no sinecure.  I recall dark days when the only customers to cross the threshold were shoplifters, Belgians or the middle classes – more about them later. There were days when the rain fell relentlessly, the robots refused to walk, when my closing pitch to a shop full of robot fanatic oligarchs was nuked by a leery Red-Stripe- toting transient crashing into the pecking chicken display. Pay days were terminated by the dreaded collectors – loud bearded middle aged know-it-alls declaiming the value of their collection ‘vintage’ robots – ‘not like this cheap Chinese crap.’ In my darkest hour Tower Hamlets’ Trading Standards Thought Police threatened to close the shop down on the grounds that the robots were a potential danger to small children, despite labels declaring ‘for adult collectors only’ on each and every box: ‘doesn’t matter – they look bright and shiny. Kids might try and play with them’.

    Balanced against this were strokes of retail genius such as the brief but spectacular run on luminous rosaries, sparked by a single purchase by an exotic beauty, later joined by her sinuous posse. The rosaries were used, allegedly, not to amass afterlife novena credits but as props for a naughty nun turn in the dark recessess of a steamy Shoreditch strip club (of which there are legion). The lapdancers returned to buy robots for unspecified purposes, always paying cash and often hanging around at closing time prior to the early shift. The fact that I was left with a gross of unsold re-orders and no further visits from religious pole dancers is heavenly retribution, I suppose. Anyway, enough already with the sex part.

    Terror, leaving aside Belgians and the middle classes, took the form of a visit from a representative of the local Bhangla boys who swaggered into the shop and asked if the robots worked on petrol. I answered what I thought to be a reasonable technical enquiry by telling him that no, virtually all the robots were clockwork, apart from a few battery-powered Japanese examples. He looked nonplussed, flashed the Manson Lamps and muttered something about the possibility of petrol bombs. I told him with no hint of irony that we didn’t sell petrol bombs – for all I knew, he might have been another undercover Tower Hamlets trading standards gumshoe – but that I’d get back to him if our policies changed. Then the penny dropped and I advised him that however slim the pickings might be in the protection racket industry, shaking down the local robot shop was at best a tangential strategy and that he was on CCTV. He didn’t return: probably a nutter, almost certainly the most incompetent gangster ever to strut his stuff on Cheshire St.

    Far more trying were middle class rubber-neckers, fresh from holidays in the souks of Marrakech or Istanbul, who thought it infra-dig to haggle over the price of a £2.50 jumping frog or a holographic bleeding heart of Jesus postcard which morphed into the Virgin Mary. Worse were the Belgians, who would not only attempt to barter but would justify their parsimony by asking ‘but what is the point of this object?’ Belgians, of all people, should recognise the logic of charging surreal prices for a pointless service.

    So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past . . . selling religion to sinners and hopping frogs to Philistines, sidestepping petrol bombers, council jobsworths and Brussels on the street of dreams . . .

    On the other hand, Jarvis Cocker has just bought a string of plastic skeletons and a tin heart pierced by an arrow for his bird for six quid. Life is sweet.

    John J Kelly

    By John Kelly | Posted in British identity, Culture, Economics, consumerism, consumers, retail | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (8)

    A year among the robots

    January 3, 2011 – 11:48 am

    Like my life, Thus broadcasts have been patchy and intermittent over the past year. One reason is that I felt I could add little to the depressing and inevitable commentary on the new UK government that I hadn’t already said long before they slunk into office. While the BBC Victor Meldrews, Guardianistas and other Hounyhyms are staging a tiresome and confused rearguard New Labour whinge fest, the Telegraph heehaws haven’t quite woken up to the fact that they are actually in power, mainly because every time an unpleasant piece of Tory legislation is run up the flagpole to see who’ll salute, the stooge on the end of the lanyard is a Lib Dem. Probably more about this anon, but right now I frankly can’t be arsed.

