This is a story about orotund pontification...

Please excuse my magniloquence, but I'm attempting to brow-beat you into submitting to my intellectual superiority. My ostentatious language is not intended to communicate, but to intimidate. The purpose of my education was not the pursuit of knowledge, but the ratification of my pre-eminence. The plebeians' obmutescence and the academic elites' hegemony is the natural order of things. The lower orders should be seen and not heard.

Our rulers and their mandarins are publicly schooled - Charterhouse, Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Shrewsbury, Westminster and Winchester - before studying PPE at Oxford. Inherited wealth, the nepotism of political dynasties and the inside track - knowing how the corridors of power function - means that we are governed by the elite of the elite, not by our peers.

Education and publishing are dominated by sycophantic courtiers - the landed gentry - reflecting our aristocracy's vested interest in culture and society being fixed and unchanging. Dead languages and classical chamber music are fetishised.

In order to prevent the working class from getting ahead many professions have overtly defended themselves through the use of Latin instead of English. Studying the classics will set you in good stead for medicine and law, although the majority of your patients or clients will not speak Ancient Greek.

Like a virulent disease, the self-interest of those in power, causes every aspect of our society to be shaped to reflect the values of the ruling class. The 'correct' answers in an examination are the ones that parrot conventional wisdom, maintaining the status quo. The 'correct' use of language is the most formal, not the colloquial.

Little by little, the self confidence to freely express your thoughts and feelings, is eroded by a hierarchy that wishes to clip your wings. It's a free country, provided you've attained the prerequisite level of education and write only in a manner which pleases your superiors.

As a little game, sometimes I posh it up a bit. Sometimes I talk like a public schoolboy and do you know what happens? Genuine posh people ask "where did you go to school?" as if I was one of them.

"Your evidence is anecdotal" I hear you say.

What about the Castilian lisp?

"Insufficient evidence"

What about the fact that people watch the Queen's speech or stand for the national anthem? What about the fact that people follow the life of Kim Kardashian?

Wherever we turn, we see ordinary people obsessed with the private lives of the ruling elites - the aristocracy, plutocracy, oligarchy and vapid celebrities - imitating their affectations.

Didn't you fantasise about being prime minister, marrying a prince or living in a castle, when you were a child? You still have those dreams today, but you pretend that you don't. Your desire to be special - number one - has been corralled into some specialist area. Maybe you're the best fudge packer in the factory, or maybe you got a 2:1 degree from a former polytechnic, but your creativity and energy was channelled into something that makes you feel like a king or queen in your little fiefdom.

You read Harry fucking Potter, didn't you?

There's a certain joyful lightness when you read something that's well written and not just written to obfuscate any meaning and stupefy everybody except for your elitist Oxbridge chums.

Why must we struggle through the supposed great works of literature, which are a crime against the enjoyment of reading? Why must we be told at every juncture, that we just don't understand how complex the world is and that we should leave it to the experts, because they know best.

It's extremely easy to come up with exceptions to any rule. It's extremely easy to pick holes in any theory or model. It's extremely easy to find areas where a person's worldview is incomplete. It's extremely easy to be the smug critic. This is the role of academia: to undermine and discredit any challengers, who threaten our dogmatic rulers.

We funnel our children through a system where they learn to kiss the arses of their teachers, lecturers, professors, Ph.D. supervisors, viva voce examiners and those who award tenured professorships. For anything to be printed, it must pander and conform to the preconceived notions of an editor or publisher. Only the most obedient servants will rise to prominence, because they are most complicit and compliant with the will of the ruling elite.

Nothing ever changes - for the better - because of the inherent homogeny created by our education system, which feeds into a political system predisposed to select a public schoolboy - born with a silver spoon in his mouth - with an Oxbridge degree, instead of a normal person who actually knows what it's like to be an average UK citizen.

We aren't choosing our brightest minds to help with the challenge of building a better society for all its members. We're choosing the very worst kind of people: snobs who think that dead languages and chamber music are culturally important.

There's a big difference between being anti-intellectual and being pro-ignorance. Being a great thinker is about having a brilliant mind, not about being able to follow a well-trodden path with your fellow privileged brethren, steered by your sharp-elbowed mother.

We've built walled gardens where spoiled middle-class children can strut and swank, safe from criticism that they're far removed from the real world. We've built robust defences to insulate the intelligentsia from responding to valid critique: only the views of other academic elites will be dignified with a response, and out of courtesy and wilful ignorance, nobody dares to burst anybody else's bubble.

Commentary and satirical magazines - Private Eye and The Spectator, for example - as well as the 'free' press gives the impression that there are some checks and balances. In fact, to have the good fortune to come under the critical gaze of one of these newspapers, is to feel as though you have been given a seal of approval: further endorsement of the importance of your good work.

What - pray tell - does the person who makes your lunch think of your job? Who cares. I doubt they can even string a sentence together.

There's an automatic filter, that rejects anything that sounds a bit common, you know?

On the lead up to the EU referendum, I noticed that social media was awash with rather over-zealous use of punctuation marks, capital letters, as well as a great deal of confusion over common homophones.

"That's unreadable" I heard you say.

Really? Does the use of a greengrocer's apostrophe or mixing up your "you're" and your "their" with your "they're" and "there" really make something unreadable? Does it really alter the meaning if you write "less" when you should have written "fewer"? You must be very stupid if you can't read something and see past a couple of typos.

Writing accessibly doesn't mean dumbing down. It's perfectly possible to set aside your arrogance and write in a manner in which you know you are much more likely to be understood, without a scramble for the dictionary. Are you really so insecure that you need to turn your writing into a demonstration of your extensive vocabulary? Save it for The Times crossword.

The fetish for institutionally issued 'qualifications' has led us to the situation where the vast majority of people are turned off by politics, philosophy and literature. The condescending manner in which our intellectual elites talk, has led to their rejection by the masses. Our finest minds have unwittingly - and stupidly - played straight into the hands of the populists, who write and speak to impress their audience, not their fellow elitists.

Politicians canvas public opinion, so that they can win votes, but they turn to their advisors - Whitehall, think tanks and academia - when they come to rule. Political parties, media and the think tanks are all funded by commercial interests - influencing public opinion by sheer weight of noise. A rising crescendo of contradictory opinion on social media was drowned out by the views of a handful of academic elites, with their puppet strings pulled by those who control the purse.

It offended me the other day when the philosopher A C Grayling wrote that ordinary people are "narcissistic" when they publish their opinions. It was tantamount to writing "STFU, plebs".

We need to have another Gutenberg moment, where ordinary people can finally overcome the barriers that stop them from being heard. Blogging platforms like Wordpress go some of the way, but mainstream media, academia and politics are doing an excellent job of marginalising and discrediting the groundswell of public opinion on social media. The constant bombardment of "fake news" stories in the [non-fake] news seems like an attempt to get us to disregard the opinion of our peers, in favour of the approved opinions printed by newspaper tycoons.

We need to change our society - from boardrooms dominated by wealthy old men, government dominated by privileged elites and publishing dominated by academics - to a society that's representative. I'm not championing ignorance and lies. I'm not suggesting that brain surgery should be performed by amateurs. I'm saying that snobbery and elitism has reached the end of the road and everything that's good in the world will get torn apart by destructive forces, unless we listen to the proletariat: they outnumber the cruel and condescending ruling class.

"My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge" -- Isaac Asimov

This quote seems to neatly encapsulate the battle between the stupid & ignorant and a class of people who know better than everybody else. Certainly, the letters after your name tell you that you're a cut above the rest don't they? You studied hard at university, so you must be more knowledgeable than those dimwitted fools who didn't attain the same standard of education as you, right?