    The second, more potent reason for my unusual verbal continence is that my recession started earlier than most, forcing me to become a retail tycoon. For the last 18 months, amongst other things, I’ve been been selling tin toys, robots and Day of the Dead stuff in a shop near London’s raffish Brick Lane. For a while I was also living in the shop: no, not above, but actually inside, among the robots, Mexican skeletons and tin ducks on trikes. At night, suspended on a platform bed, inches from the ceiling, huddled under my John Lewis Egyptian cotton duck down duvet – got to keep up standards somehow – I listened as carousing Shoreditchers stabbed the shop window and drunkenly promised to buy each other ‘one o them fucking cool robots.’ I even heard people claiming that they had actually met ‘the robot bloke’ – my opening hours, dictated by fate and other expediencies, boasted a sign which said ‘often open at random.’

    The Brick Lane Robot shop at night, guarded by a savage devil dog - alright, my whippet, William

    Entombed in my fortress of solitude, besieged by revelling 2 am window shoppers, I mused on wiring up a robot, programmed to start marching and  beckoning while a loudspeaker intoned ‘buy me, then, you twat’  in a Dalek monotone (not dissimilar to the Shoreditch accent). I got as far as briefing my new friend Ben, a Fabricator – more about these Brave New jobs later – to work out the mechanics of such an automaton, which has precedents in the scary mannekin midget shoemakers (sometimes monkeys) occasionally seen eternally hammering soles in the windows of old-fashioned cobblers. But like many of my schemes, cost and effort got the better of me so I endured enforced insomnia sustained by only the imagined prospect of revenge. Plus, by day, these middle class sans culottes were my customers. And the customer is always right.

    Brick Lane Robot shop, Christmas 2010

    The shop started out under the name of Thus, but unsurprisingly, everybody knew it as the Robot Shop. As a shopkeeper, I became an Illuminatus of the Brick Lane pageant. Aloof from the paddling hoi poloi whose role was to wander aimlessly, gawping at less-than-worthless multicultural tat, gobbling Ethiopian vegan lemongrass burgers, served by Cambodians from trestle stalls, I was a baron, a seigneur, a bloke with a shopfront and stock. People were drawn like moths to the flame by my George Wallace ‘Stand up for President’ 1968 election campaign buttons, plastic prison rosaries designed to stop religious perps strangling themselves and others, elephants on Lambrettas balancing beach balls, Colin Powell GI Joe figures. The list was endless, and I haven’t even got to the robots – I probably will, later.

    Like Microsoft, Apple and the Body Shop, the Robot Shop was an accidental empire. Thrown out of home, I rented the storefront premises from an eccentric friend who had bought cheap land in a desolate area of Sweden to pursue his dream of living in a 10 foot hut in the style of Hojoki. In true English middle class fashion, this required 25 acres and a large house, but was entirely consistent with living in a shop – but not trading – for the past 12 years starting at a time when the street vied for the title of London’s most dangerous – certainly most seedy – thoroughfare. (The opening shot of ‘Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels was filmed on Cheshire St). My retail odyssey began on my first lonely weekend at the shop, in the dog days of a hot August, when I lined up a few tin robots and a couple of Turkish Iznik plates in the shop window for decoration only and left the door open to dispel the stifling heat. I was affronted when a couple of scarecrows wandered in and started browsing my stuff. Two hours later I had sold the robots, some books and refused offers on my dog. I sourced more robots from the internet, put up shelves, bought a credit card machine, carrier bags, an open/closed sign and a till. The rest is history.

    Actually, it will soon be history, for success breeds failure in enterprise Britain. Although the robot shop, like most of Cheshire St, traded to subsistence levels on the crumbs of the footfall from the Sunday Brick Lane market and echoed to the cries of midnight drunks returning from student shebeens the rest of the time, the landlord’s response to the recession has been to double the rent on my expiring lease. So London’ only robot shop will soon cease to trade and I will be obliged to think about doing something serious about my Micawberish situation.

    I’ve been thinking of opening a branch in Bloomsbury, where I now live, and extending the franchise to include counter-cultural artefacts, bottle gardens, bonzai trees and coral reef aquariums. But it’s still at the planning stage. As a retail guru, I need to check out whether the 30 Minute Fancy Dress Hire premises which I have the option of acquiring failed because the idea was completely and ingloriously hatstand, the shop was painted fluorescent puke green with a strange golden throne as its centre piece and the owner and staff could not speak English.  The USP was possibly flawed: I guess that too few of the baffled tourist punters wished to wander in and around the British Museum dressed as March Hares, Beefeaters, Batman, gorillas, vicars, tarts or the Queen of Hearts, especially in the teeth of the worst British weather for 100 years, even if the security blokes had let them in. If I were New Labour, I’d employ consultants and focus groups to give me the answer. But since I’m not, I think I’ll go with my instincts. Expect robots in Bloomsbury some time soon, unless I get a better offer.

    John J Kelly

    By John Kelly | Posted in British identity, Social studies, retail | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (19)

    I’ve not been writing about Quality because there’s not much of it about

    November 15, 2010 – 1:04 pm

    Thus boldly boasted at the start of  the year that I/we would focus on single-handedly starting a quality drive. After a lot of hard work, some hot air and a survey conducted with CQI and YouGov Stone, we staged a debate last May entitled ‘Whatever Happened to the ‘Q’ Word?’ Hosted brilliantly by Andrew Neil (I never thought I’d say THAT but credit where it’s due).

    The upshot of my research was that the overwhelming majority of Uk opinion formers agreed that a decline in quality of goods and services was the root cause of our economic malaise and imbalance of trade. Chief culprits, unsurprisingly, were central and local government services, which had markedly declined despite vastly increased budgets. Government bureaucracy resulted in ten times more laws over 12 years than in the previous period, while the 2006 Companies Act was the longest document in British legal history. Close behind were Britain’s rapacious utility companies, privatised quasi-monopolies themselves mostly owned by state owned French and German  utilities, with the exception of Virgin, which is ‘owned’ by a man whose genius is delivering second-best, getting a government subsidy for doing so, but convincing us we got a great deal.

    Over 50% of respondents agreed that ‘quality is everyone’s business’ but only 27% thought it was an individual’s responsibility. Most respondents thought the quality of the things they provided had increased over the past year but that quality standards in general had fallen. Less than 30% had a formal quality function in their organisation but virtually everyone was familiar with the theory, practice and terminology of ‘quality.’

    What clearly emerged from the study and the live debate was that people were acutely aware of the need to improve quality but didn’t necessarily trust the Quality guys to deliver it for them. Also, while 53% is a majority, no Japanese or German manager would be satisfied if less than 80% of his cohorts, much less senior managers, didn’t acknowldge that Quality was EVERYONE’S job. So we have a problem: the quality guys are seen as clipboard-wielding functionaries (let’s be honest, most of them are) while the top managers think that quality will look after itself, aided and abetted by gurus who tell us that quality is SO last century.

    Last week, the Economic tourists of the G20 sagely proclaimed that ‘surplus’ countries such as Germany, Japan and, of course, China, should be ‘encouraged’ to export less and focus more on ‘domestic consumption’ while deficit countries such as the US and UK should make a bit of an effort to export more and consume less imports. Well shave my beard and call me normal! How many supercomputers did it take to work out that macroeconomic solution? Germany, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan all export more than they consume because they are quite good at making quality products. China, The US’s biggest creditor, exports shedloads because it pays its workers slave wages and keeps its currency low. The UK scarcely manufactures anything noteworthy and the US prefers to lay off workers and create the largest deficit the world has ever seen on the principle that the virtual economy has replaced the real economy.

    Quality has been the casualty of short-termism in the Anglo-Saxon model and without it we will be consigned to economic and actual mediocrity. Our cost of living will continue to rise while standards will continue to fall, in a grotesque capitalist parallel of the failed Communist system. There, I’ve said it. Prove me wrong.