As I wrote before, being anti-intellectual is not the same as being pro-ignorance.

Is it possible, that people are sick of being voiceless, unrepresented and talked down to by people who are so privileged that they have absolutely no idea what ordinary day-to-day life is like for most people? Is it possible that people are sick of being told that geopolitical complexities are beyond their comprehension and they should just leave things to the people who crashed the economy and started a bunch of wars, destabilising the world.

Is the desire to simplify problems and put things into terms and language that can be universally understood, the wrong approach? In my experience, jargon and impenetrable complexity exists only to justify pointless jobs and make talentless twits seem indispensable. If I was going to sack one person, would it be the front-line worker or the middle-manager? Is that a hard decision to make?

All this talk about facts and expert analysis: has it truly added any value?

Of course I want my bridges to be built by civil engineers, not amateurs, but I don't want career politicians, political commentators and intellectual masturbation.

The whole point about democracy is that the people govern themselves, through elected representatives. If our government and our media is not representative, because it's stuffed full of elitists, then we've completely failed to create a democratic society. It's not like a bunch of knuckle-dragging ignoramuses are saying they can do a better job of flying the plane than the pilot. It's literally that democracy has been perverted by the plutocracy.

Have a look at this list of autodidacts and ask yourself if they're ignorant fools who've contributed nothing to humanity.

Formal education, an obsession with conformity and the rejection of ordinary people's opinions, on the basis that they are stupid and ignorant, has led us to obscene wealth disparity and untold human misery. The reason why you don't believe it's true is because you're surrounded by people of the same socioeconomic class and you disregard the 'unreadable' comments of the great unwashed masses. The peasants are revolting.

Unless we give ordinary people a voice, they will never be able to develop their own philosophy for the 21st century, explore political ideas and challenge the plutocratic interests that seek to enslave them.

Until we end intellectual snobbery, we are on a collision-course with a popular uprising that will throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Tags: #politics #writing

This is a story about inevitable disappointment...

Oh no! Bad news!

Time to press the FUCK IT button and self destruct. I just can't take shit like this any longer. Life is one long string of let-downs and anticlimaxes. Life is like being fucked up the arse with a red hot poker, until the day you die.

But, isn't this what separates the winners from the losers: how do you handle the bumps in the road? Do you fall to pieces, or do you pick yourself up, dust yourself off and get back on the horse?

How much can you take before you inevitably conclude that the world's got it in for you? A life of happiness and contentment just aren't on the cards. You're consigned to your fate, which is misery, failure and then death.

You could try to be philosophical and look for a silver lining in every cloud. Maybe the reason why you didn't get that job was because it wasn't meant to be: there's a better job waiting for you just around the corner. Maybe the reason why those shitty things happened was to toughen you up for the challenges ahead.

You could try to be pragmatic; realistic. Give up and get a cat, because you're going to be single and unemployed forever. Nobody wants you. The world's trying to send you a message and that message is crystal clear: fuck off and die.

We seem determined to build an adversarial zero-sum world, where our lives are dominated by stress and rejection. Instead of cooperating, collaborating and sharing, we want to have winners and losers. Instead of everybody having what they need, we want to create a world of haves and have-nots.

I read something the other day suggesting that participation medals for coming last place in a running race were a terrible idea, because they made victory taste less sweet. Supposedly, we'll be less hungry to dominate our peers if we start doing away with the spirit of competition. Yes. Yes, that's the point.

"That's loser talk" I hear you say.

Yes, if you think you're pretty great at something, you can get a bit carried away, can't you?

Remember: there can only be one ultimate winner, in a competitive world.

Taken to its ultimate conclusion, there'll be one person who has all the money, all the sexual partners, all the power. There'll be one person who's the best at sport, music, art, acting, writing, science, adding up numbers, memorising facts, spelling. Anything that you think you're good at and you enjoy... you'll find out you're inferior. Trust me, you're not going to like it.

You might think you're a big fish in your small pond, but remember there are 7 billion people crawling all over the surface of the planet, trying to fuck each other over. Your delusions of grandeur will be shattered and you'll find out that you were simply being used by powerful people, to further their ambitions.

You might think that competition is natural. You might think that survival of the fittest means that humans are evolved to fuck each other over, but in actual fact the success of our species is cooperation not competition.

We have baked adversarial practices into our society. We have the government and the opposition in politics. We have the prosecution and the defence in law. We have legal and illegal; right and wrong; black and white. We have native and immigrant; us and them. We pay our sports stars obscene amounts of money and we have football hooliganism in support of our favourite team.

This is a mistake.

The competition is with nature, not with each other. A hurricane will flatten our houses, so we should cooperate to build stronger buildings. A drought will leave us all thirsty, so we should cooperate to dig a well. Crop failures will leave us all starving, so we should cooperate to store our grain. Lions and tigers will eat us, so we should cooperate to warn each other of approaching danger.

So far as I can see, all the misery and suffering in the world is a man-made problem, because we refuse to rein in the horrible power-hungry and greedy aspects of humanity. Why do we celebrate celebrity, wealth and status? Instead, we should punish and shun the freakishly vain and selfish people, who consume and hoard more than their fair share. Democracy has been perverted to serve the interests of a few rich people, instead of the masses who toil in the factories, fields and build the houses.

If you ever wonder why bad shit happens to you and why life is such a struggle, the answer is fairly easy. In an adversarial competitive system, everybody has to suffer so that one person can be the 'winner'.

I'm now playing a waiting game. I'm clinging on with my fingernails, just waiting for the whole house of cards to collapse and the proletariat to rise up and strike down their cruel masters. Humanity has been enslaved by capitalism for too long. It doesn't work for 99% of humanity, and that's fucked up.

Tags: #politics #capitalism

This is a story about referees...

Here's me travelling to work by boat during the tube strike. But why do you even have to go to work anyway? Why do we need the fancy towers of glass, steel and concrete? Why do we need to move millions of people away from their homes and into the cities every day? Why do we need to inflict untold agony on a huge proportion of humanity, just so we can keep some office chairs warm?

Imagine the global economy to be a game of football: the defenders are the police, army and healthcare professionals; the midfielders are the builders, farmers and fishermen; the attackers are the engineers and scientists. So, who's the referee?

The banks are the referee: they're the ones keeping score.

Banks are simply supposed to keep a tally - a balance - of who's winning the game. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less. You can play football without a referee, but it's supposed to be a fairer game if you have somebody impartial to be in charge of the match, running it according to the rules and without cheating.

Why the hell would over 80% of our economy be given to the people keeping score?

If you think about it, most of what goes on at head office is administration. Administration never put food on the table or a roof over anybody's head. Administration is an unnecessary overhead, not a business in its own right.

For sure, administration is hard and complex, but that doesn't mean it's valuable. Just because you've been to business school and got your Masters in Business Administration (MBA) doesn't mean you know fuck all about building a profitable business that adds value to humanity. In fact, you probably got a bit confused and you started to think that administration is the same as business.

If you don't pay your taxes, the government will shut you down. If you don't follow the trading laws, your business is going to get big fines and may be forced to cease trading. However, following the regulations isn't actually the same as running a business.

It's easy to believe that because your business is well administered, your book-keeping is well done and your taxes are all paid, that you're doing a great job. In fact, that's utter horse-shit. What does your business actually do?

So much money is wasted building fancy head offices and filling them full of administrative drones. One office block I worked in actually had a worm farm in the basement in order to eat all the useless paper that was generated by the bean counters.

Do we really need all these people doing bullshit jobs? Do we really need all these records and processes? Is it really helping humanity? Is it making anybody happier?