    By John Kelly | Posted in Banking, Development, Economics, Finance | Comments (4)

    Exit Banana Boy and the Blairites, pursued by a dead sheep

    November 15, 2010 – 11:36 am

    A couple of posts ago, Thus urged anyone with a semblance of influence and common sense to choose Ed Miliband over elder brother Dave. Endorsements from Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell and ‘Lord’ Peter Mandelson confirmed what we’d been saying for some time – that Banana Boy was a puppet, determined to hold onto all the belligerent, class-divisive, oligarch-inclined right-wingery which lost ‘New’ Labour the last election. Increasingly shrill endorsements from the Times, Sunday Times, Financial Times and, oddly, The Economist, plus warnings about Ed’s lack of experience – as though Banana Boy were some sort of elder statesman – confirmed that the Blairite tendency’s desperation to cling on to influence.

    This yellow cake uranium is proof itself that Iraq was the right decision, Hattie, you treacherous hagwitch

    Dave was backed by the big money Illuminati. Ed won because the big unions decided that genug was genug in the face of overwhelming evidence, if any more were needed, that New Labour meant old Conservative, with the added ingredient of unquestioning Atlanticism – hence The Economist’s ringing endorsement – unthinking globalisation – ditto the FT’s Martin Wolf’s enthusiasm – lickspittle obeisance to Big Usury. The shrieks of protest from the Guardianistas at the very idea that ANYONE could think that ANYTHING associated with THE UNIONS had any merit whatsoever underlines just how far English politics have drifted to the centre right.

    Ed Miliband and his brother, Schnorbits, in happier times

    I’m not convinced about Ed, who looks too much like Bernie Winters and sounds too adenoidal to be taken seriously. Though his speech to Conference was workmanlike and it was brave to admit that the murderous and incompetent invasion of  Iraq was ‘a mistake’, he is still an uninspiring figure who went to the same primary school as Boris Johnson, Oxford and, after all, comes from the same gene pool as Banana Boy. He is a devoted environmentalist, however, who seems genuinely committed to repositioning Labour as an alternative to the muddy centre-right – perfect for attracting disillusioned Lib-Dems and securing at least a coalition when the current government implodes as the (partly necessary) cuts cause widespread misery and introduce the possibility, if not the actuality, of civil unrest.

    Still, it’s not all bad news. Banana Boy has taken his bat home, after having been caught on camera castigating the awful Harriet Harman for applauding brother Ed’s apology over Iraq (‘why are you clapping? You voted to go to war’). David Milliband’s wife was apparently ‘furious’ that David didn’t get the job (why should we care?) and we shouldn’t forget that he waged a snide and, at times, decidedly unfraternal campaign against Ed, whom, by contrast, kept his dignity.

    So, the verdict of Thus, for what it’s worth, is good riddance to Banana Boy and good luck to Ed, who will need it. None of the candidates were up to much, but then again, the government itself isn’t exactly stellar. Ed needs to distance himself from the Blairites, the Brownites, especially Ed Balls, and learn to be constructively confrontational. The middle classes aren’t the only game in town, and though Ed is one of them, his best chance is to concede the need for deficit reduction but ruthlessly expose ideologically-motivated policies which the Tories are finding it increasingly difficult to resist putting into play.

    John J Kelly

    By John Kelly | Posted in Politics, UK politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off

    Who has really won the Afghan ‘War’ ?

    August 12, 2010 – 12:55 pm

    Clue: not the Taliban

    Last year, full of dudgeon, Thus posted a modest and moderate commentary on the 2009 Afghan ‘election’ http://thusmagazine.com/2009/11/afghan-democracy-postponed-in-an-orgy-of-hypocrisy/. Read it and weep – or laugh sardonically, depending upon your smug levels. I’m certainly not proud of stating the obvious, then or now.

    The ‘war’ (called, with no hint of irony ‘Operation Enduring Freedom‘ intensified following the ‘surge’ – which in Orwellian fashion was designed to lower the threat of continued violence by killing and maiming as many ‘insurgents’ as possible and winning hearts and minds by drone bombing civilian populations. General Stanley McChrystal, reluctant figurehead of this thinly-disguised ‘shoot-em-up-and-get-the-hell-out-of-here’ attempt to plait sawdust and sell it as a counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy, was allegedly none-too-keen in the first place but refused to take the blame for what he and others saw as desperation tactics on the part of certain Obama administration figures. His ‘unwise’ comments to Rolling Stone magazine in July got him carpeted and fired by Nobel Peace Laureate Obama. His replacement, saintly General Petraeus, ‘inventor’ of COIN’s Iraq surge strategy has had the lasting benefit of a recent increase in violence and an effective caliphate of Shia militias, despite the continued presence of over 65,000 US troops and $7 billion spend on ‘aid’ per month (2009).

    The McChrystal-led strategy depended upon legitimising the position of Karzai, whom most of the Afghani population and anyone else with a grain of intelligence knows – not including the US and UK governments of the time – presided over an endemically corrupt, kleptocratic regime which was ‘re-elected’ in a fraudulent pantomime of ‘democracy.’ Petraeus will need to work with the same materials. Over 80% of the enormous Afghan ‘aid’ budget is administered by the Afghan government. As the US continues to ‘devolve responsibility to the Afghan people’ Karzai’s extended family will have correspondingly greater access and even less accountability, I’d say the winner of the Afghan conflict/war/insurgency/Jihad – call it what you will –  is none other than His Excellency President Hamid Karzai, dead heating with the Mullah Omar, whose Taleban Ulema will be ‘allowed’ to lark around chopping off heads and hands, tearing out hearts and warping minds in their own special playground in the south – or wherever they like, given the ‘strength’ of the Afghan forces.

    At the risk of sounding unfashionably contrarian, I’d advocate making moderate elements of the Taleban – like the IRA, such people do exist – custodians of civilian-targeted regional aid rather than hand it all to the incumbent narco-kleptocrats. Or withdraw all the aid, 80% of which is stolen anyway. Even though former Thus favourite Ashraf Ghani, now on speaking terms with Karzai in what is presumably an attempted reprise of his time as Finance Minister from 2001-4 is there to keep an eye on the US cash, I doubt he will be capable of keeping Karzai under control as the ‘handover process’ accelerates – with increasing velocity as the next US elections approach – which Obama may lose, especially if the US is still in Afghanistan, now America’s longest war after Vietnam, and, like Vietnam (and Iraq), an ideological shitfight which it has clearly lost at huge cost.

    John J Kelly

    PS. Funny how we don’t hear much about al Qaeda , much less Osama Bin Laden, nowadays. Does anyone know why?

    By John Kelly | Posted in Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Insurgency, War on Terror, democracy | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off

    What’s the difference between Mandelson and dogshit?

    August 11, 2010 – 5:16 pm

    You can get rid of dogshit.

    The UK Labour Party leadership election machine

    As I was picking up dog mess on Hampstead Heath recently – my own dog’s mess, I hasten to add – my thoughts naturally turned to ‘Lord’ Peter Mandelson and the current Labour Party leadership crisis. The image of this creature selling his interminable, self-serving, platitudinous and badly-written account of the rise and fall of New Labour in a cheap TV commercial makes whippet turds look positively enticing.

    Others have commented at length on the iniquity and hypocrisy of Mandelson’s admission that he knew Brown was a sociopathic, authoritarian blobby sack of neuroses with no right, sanction or business to be running a whelk stall, much less a country, yet he urged the party and the country to vote for him all the same. Mandelson quotes Blair’s opinion that Brown was ‘mad, bad and dangerous’ and does little to disagree with this kind assessment of the co-architect of the ‘Project.’ On these grounds alone the twice-sacked, expenses-happy, oligarch-friendly Blair mongerer should be picked up on the Heath and incinerated along with the rest of the mess.