Today, London was paralysed by a tube strike, but what's the fucking point of those miserable journeys into the office anyway? What got done today? What wouldn't get done if nobody turned up? Would the world end? Would people go hungry or not have a place to live?

"But what about money? What about mortgages?"

Fuck those things.

There are plenty of resources. There's plenty of land to build houses and grow food. There are plenty of rivers and reservoirs. There's plenty of wind and solar energy to be harvested. Fuck sitting at a desk shuffling paper around. Fuck kowtowing to some bean counters.

You've been mortgaged. The reason why you have to do a pointless bullshit job that adds no value to humanity, is because the natural world is being destroyed to create more phallic towers of concrete, full of administrative drones, to add some more fucking zeros onto the digital bank balance of a small-penised oligarch. Does that sound like a useful endeavour to you? Is that how you want to say you spent your life?

It maddens me that we have to get up early in the morning in the middle of winter and struggle to get to 'work' on overcrowded commuter trains, because our bullshit economy worships the referees; the bean counters. The banks are supposed to grease the wheels of commerce, not hoover up all the fucking wealth.

It disgusts me that the lawyers, accountants, bankers and other financial service leeches are wallowing in cash, doing precisely fuck all of any value, and mandating that humanity has to commute across the country twice a day in order to shuffle paper around a desk and move digital money in increasingly pointless complex ways.

In financial markets, we talk about 'naked' positions. That is to say, the trading of a financial product with no need to do so except to try and make a quick buck in the global casino. Futures contracts were invented so that a farmer could sell his corn before it was harvested, in order to buy a combine harvester, and so that the corn flake factory knew exactly what the cost of their raw materials would be. Futures contracts were NOT invented so that some wanker who flies a desk could make an easy buck without so much as breaking a sweat.

The whole fucking system has gone berserk. Money is supposed to be exchangeable for labour or scarce goods, but instead money's just casino chips that have no use outside the global financial markets. We're all paying a heavy human price for our financial services, accounting, legal and administrative world, where we've ended up toiling over ever-growing mountains of worthless paper, instead of trying to build a better life for ourselves and future generations.

What the fuck are we doing, when our most brilliant minds go off to work in head offices, doing administrative and accounting type jobs, writing legal contracts, banking and other kinds of referee type bullshit? What the fuck are we doing, running a football match with 22 referees and a kid with two left feet who can't kick a ball?

Referees don't make a football match. Head offices don't make an economy.

Tags: #capitalism #banking #economics

This is a story about political correctness gone mad...

The liberal metropolitan elites are on the right side of history, right? The neanderthal knuckle-draggers are simply poorly educated angry white men, who need to step aside and make way for the black one-legged Muslim lesbian immigrants to take all the jobs and go on the dole, right? I probably can't even say black. It's political correctness gone mad.

Right, I've probably successfully got your heckles up. Now, get your calculator out.

The average wage in the UK is roughly £26,000. The average house price is £260,000. Assuming you can borrow three and a half times your income, you can get a mortgage of £91,000. So, you'll need a deposit of £169,000.

For the current tax year, average take home pay is £1,737. Average rent in the UK is £900 a month, leaving £837 a month for council tax, gas, electric, water, sewerage, food & drink, toiletries, cleaning products, transport, clothing, mobile phone, Internet, home & life insurance, home maintenance, alcohol & tobacco, gambling & lottery, going out and saving money.

Let's assume that our average UK citizen is a super scrimpy person who lives on budget baked beans and never turns on the heating or any lights. They can probably save a maximum of £500 per month, which leaves them £337 a month to spend on everything else. To save up the £170k they need to buy a house, they'll need to be thrifty for the next 28 years... assuming house prices don't go up.

Of course, this also assumes that you can even get a job that pays about £12.50 an hour, when 80% of all new jobs being created pay less than £17,000 per annum. Most jobs pay less than the average, because the average wage is skewed by a small number of very high earners.

OK, but we can all just go on benefits, right?

Well, housing benefit doesn't pay enough to rent a place. Rents are higher than housing benefit. If you work more than 16 hours a week, your benefits will be cut off, so you can't use housing benefit to top up your income. If you're a 'snowflake' millennial, you'll have just £57.90 to live on each week, plus your housing benefit that isn't enough to pay the rent.

So, what's the solution?

Well, if you're an immigrant you might be prepared to live in an appallingly shit house, with several people in every room. Many of us grew up in houses with sitting rooms and dining rooms. If you have a look round a house full of economic migrants who are all working for minimum wage, you're not going to find any reception rooms: every room is a bedroom.

Who cleans the toilets? Who waits the tables? Who serves the coffee? Who picks up the litter? Who hoovers your office? Who washes your car? Who built your house? Who unblocked your drain?

When we want something, we demand rock-bottom prices. We believe all the bullshit about 'rogue traders' and 'rip-off Britain' when in actual fact we are mostly idle and spoiled. We wanted cheap goods, so the factories moved to the Far East. We wanted easy jobs, so the immigrants came to do all the shitty ones. We wanted big fat undeserved early pensions, so asset prices bubbled. The petit bourgeois rentier class is a parasite on young people who need somewhere to live.

"Build some more houses!"

Yes, but who's going to build them? You wanted people who work hard for peanuts, so you got Poles. It's a fairly established middle-class thing to do: to demand Eastern European builders, because your British counterparts are supposedly lazy and work-shy, but aren't you part of the problem if you're not rolling up your sleeves and getting on with the job yourself?

The UK population was 50 million in the 1950s. Now it's 65 million. If there were 30 children in a school classroom in the fifties, there would be 39 today. If there were 1 million cars in the fifties, there are 1.3 million now. Hang on! That can't be right, can it?

Yes, ostensibly our observations don't match the hard numbers. Our day-to-day experiences don't tally with the facts, data and opinion polls.

Of course, I picked a difficult example: car ownership has soared, along with our living standards.

Our living standards have soared, haven't they?

Well, why do so many people want to go back to some kind of golden era of yesteryear? Perhaps 1954 would be the perfect year for us to roll the clock back to: when rationing ended.

"Britain's full" we hear. Certainly, many of us perceive overcrowding, congestion, heavy traffic, problems making a doctor's appointment, problems getting our kids into the school we want our little darlings to go to. What the hell? And there's always some darkies in the queue too... it must be all those mozzies, right?

The liberal metropolitan elites [like me] will tell you that you're imagining things. You're just not colourblind enough. If you squint your eyes - like a Chinaman - you'll see that your crowded train carriage actually has plenty of seats, and the few passengers are white men wearing hats, reading broadsheet newspapers and puffing pipes.

There's clearly a mismatch between perception, reality and what the 'facts' tell us. How can Britain have filled up when the population has only increased by 30%?

Let's look at the example of the economic migrant.

I don't live in The City of London. I live out near Canary Wharf and commute into the Square Mile for work. I migrate each day, for economic reasons. The official population of the City is 12,000 people, but in fact the population on a miserable Monday morning is more like 400,000. That's a 33 fold increase. That's a helluva migration every day.

In the desperate struggle of the rat race, both parents are now working, when previously the husband's sole income was adequate for the household's meagre expenses. I'm sorry to be so heteronormative, but women were housewives and men were the breadwinners. With sexual equality comes a doubling of the workforce, taking up space on the trains and roads, struggling to get to work each morning.

If both parents are working, who's going to clean the house? We're going to need a Lithuanian cleaner. Who's going to look after the kids? We're going to need a Spanish au pair. Who's going to prepare lunch? We're going to need an Italian sandwich maker.

We cluster together where all the jobs are: London and the South-East. We all commute huge distances on horribly overcrowded transport networks, because it's cheaper for our employers to build massive office blocks. The more office blocks you get in one place, the bigger the pool of potential employees, creating a liquid market for commoditised humans.