    Mandelson’s artless display shows his unashamed addiction to perfidy and intrigue. More Gollum than Machiavelli, he is unquestionably playing a leading role in the farcical ‘campaign’ to ‘elect’ a new leader of the Opposition. My guess, despite protestations to the contrary, is that he’s behind Banana Boy David Miliband. For that reason alone, whoever has the power should vote for brother Ed.

    In passing, Thus predicted Mandelson’s resurgence as kingmaker , with no enthusiasm, back in April 2009. Before he completes the job of completely destroying Labour, we should perhaps reflect on whether this was what he and Blair planned all along. There is no other plausible excuse for his actions.

    John J Kelly

    By John Kelly | Posted in Media, Policy, Political spin, Politics, Spin doctors, UK politics | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off

    Thus was wrong about Methadrone, sort of, uh, I guess

    June 24, 2010 – 11:51 am
    Actually I quite like smoking and all the things advertised on this poster so it shows how messed up I am and how tricky and pointless it is to pontificate about this sort of malarky.

    A couple of posts back Thus got on an uncharacteristically high horse about the dangers of Methadrone. My comments were not based on the government’s (subsequent) decision to ban the Chinese designer drug, but on reports from people I know and respect that it is generally horribly moreish and does one’s head in on an industrial scale. While the same or similar might apply to all sorts of legal highs, including alchohol, Methadrone/Mephedrone is a particularly potent drug.

    But there is still no evidence that it kills people, per se. In March, after the death of two teenagers on Humberside, the then government of Gordon Brown jerked its knees and banned the drug, causing the resignation of Professor Nutt (Thus passim) who appears to be a bit of a blowhard but who probably had a point about the government using drugs legislation for political purposes.

    A few weeks ago, after the general election, it was (not very widely) reported that Methadrone was not, after all, the root cause of the deaths. Without impugning the intelligence and impartiality of our glorious police force, which we all know is wonderful, the most worrying part about the ‘findings’ is that the police may have confused the word ‘methadrone’ with ‘methadone’ – a heroin substitute which the boys may also have been taking.

    Notwithstanding the above, I apologise for straying into the drugs debate. The problem with Methadrone, like Crack, is that it’s far too cheap for the hit it provides. Apparently. But I don’t know what I’m talking about and I’m certain that neither the police nor the government do either.

    John J Kelly

    By John Kelly | Posted in Drugs legislation, Law and order, citizens' rights, civil rights | Tagged | Comments (1)

    Conclusive evidence that Oxbridge produces financially illiterate, lying sociopaths.

    May 24, 2010 – 8:40 pm

    Ed Balls went to Oxbridge, thus making him eminently eligible to lead ‘New’ Labour through its next incarnation as the Pinochio Party. Then again, so did all the other ‘contenders’ as did most of the Coalition cabinet, but let’s stick with Balls for a minute . . . .

    David Miliband/Ed Balls/Ed Milliband/David Balls - the new face of New Labour

    Responding to a question from Peter Allen on BBC Radio 5 Live , Balls claimed that the £6 billion UK emergency budget cuts announced today would cost ‘hundreds of thousands of jobs.’ When asked to clarify, he repeated that the £6 billion cuts – many of which are earmarked to cull quangos, civil servants’ travel expenses and the like, would result in many hundreds of hundreds of thousands of  job cuts.

    In perspective, UK unemployment increased by 53,000 over the past quarter alone to reach 2.51 million, the highest figure since the three months to December 1994 (three years before the New Labour project). By this reckoning, the Balls boys could have fixed the economy and romped home at the election for less than the price of an RBS bailout.

    But they didn’t.

    Oxbridge taught me the value of a banana. Let me lead you.

    Balls had the further audacity to claim that the Lib Dem/Tory Coalition was bent on doing ‘what the Germans have told Greece to do’ – as if this was some sort of madness on the part of those whacky spendthrift Krauts. He furthermore blamed the UK recession on global economic conditions but claimed we were better off than most because we entered with lower levels of debt – oblivious to the fact that New Labour inherited a budget surplus from the Tories but have left the UK in its most indebted state since the Second World War.

    As most people in the real world know, the £6 billion cuts announced today are a prelude to very scary and probably destructive slash and burn measures later this year, as the world’s credit markets, under pressure from Euro defaulters and other scallywags, take an increasingly dim view of Britain’s Stalinist-inspired cardboard economy and question our ability to repay burgeoning debts with exports of talent shows, sweary celebrity chefs and private equity Ponzi schemes.

    Keep that banana away from me. I know it's not Fair Trade.

    There is no question that we cannot continue to run a balance of trade deficit and public sector debt on anything like existing levels, but the question facing the Coalition is how to stimulate export trade in what increasingly looks like another downturn while enacting necessary cuts without choking off the domestic economy. By anyone’s definition, the UK is in crisis. Anyone but Balls, that is.

    Andy Burnham: turned out nice again? No, it hasn't

    The Rocky Horror Show

    New Labour, meanwhile, is staging a talent show of its own. Ed Balls, running on the Gordon Brown’s posterior ticket is jostling with Banana Boy David Milliband, running on the Blair Duke Nuke ‘em ticket, Ed Milliband, running on the Eco-by-gum Worzel Gummidge ticket and Andy Burnham, running on the George Formby Blackpool tram ticket. Diane Abbott, running on the black, proud-to-be-working-class and never mind about sending my kid to public school ticket and other, yet-to-be-revealed whack-jobs may yet emerge to remind us that our politicians are a reflection of the economy – weak, preening, deluded, second-rate.

    The one thing they all have in common is that they all went to Oxbridge, as did 18 members of the Coalition Cabinet. What does this tell us? This is Britain, where every middle class white person (and the occasional VERY CLEVER and VERY PUSHY black person) has the right to become elitist, useless and destroy the economy. All you need to do is blag your way into Oxbridge.

    I have very little confidence that the Coalition will do the right thing and enact genuine efficiency initiatives, sensitively protecting the jobs and services provided by front line workers while cutting the cadres of overpaid middle managers who have mismanaged the public sector to its present parlous state. I know this because they are incapable of listening to the people who know how to get the work done, and cannot possibly empathise with the people for whom the work needs to be done. That’s because they were educated in dreaming spires from which they never saw the need to emerge. How do I know this? because I went to Oxford. I left after a term, though that’s no excuse.

    Oxbridge is the problem, not the solution. Maybe the cuts should start there. But they won’t.

    By John Kelly | Posted in British identity, Political spin, Politics, UK politics, democracy, political theory | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

    New Labour gambles on turkeys not voting for Christmas in May

    March 30, 2010 – 2:39 pm

    The UK media have been scratching their pointy heads of late as the opinion poll gap between New Labour and the Tories has closed to indicate at best a hung parliament. Despite looming and actual strikes, a record budget deficit with no prospect of recovery, real and impending tax rises, unemployment levels at a 30 year high, a weakened currency with no corresponding rise in exports, threats of public sector cuts, particularly in the education sector, a costly, murderous unwinnable, and strategically inexplicable war and a hopeless, bullying unelected gargoyle with little or no charisma, the nation apparently remains undecided. Why?

    Leaving aside their general incompetence, bad advisors, dodgy donors, hooray Henry Metrocentricity and extreme reluctance to clarify, much less detail, any sensible policies, even the New Tories should have been able to savage the field of half-dead sheep that passes for the incumbent UK government. Part of the reason is demographics – Britain’s ‘much-admired’ first past the post voting system has been comprehensively gerrymandered so as to make it very difficult indeed for the party which gets a popular majority to ensure a working majority of seats. This has worked in favour of the Tories in the past, so no sympathy there. To ensure a landslide along the lines of the Labour 1997 victory, the Tories would need to be looking at a 15 point opinion poll lead at this stage. This time last year, it was trending that way. So whatever could be the matter?