Most of the UK is an also-ran. Who gives a fuck about job losses across the whole country, when London earns so much tax for the treasury and financial services dominates 80% of the 'economy'.

Of course, it's disingenuous to think that the coal mines are going to re-open, the demand for steel can remain constantly high forever, and there will always be a need for unskilled manual labour. However, didn't we forget that a lot of people have been thrown onto the scrap heap, because we only worship facts and figures, not lives?

Is it possible that the knuckle-draggers  -- who hanker for a yesteryear of homophobia, sexism, bigotry and an empire riding roughshod over the developing world -- also have a small handful amongst their number who are right? Their quality of life would have been a lot better when they could have afforded to buy a house, get married, have kids and earn a living without having to resort to government handouts, black market jobs, benefit fraud, drug dealing and other degrading things.

I feel like I need to be the liberal metropolitan elitist who empathises with the plight of the scrounger, the NEET, the JAM family, the council-estate dwelling na'er do well. It's terribly patronising, but what have the unwashed masses noticed that we haven't?

I'm not even allowed to raise the questions without tarring myself with the brush we lazily swish over the enemies of progress: bigot, xenophobe, homophobe, FASCIST!

I hate UKIP, Nigel Farage, Donald Trump and their ilk, but they're shrewd in their observation that people have detected a certain lack of greatness in their once-great nations. Perhaps they weren't great places to be an educated black gay woman, in those yesteryear eras, but isn't politics about the greater good, to some extent? We don't have to lynch the blacks for the benefit of the whites. Trump et. al. have emboldened the racists, and that's awful, but why are they so angry?

Until the liberal metropolitan elites can accept that "[poor ill-educated] white male" has become a pejorative term amongst a sneering set of arrogant, privileged people who rule over them, doesn't it seem obvious that the anger is going to boil over?

Football, X-Factor, Big Brother and all of the other distractions and titillations are inadequate to contain the dissatisfied masses: they don't have any prospects; they don't have anything to hope for, except for a life of miserable poverty; they're unwanted in 'their own' country.

That's what "take are (sic) country back" means... it means that through the Internet, the masses have figured out that they outnumber the rulers and their court, and they want their fair slice of the pie. They've been misdirected into blaming immigrants, because that's always the last desperate ploy played by the greedy people who control the country. The simple fools don't even realise that the rich get even richer during times of war and conflict. Who's going to fight this imaginary fight that we're being whipped into national hysteria over? It will be the poorest, least educated and least privileged who will lose out, yet again.

Sadly, unless income inequality and declining living standards are addressed, there's little to offer the angry people except a cathartic bloodletting. Obviously, it offends my liberal sensibilities to see anger misdirected at the hardworking immigrants who cook me delicious halal food and act as a kind of lightning rod, stopping me from getting beaten up as a yuppie... a gentrifier.

What happened to class warfare? What happened to the labour movement? What happened to revolution?

TV melted your brain, dude.

Tags: #politics

This is a story about having fun...

If you need to prove that you're good at drinking and taking long holidays, university is an excellent choice. If you have wealthy middle-class parents, don't know what you want to do with the rest of your life except avoid working (you're right - work is boring and shit) then why not take a gap-yah or two and spend as long as you can in full-time education? Study now. Pay later.

Did you select your A-levels based on the degree course that you wanted to study? Did you make sure you have as many languages and extracurricular activities on your university application as possible? Did you make sure you've got some volunteering or Duke of Edinburgh award, or some other bollocks to make you look like more of a model student?

Next question: did you pick your degree based on the job you wanted at the end of your studies?

There are a limited number of professions that require undergraduate or postgraduate qualifications. To enter into law, medicine, accountancy, teaching, dentistry, veterinary surgery and a handful of other fields, you cannot legally practice without membership of a professional body, who usually mandate that you have followed a proscribed educational path.

In short: you only really need to go to university if a degree is absolutely necessary in order to get the job you want, right?

Wrong.

What about fun? What about staying with like-minded peers. While those who are not academically gifted (read: thick as pig shit) go on to have fulfilling lives in prison, on remand, on probation and tending their many illegitimate children, the brightest bunch will get into thousands of pounds of debt while having an extended infancy. Who wouldn't enjoy spending their student loan on beer and drugs?

Have I missed something?

Yes.

While I fumbled my way through my career, hamstrung by the fact that I was 3 to 5 years younger than my peers on British Aerospace's graduate trainee program, I had missed out on living in a dog-shit untidy flat with a load of selfish arseholes, having some lovely girlfriends and making lifelong friends, while growing up amongst a peer group of likeminded individuals in ostensibly the same circumstances. My first few years after college fucking sucked. Yes, I had money, but I was fucking lonely and miserable.

After a couple of years I became fucked off with the ageism and went in search of a company that would give me a proper opportunity to prove myself. With another job as a stepping stone, I got into IT contracting by the age of 20. I was earning £34 an hour, plus VAT. It was a king's ransom and I started to use money to fill the hole that would ordinarily have been filled with tales of happy 'student days'.

By the time Y2K came around I was working at Harbour Exchange, on the backbone of the Internet. I was doing some software development for Lloyds TSB on their telephone exchange (PABX) software. My Docklands Light Railway journey to work each day took me past two enormous holes in the ground: the foundations of the HSBC and Citibank towers that flank 1 Canada Square: the UK's tallest building. Career-wise, I had won. I was earning 6-figures at the tender age of 21. Fuck you, graduates.

When did I ask myself "what do I really want to do with my life?" or "what do I enjoy doing?"

Never.

Who can afford to dream?

If you've got somebody underwriting your risk; if you've got a loving family; if you have wealth... sure, go ahead, dare to dream. If you haven't, you'd better be pragmatic. We saw what happened to me when I slipped. Was anybody there to catch me? No fucking way. I was homeless, destitute. Neither my family nor the state intervened. There's no safety net for me. Failure means failure. Complete and utter failure, destruction and destitution.

And so, I don't choose to do what I want, work where I want, consider what I want. I take the job that pays and I get on and I do it. I'm cynical and I moan about it, but what's the alternative? Flipping burgers for minimum wage? A shop doorway that smells of piss and sneering government employees begrudging me a pittance of a support allowance... not enough to escape poverty.

I'm almost incensed by people who suggest I should retrain, or at least choose work that I hate a little less. That's madness, for me. I just don't have anybody underwriting my risk. I'm already leveraged to the max: all-in, bollocks on the chopping block.

The annoying thing is that it works.

I fucking hate the whole stupid fucking industry that I'm mixed up in. I'm doing the same shit I was doing when I was 21. Wouldn't you be, if the rewards were the same for you? Think about what you could do with all that money. Imagine having a 5-figure paycheque every month.

But it's not like that.

I'm so fucking serious.

Take that 6-figure job, but get rid of your lifelong friends. Get rid of those memories of meeting people on freshers week. Get rid of those memories of student halls, the NUS bar, living away from home for the first time, your proper girlfriend/boyfriend who you were mad about. You can kiss those 3+ years you spent discovering your adult identity goodbye. You'll be financially rich, but you'll be miserable, lonely and insecure. You won't have that piece of your identity that says you belong to some club: the town or city where you studied, the campus, the finals, the dissertations... the grade, the diploma, the graduation.

Take those happy memories, and instead replace them with being at least 3 years younger than your closest peer, and having to work several times harder to overcome the impression that you're less experienced, less developed, less able. Of course, I was inexperienced: I was living away from home for the first time. When I threw up on a night out, it wasn't with other students who were doing the same, but with work colleagues. At university it was a fun rite of passage shared with others who had done exactly the same thing. I really don't advise doing it as part of your career, although it's a somewhat unavoidable part of life that has to be done at some point. In my defence, I was tricked into eating a Dorset Naga chilli pepper.

Moan, moan, moan.

Anyway, I got my gap-yah. I had my 3 years of living in appalling conditions and getting fucked up on a non-stop rollercoaster of sex, drugs and drink, with few responsibilities. I had long holidays. I got a stupendous education that I certainly won't forget in a hurry. Bizarrely, I did even get a certificate at one point. I kid you not.

"University of life" is rather synonymous with people who the elites rather like to sneer at, but consider this: there are a lot of smart people who don't get to go to university, because they don't have wealthy middle-class parents underwriting their risk. The point that I missed - and I regret - is that it's better if you stick with the herd. My peer group went to university and I didn't, and for that reason I became even more isolated and lonely. My parents successfully sabotaged my childhood by moving me all over the fucking country, but I made the final mistake by not seeing the value in fucking about for 3+ years with likeminded individuals, as far away from my c**tish parents as I could get.

I've come back to bitching and whining, full of bitterness and regret, but isn't it apt? Here I am, about to secure another contract doing the same old thing, the same old way. Sure, I can do it, but can I fondly reminisce about the journey that brought me to this point? Do I share the journey onwards with lifelong adulthood friends?

No.

My life was fractured in my childhood. I'm on a different path from my peer group. Having fun and having friends is not for me: I've been told that from a very early age.

Tags: #childhood #parents #career #university

Contents

Chapter 1: The Caravan

Chapter 2: Invisible Illness

Chapter 3: The Forest

Chapter 4: Prosaic

Chapter 5: The Van

Chapter 6: Into the Unknown

Chapter 7: The Journey

Chapter 8: Infamy

Chapter 9: The Villages

Chapter 10: Waiting Room

Chapter 11: The Shadow People

Chapter 12: Enough Rope

Chapter 13: The Post Offices

Chapter 14: Unsuitable Friends

Chapter 15: The Chase

Chapter 16: Self Inflicted

Chapter 17: The Holiday

Chapter 18: Psychosis, Madness, Insanity and Lunacy

Chapter 19: The Hospitals

Chapter 20: Segmentation

Chapter 21: The Cell

Chapter 22: Wells of Silence

Chapter 23: The Box

Chapter 24: Jailbird

Chapter 25: The Scales

Chapter 26: Descent

Chapter 27: The Syringe

Chapter 28: Anonymity

Chapter 29: The Imposter

Chapter 30: Wish You Were Here

25. The Scales

The crisis team - part of the community mental health team - social services and the police had all been quite helpful when Neil had originally gone missing. The police had quickly discovered that Neil had left his phone, wallet and passport behind. All the services were very concerned about Neil's welfare and had attempted to establish his last known movements as well as searching for him. Because Neil was considered a vulnerable person at risk of suicide, there had been a lot of initial effort, focus and attention on helping Lara, Colin and the family to make sure he was found safe and well.

With all avenues exhausted, there was little more that any of the services could do unless new information emerged. Lara and Colin were main points of contact, liaising with a police detective who was in charge of the ongoing - but parked - investigation.

Frustrated with a lack of progress, two highly regarded private investigators were contacted by Colin. After initial discussions they decided that there was insufficient evidence for them to be able to pursue the case. The truth was that nobody really wanted to touch the case, because of the number of government bodies already involved: National Health Service, mental health services, the police and social services.

Colin had eventually taken matters in to his own hands and gone to the house to look for more clues, when he found the transactions that had led him to the ongoing prosecution of the businesswoman and her associates. Once he'd found the names of the defendants, it was a simple case of searching the register of directors and finding the trading address of their company in the public records.

Now, he was back at the house once again. He regretted involving Lara so closely, but she wanted to play an active role and had discovered vital information that he himself - a grey-haired man in his sixties - would have been unlikely to have been able to extract from anybody embroiled in the court case.

Colin had sounded out friends - retired police officers, solicitors and even a judge - about bringing their own case to court. "Not a hope in hell" were the exact words of one former Justice of the Peace. His sentiments were pretty much echoed by everybody else Colin consulted informally.

"Imagine if a person was selling rat poison as heroin" said Bill, the retired judge. "Now, if that person was to sell rat poison in place of sugar, they might be convicted of murder or manslaughter. But as soon as they sell it as heroin, they'll be convicted for supply of a controlled substance, even though rat poison is not illegal to sell per se."

"But that's insane! Surely the charge of murder should take precedence over the charge of supplying a controlled substance" protested Colin.

"Well, it's about the buyer. If the buyer thought they were buying heroin, then nobody really cares whether that junkie dies. The seller will be convicted as a drug dealer, not a murderer."

"So the law really doesn't care whether you sell a junkie sugar, caffeine, heroin or rat poison?" asked Colin.

"Yep."

"What if the buyer didn't know what they were getting?"

"What did they actually buy?" Bill asked.

"A controlled substance."

"What was it sold as?"

"A chemical for laboratory research."

"There's no chance it could have been confused for a foodstuff? Was it marked as hazardous? Unfit for human consumption?"

"Yeah. It's not like it was sold as sugar or anything" Colin replied.

"Well then, the only conviction you could possibly get would be for supply of a controlled substance."

To make matters worse, everybody advised Colin not to mention the drug use to the police. One whiff of drug abuse and the case would be filed in a dustbin marked 'lost cause junkie'.

Back at the house searching for more clues, he looked high and low before finally he decided to search the attic. Boxes of Christmas decorations and long-neglected exercise equipment, the attic contained very little else except for a disused hot water cylinder and a galvanised metal cold water tank. There was a chipboard lid on the tank and Colin noticed that it was an inch or so out of place, overhanging on one corner. Lifting the lid, there was a green plastic box floating inside with a black plastic handle.

In the kitchen, Colin towelled off the green box so it was clean and dry and took it through to the dining room. Unclasping the two black plastic latches, the lid was stuck tight until the airtight and dust proof seal released the pressure. Inside the box was grey foam to protect the delicate instrument contained within: a laboratory-grade weighing scale.

Normal kitchen scales might tell you the weight of something in grams, but not very accurately. If you needed to weigh 10 grams - approximately the same as a one pound coin - then your kitchen scales would be woefully inadequate. Even fine balance scales with small weights would struggle to weigh anything lighter than a gram. Some digital scales could weigh one tenth of a gram with reasonable accuracy: 0.1g. The scales that Colin had found could weigh at a sub-milligram accuracy. Less than 0.001 grams. Even breathing on the instrument or standing too near the table on a wooden floor would cause measurement fluctuations, so there was a special stand, cover and calibration weights to ensure the readings were accurate. The "quick reference" instruction manual inside the case was a hefty pamphlet.

There were some spatulas and a metal dish inside the green box. A tiny amount of light brownish powder residue was visible on the foam that held the dish and the spatulas. There was also a very small plastic resealable bag which was almost empty except for the tiniest residue of powder in the corners.

Colin spent the whole next day searching the Internet and phoning testing facilities, before he finally located a laboratory that would be able to swab and test the tiny traces of drugs that he had found. Using gas chromatography mass spectrometry, the lab was able to then search the 'signature' of the chemical compounds and to find a match in their database.

After sending the scales by courier to the lab in the Netherlands, it took 3 weeks before he got the results emailed to him. There was no conclusive match, but there were several compounds that were 97% similar to chemicals that were held in their database. He had been warned that a 99% match was the highest that he could expect anyway, so it was a good start.