    It’s the economy, stupid. Or rather, the bubble economy which constitutes the UK public sector. Under New Labour, it now accounts for 6.1 million jobs out of 21.6 million full time workers, representing 28 percent of the UK workforce, the vast majority of which must be assumed to be ‘natural’ Labour voters. In addition, there are 7.1 million part time workers, many of whom either work in the public sector and participate in McJob schemes. That’s not to count the 2.3 million higher education students and 176,000 academics who teach them. The vast majority of these cadres wouldn’t be considered natural Tories. – nor have the Tories given them any reason to change their collective minds – but now they aren’t so sure of their masters’ intentions either. Proposed Labour cuts in the Higher Education budgets will definitely reduce jobs and the number of student places, plus a growing wave of discontent amongst workers in areas of the civil service, Network Rail and (privatised) British Airways, may mean that a significant number will lose faith in the ‘devil you know’ nostrum and punish the incumbents.

    Moreover, despite the recession and clear evidence that the sporran is empty, Gordon’s job creation schemes, designed to massage grisly employment figures, have continued apace. Overall unemployment rose by 54,000 in the three months to January 2010, but this was mitigated by 20,000 new jobs in the NHS – 1.3 million employees – alone. Employment in the private sector fell by 61,000 in the last quarter of 2009 alone. Nobody can seriously believe that this version of Maoist economics can lead anywhere but to the IMF.

    Voter turnout in the 2001 and 2005 General Elections was 59.4 and 61.4 percent respectively, compared to 77.7 and 71.4 percent in 1992 and 1997. John Major’s Tories won with a vastly-reduced majority in recession conditions mainly because Neil Kinnock’s ‘nearly-new’ Labour failed to convince the electorate that they represented a viable alternative. Five years later, the outgoing Major administration left Tony Blair and Gordon Brown with a budget surplus at a time of unprecedented global economic growth. Having put the budget back on an even keel, Major lost, apparently, because he couldn’t drum up the necessary ‘feelgood factor.’ From 1997-2001, after a four year period of pretending to adhere to the ‘golden mean,’ Gordon set about taxing, spending and consequently wrecking the exchequor just in time for a global economic downturn.

    With the stakes as high as they are, I predict that the 2010 percentage voter turnout will be as high as in 1997. It would require epic numbers of turkeys to vote for Christmas for the pink-tinged Cameronites to secure anything like a landslide on a Blairite scale, given that from 2001 to the present time, the much-trumpeted growth in UK jobs has been driven by the public sector, so whatever goes down, we are unlikely to see a landslide. But public sector workers will need to weigh up as to what degree the inevitable budget cuts which will follow the election will be more savage under the Tories than under Labour. Meanwhile, those in the private sector know that taxes will rise whoever sits astride the woolsack. They won’t vote Labour.

    So I’ll stick my neck out and say that, despite the unconvincing Tory arguments, most voters are going to wake up on polling day, survey the mess and vote for anyone but Gordon. The Tories will win a reasonable working majority, show their true colours and set about vigorously dismantling New Labour’s constituency, the public sector, partly because of the imperative to reduce the obese deficit and partly because that’s what they are ideologically inclined to do. This will be a shame, since it employs a lot of hardworking people who work for the public good, who deserved better leadership than they got under the Great Helmsman.

    Thus the next election, which should be about the environment, sustainability, public sector reform, a fairer society, education, training, infrastructure and health will be won by the Tories on the feelbad factor, and Britain’s half-assed stab at the Middle Way will be history.

    John J Kelly

    By John Kelly | Posted in Economics, Education, Policy, UK politics, citizens' rights, democracy, political theory, public sector reform | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off