Searching the Internet, he found detailed online encyclopedia entries for two chemicals, as well as a brief summary of a third. The compounds were stimulants from three different families of drugs. Two had been developed and patented in the 1950's and 1960's, but had never been marketed to the public because of serious side effects. Colin found a shorter acronym form of the full chemical name of each of the three compounds and started to search the Internet for more information.

Quickly, Colin was immersed in a world of online discussion forums. Thousands of Internet users from around the globe were talking about their experiences of self-experimentation with chemical compounds that had been abandoned by pharmaceutical companies or not even patented. Some of the chemicals had only been thought of as theoretically possible, but a laboratory somewhere in the world was cooking up these drugs for people to buy and try on themselves.

He couldn't read any more. What he saw was immediately horrifying. Hundreds of stories of addiction and horrible psychotic episodes, health damage and hospitalisations. Internet users were swapping stories about how awful these chemicals were and that they were the most addictive drugs they'd ever tried. Many lamented the day they ever first experimented. One message stood out as clearly as the obvious warning to never take these substances: accurate measurement was the difference between desired effects and overdose.

Perhaps Neil had two sets of scales, but one set alone was worth almost £1,000. If he had overdosed at home, surely he would have been found there along with his scales?

From what Colin had read, a powerful dose of those drugs was just 0.005 grams. If Neil had half a gram delivered from China, that would be 100 doses. The effects would last well over 12 hours. That meant Neil would have been on a nonstop drug binge for 50 days with just one free sample, assuming he was measuring accurately.

He felt sick. His son had got mixed up with something so dangerous that it had overwhelmed him and taken his life in the blink of an eye. There was no way to sugar coat this. Was there even any point in telling Lara and the family that Neil had been completely consumed by addiction and stimulant psychosis? In less than 6 weeks these powerful Chinese drugs caused him to flee his home to his final resting place.

Next chapter...

Contents

Chapter 1: The Caravan

Chapter 2: Invisible Illness

Chapter 3: The Forest

Chapter 4: Prosaic

Chapter 5: The Van

Chapter 6: Into the Unknown

Chapter 7: The Journey

Chapter 8: Infamy

Chapter 9: The Villages

Chapter 10: Waiting Room

Chapter 11: The Shadow People

Chapter 12: Enough Rope

Chapter 13: The Post Offices

Chapter 14: Unsuitable Friends

Chapter 15: The Chase

Chapter 16: Self Inflicted

Chapter 17: The Holiday

Chapter 18: Psychosis, Madness, Insanity and Lunacy

Chapter 19: The Hospitals

Chapter 20: Segmentation

Chapter 21: The Cell

Chapter 22: Wells of Silence

Chapter 23: The Box

Chapter 24: Jailbird

Chapter 25: The Scales

Chapter 26: Descent

Chapter 27: The Syringe

Chapter 28: Anonymity

Chapter 29: The Imposter

Chapter 30: Wish You Were Here

21. The Cell

"If you don't mind, please empty everything out of your pockets into this plastic tray."

Neil put his wallet, mobile phone, house keys, loose change, used tissue and a folded piece of paper into the grey plastic tray, which had a sticky label on it with "Neil - Room 8" written on it in red marker pen.

"Do you have anything sharp in any of your pockets that could hurt me? I'm afraid we have to check we've got everything."

"No."

The nurse patted Neil's clothes down and checked the waistband of his trousers and underpants.

"OK, would you mind taking off your belt and your shoes, please. Just pop your shoes down on the table here next to the tray."

Neil complied.

"We have to keep your belt, sorry. I saw you brought a dressing gown and we have to keep the cord from that too. We're also going to have to take the laces from your shoes. We'll go through your bag from home in a minute but you can't have necklaces, cables - such as mobile phone chargers - razors, scissors, keys or anything else sharp."

"OK."

"If it's alright with you, we'll hang on to your mobile phone and keep your wallet safe here at the nurse's station. If you need something for any reason, you can ask one of the staff to get it for you, but we'd really like you to try and relax and get used to the ward for the first few days, so we'll be keeping your phone right here."

The nurse was now coiling the dressing gown cord and putting it in the tray, as he went through rest of Neil's belongings.

"We have to keep aerosols here. If you need your razor you can have it while somebody supervises you shaving."

"I'm not feeling suicidal" Neil said.

"OK, that's great, but there are other patients here who might be. The bedroom doors aren't locked so we have to keep all these high risk items here for everybody's safety."

The nurse showed Neil to his room. The door had a window with a blind which could be opened and closed from the outside. There was a single bed with a foam mattress, a writing desk, a plastic chair, an open wardrobe with drawers at the bottom, a sink and a plastic mirror screwed to the wall. A big window was secured with a wire tether so it could only be opened a few inches. There were no curtains. Across the hallway there was a wet-room with a shower. There was no shower curtain. There were no locks on any of the doors.

"Get yourself settled and then come and sit in the lounge. We try to encourage patients to not spend time in their rooms during the day."

Neil sat on his bed with his bag next to him for a few minutes. He thought about unpacking but he really didn't want to give the impression that he was OK about being detained in hospital against his will. He'd been told to bring a few essential clothes and toiletries. Visitors could bring him anything else he needed once he'd settled in.

In the main part of the ward, there was a lounge at one end with several sofas arranged around a big TV which was hung on the wall. At the other end of the room were a number of tables and chairs. There was a nurses' office and two rooms with sofas in, which had big windows so you could see in and out. There was a doctors' office and an examination room which were private. There was a door leading to the male bedrooms and another one leading to the female bedrooms. A recreation room had a pool table, table tennis table and books in it, as well as a number of patients' artworks displayed on the walls. There was also a small kitchen for the patients to be able to make their own drinks and snacks.

A noticeboard displayed a timetable of the week's events, which had many of the same things that Neil was familiar with from day hospital: art therapy, music therapy, drama therapy and community meetings. A whiteboard had the first names of the 18 patients who were staying on the ward, with their allocated nurse's name written next to it in green marker pen. The ward was at its maximum capacity, with 9 men and 9 women.

There was a dispensary hatch where patients would queue up to get their medication several times a day. There was a door that led out to a small courtyard surrounded by high walls on all sides. That was both the smoking area and the only place that patients were allowed outside without staff supervision.

CCTV cameras were everywhere, except in the bedrooms and bathrooms. The ward was secure but the patients were considered low risk. There was only one locked door between the ward and the main corridor of the hospital that led to the other wards and facilities. For a few days, Neil had to stay on the ward, but then staff members were allowed to escort him to and from the drama studio, art studio and music room.

Some of the patients had obvious scarring on their arms where they had cut themselves. A girl's neck was bandaged. Other patients had problems that were more subtle. A man with a big beard smelt of pooh and always wore pyjamas. Many were quiet and withdrawn and a few would shout randomly, talk or sing to themselves.

"BBC one, BBC two, ITV" a man started. "Channel four" he said, raising his voice an octave higher. He repeated this same phrase over and over in a lyrical and rhythmic way, like he was chanting a mantra. It was quite catchy and Neil found it stuck in his head too.

"I just want to be dead."

This is what Michael said loudly every single morning before breakfast. Neil was a late riser, but he could hear his fellow patient shouting all the way down the corridor.

"OK, Michael. Time for your morning medication" a staff member would coo, coaxing him towards the dispensary hatch. Michael would shuffle along in his slippers. By the time Neil got up for breakfast, Michael would be sat quietly at a table with a vacant stare and a half-eaten bowl of cereal in front of him.

"NEIL! What are you having for breakfast?" Nicole shrieked with excitement.

Nicole was young but some developmental disorder meant that she was even more childlike. Her eyes were always half-closed with her bottom lip protruding. Saliva dripped liberally from her mouth. However, despite her tenuous grasp on almost all aspects of reality, she had latched onto Neil, much to his annoyance.

"I don't know. I might have toast."

"I was going to have toast."

"Actually, I might have corn flakes." he toyed with her.

Nicole hesitated for a moment, looking crestfallen. Then her face lit up.

"I'm going to have corn flakes."

Neil swiftly poured himself some rice crispies and dashed out of the kitchen to find a table with only one spare seat.

"Those aren't corn flakes, Neil." said Nicole, coming out of the kitchen and looking with dismay at her own bowl. "Sit here with me" she gestured, standing by an unoccupied table.

"How's it going?" Neil asked a patient who he didn't know, sat at the table next to him, ignoring Nicole's entreaties.

"Not great" the man replied.

Nicole huffed and sat down to eat her breakfast. A staff member rushed over to join her, fearing there would be an upset outburst if the poor girl felt too overlooked.

In his first three weeks in hospital, Neil saw the psychiatrist three times. He had a few meetings with mental health nurses and a physical health check-up, but his life was one of ordered institutional hospital routine: medication, mealtimes, planned activities and lots of time spent watching TV.

Suddenly losing his liberty had been terrifying and his natural instinct was to yell for lawyers, demand his human rights and to complain about the arbitration that had led to him now being held under lock and key. However, he also feared the power of the state institutions. The police, the National Health Service, the government, the law: he was no match for these massive entities and he knew that he would only make things worse for himself if he made a fuss.

He now deeply mistrusted the system and regretted seeking medical help at all. He felt betrayed by his doctors, he felt that the medications had made him sick, he felt that the crisis team and Lara had conspired to lock him up. He was angry that the police were used for his "welfare" when he really felt they simply provided the muscle to drag him away from his home if he tried to fight for his freedom.

Neil's faith in medicine had been completely shattered, but now, as he lay contemplating his wrecked body he knew he urgently needed medical help. He was dying.

The can of cola that he had found in the shopping bag he'd left outside the caravan had worked its way quickly through to his bladder and he needed the toilet. Grabbing a half-full glass from a nearby shelf, he urinated into it. His urine had been getting more and more cloudy and smelled terrible, but now there was a copious amount of blood present.

His organs were failing. His lungs were flooding with fluid that he couldn't cough up. His chest was tight and his breathing was laboured. His ankles were swelling up as his heart struggled to pump blood around his body. His dehydration and malnutrition had reached the point where his body had start to eat itself and his muscles were wasting away. He was so fatigued that he struggled to move and he blacked out from low blood pressure if he raised his head too quickly.

Death in the filth and darkness of the caravan was nearly upon him.

Next chapter...

This is a story about slavery...

Do you have to run just to stand still? Does it seem like no matter how hard you try, you just can't get ahead? Why is it that the only time you're going to get to enjoy any leisure time, is when you're sick and old?

Even if I owned my own home outright, I would still need to pay council tax, gas, water, electric and sewerage. Even if I grew all the vegetables I needed and never left my plot of land, I would still need to raise a significant sum of money every single month.

Let's assume that I had solar panels, wind turbines and I heated my own water using firewood from my own trees. Let's assume I got water from my own well, and I operated my own miniature sewerage plant, so I could release my processed effluent back into the water table, without breaking environmental protection laws. I would still have to pay council tax.

I don't object to council tax. Council tax pays for the police, who will protect my self-sustaining home from being burgled. Council tax pays for the fire service, who will come and douse my house with water, in the event that it should catch alight.

If I never leave the house, I grow everything I eat and compost everything I waste, then I have no use for dustbin collection, and I have no use for street lighting or roads. I have no use for car parks. I have no use for regular parks and recreation grounds.

Furthermore, I have no use for schools or libraries. I certainly have no use for councillors, council officers and other civil servants.

Let's assume I surround my land with a 15-foot electrified fence, topped with razor wire. Let's assume that I install a sprinkler system, and have my own high-pressure hoses and firefighting training. I would still have no exemption from paying council tax. Paying council tax is my civic duty, because of the air that I breathe in a particular county.

This isn't a rant about how "taxation is theft". I'm just pointing out that there's no such thing as a free man in the United Kingdom. Somebody will always want something from you, even if you're minding your own business, being totally self-sufficient and working in harmony with nature and the land.

Very few people would be able to buy a sufficiently large plot of land to be able to grow enough trees to give them a lifetime's supply of firewood. Also, you're going to need somewhere to grow all those vegetables you're going to eat. You're probably going to need greenhouses and polytunnels to grow more frost-sensitive fruit & veg.

There's capital expenditure necessary to buy a wind turbine and a lifetime of spares for any repairs. Solar panels don't come cheap, and they have a finite lifespan. You're going to need a shittonne of batteries, so that you can store energy for when it's not windy or sunny.

You're going to need a well insulated house with a wood-fired boiler to heat hot water as well as to keep you warm in winter. Your home is going to have to be super energy efficient, because you don't have much electricity, so you'll use LED lighting and cook on a wood-fired stove. You won't be able to use a washing machine, dishwasher, tumble dryer, electric oven, microwave, electric hob, hairdryer, electric heater or other electricity consuming units.

Then, to keep your smallholding running, you're going to need tons of tools and machinery. Doing it all on your own means you'll want a petrol-powered rotivator, strimmer, lawnmower and a bunch of chainsaws to chop up all that firewood. You'll need lots of gardening equipment to make sure you're growing enough food to keep yourself nourished the whole time. You'll need lots of building equipment, to make sure you keep your house repaired and maintained.

If you don't have a well on your plot of land, you're going to have to dig a borehole and install a pump. Building a sewerage processing plant is no small investment of time, labour and materials, and probably not something you would do yourself, although you would be responsible for ongoing maintenance: a lovely job.

Remember, you're also going to need a lifetime's supply of petrol, engine oil and other consumables such as soap, toothpaste, spare lightbulbs etc.

So, after all this, your miniature self-sustaining estate has probably set you back the best part of £1 million, and you still have to work full-time to tend to your fruit and vegetables, and maintain all the equipment that generates power, pumps water, pumps sewage etc. etc.

Worst of all, you're going to have to sell some of the fruit & veg that you produce to pay your council tax, so really, you're not very free at all.

You may end up busting your balls in all weather, just so some council bureaucrat can take paid sick days and generally not work very hard at all.

Through economies of scale, farmers can harvest the crop in huge fields in a single day, when previously it would have taken men and women all summer to do it with sickles and scythes. Something as basic as a masonry nail is incredibly hard for a blacksmith to make, but in factories, vast quantities of goods like nails can be produced much more cheaply, in terms of labour effort.

"The good life" and nostalgia for a time of peasantry is nothing more than stupidity. Only a tiny handful of people blessed with inherited wealth can be idle in the countryside, doing the occasional spot of gardening, and otherwise spending their trust fund income in Waitrose and charging around the countryside in a gas-guzzling Range Rover.

Thus, I don't believe in communism, with its emblem of the sickle and hammer. Growing your own vegetables, or making ornate ironwork is a nice hobby, but we don't want to return to the era of blacksmithing and working in the fields. The combine harvester is a thing of great progress, as is the ability to mass-produce metal goods in factories.

The communes that sprang up in California in the 1960s and 1970s all failed, because they were set up by lazy bums who just wanted to sit around smoking dope. When they ran out of money, they found that they had been subsidising their stupid middle-class fantasies all along. Eventually power struggles tore the little hippy communities apart, but they were doomed to failure from the start.

In climates where the need for heating is less pronounced and the crop yields can be much higher, there are already population problems. For sure, you can go and buy a plantation in the developing world relatively cheaply, but aren't you then headed down the colonial path? When you employ local labour to till the fields, because it's too hot to do it yourself, you've then economically enslaved your workforce.

The division of labour is a hard problem to solve, but there is also dignity in labour, if you're doing something that you feel is productive and useful. Perhaps the high sickness rates in local government are due to the fact that their staff know that all they're doing is pushing paper around their desks and looking busy. It doesn't feel morally right, to tithe the estates of the hard-working men and women who are working the land, only to spend it on fancy offices, coffee machines and watercoolers.

Eventually, I decide that we must move to a model of state-owned enterprise for everything that's in the public interest: transport, education, healthcare. But where do you stop? What about housing, food and clothing?

Clearly the technocrats of the Soviet Union completely failed in their attempts at central planning, but can we be sure that there's less wasteful use of resources in private enterprise? My experiences certainly don't bear this out. Every company I've ever worked for has been full of idle incompetent fucktards. That's not supposed to happen in capitalism. Capitalism is supposed to lead to efficiency.

If we look at the vast amounts of food and energy that are wasted by the United States and Britain, we can be certain that capitalism is a failed model for the efficient use of labour and scarce resources, and the fair distribution of wealth. Capitalism has failed every single test, including its ability to weed out the 'bad apples'. One only has to look at the 2008 financial crisis to see that the idea of market efficiency has been replaced by monstrous monopolies: enterprises that are too big to fail, but are bleeding our economy dry.

The banks need to be nationalised. The railways need to be re-nationalised. No more council houses can be sold off. Any private parts of the National Health Service need to be re-nationalised, and a huge cull of middle-management dead wood needs to happen. Executive pay needs to be capped, and those who wish to work in public services should be proud to be performing their civic duty for their fellow citizens.

Of course, wealth will flee offshore. Investors will panic. Let them.

The assets are here. The workforce is here. We don't need the paper money created by the plutocrats. We can rebase our currency back to a sensible gold standard, forgive all loans and start over. Clean slate.

One only has to study the German economic miracle to see that these reforms can work, do work, and will transform a country into one of happiness and productivity.

The strategy of trying to print money to get out of economic trouble, and enforce bad policy with a police state and martial law, is always doomed to failure. We are at the tipping point. Things could boil over at any moment.

So, the Western world finds itself at a crossroads: to continue with the folly, down a path that has always led to ruin for past civilisations, or to learn from the lessons of history, and take the alternative route.

Tags: #politics #economics #capitalism

This is a story about reality checks...

When you're amplifying a signal - for example, a microphone connected to a public address loudspeaker - then you have to be careful that you don't get the microphone too close to the speakers, or else you will get horrible feedback.

My blog is read by friends who've known me for years & years, but I very rarely meet up with them. Sometimes I get an email or a Facebook message, and it's jaw-dropping that they understand me and what I've been going through so well. The usual trite platitudes (e.g. "why don't you try getting more exercise?") are certainly applicable to anybody and it does show that you care, but it's a wonderful experience when I communicate with friends and they've got all this background info on me.

Regarding my blog, only very rarely will anybody ever present an alternative opinion, or challenge me. I think I have a fairly persuasive manner of putting a point across, and I write with a great deal of certainty; forcefulness. It must be somewhat intimidating: the idea of potentially entering into debate with me.

A strange thing starts to happen when you think about things in isolation too much. Because I work with boolean algebra for a living, I start to think of everything as binary: there's a right answer and a wrong answer. I can use a lot of deductive reasoning to arrive at a set of beliefs that evolved purely from logic - a priori - as opposed to being shaped by experiences, discussions and human relationships. I labour the same points, over and over again, becoming ever more certain in my convictions and better and better at defending my position; entrenched in my stance.

It's quite satisfying to present your thesis quod erat demonstrandum.

Weirdly, if nobody calls you out on anything, then you assume that you must have made a valid unassailable point. When somebody does call you out on something, then things get a bit more fun, because you have to decide whether to dig into your trenches and defend, or whether to concede the validity of an alternative viewpoint that had not been considered.

I used to have a certain attitude that could be surmised as follows:

"Fuck you. You're wrong"

Once you have constructed a fairly infallible piece of logical reasoning, being told "no, I disagree" is the most frustrating thing in the world. You can't just disagree with something. It's point/counterpoint. You need to make your own reasoned counterargument. Contradiction is just stupidity. It's very frustrating to deal with people who don't even realise that they're complete idiots.

I deal with idiots for a job: they're called computers. If I tell a computer to jump off a cliff, it will do it. Computers just follow my instructions to the letter. Computers follow my logic with 100% precision. Being a computer programmer quickly teaches you how to logically reason things, leaving few loopholes. If you leave loopholes, these are called 'bugs'. Bugs will cause rockets to explode, trains to derail or aeroplanes to crash.

And so, a computer programmer arrives in the real world, and they're experts at spotting cognitive dissonance. "Fucking immigrants, coming over here, taking our jobs"... but, but, but you're an immigrant, stutters the programmer, incredulous that somebody could be so stupid as to not see the flaw in what they're saying.

Anyway, I'm not even part of the debate. I'm watching from the sidelines, writing my manifesto; proselytising my theology; broadcasting my dogma. Nobody is questioning the validity of anything I'm saying. Nobody is challenging my assumptions. Nobody has yet said "you're wrong, and this is why...".

Even to say the word manifesto sends a shiver down my spine. I fear that I might have gone mad. There are so many vilified people and policies, linked to a manifesto. In Britain we are not particularly terrified of communism. Being called "red", "Marxist" or "Trot" is not even pejorative, to me. However, if you were to point out that Anders Breivik also wrote a manifesto, and so did Hitler, then I start to feel a little defensive.

But, how the hell are you supposed to develop a political ideology, if you don't write it down? If you can't express a set of values and ideals for the betterment of humanity, then what? Am I only allowed to select from a menu of just a few mainstream choices? Of course, this is what party politics wants. The idea is that we should vote for party, not policy. If we voted for policies that we wanted as citizens, we'd be getting dangerously close to having a democracy.

If voting made any difference, they wouldn't let us do it.

I worry like crazy about how isolated and weird I'm getting, honing my ideas and developing my system of values, without very often discussing what I'm thinking over a pint of beer, with a good friend in the pub. Obviously, one must be mindful that Mein Kampf was conceived while Hitler was in hospital, and started when he was incarcerated. It's mad to speak this aloud, but I'm always asking myself: "am I more like Hitler or Jesus".

Christian values are actually pretty cool. Forget the ten commandments, because, I mean, rape isn't even on there. Graven images: no frigging way! Rape: no problem.

Jesus Christ was an awesome dude. He basically founded the Occupy Wall Street movement when he turned over the tables of the money lenders in Herod's Temple. Does that make him an anti-semite though? Could that have been a hate crime, given that it was an attack on Jewish businessmen, in a holy Jewish temple. Certainly a controversy worth pondering.

Then you get to thinking that Jesus Christ, The Prophet Mohammed and Adolf Hitler, all thought that earning interest should be abolished. Hitler was a socialist, as was Stalin, but then so was Tony Blair and he started an illegal war that ended up killing hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis. It's all so damn confusing.

To my mind, if you have a political system that's successful for the vast majority of people, the educated bourgeois can go to hell. To hell with your freedom of speech. To hell with your attempts to pervert government to better serve your own needs, at the expense of the majority. Go buy yourself a desert island if you want to run things in your own selfish interests.

Eventually, I arrive at the decision that it might be better to just write a utopian novel that merely disguises my manifesto. It should be no surprise that I've extensively read Orwell and Huxley. However, the dystopian novels seem to have become instruction manuals for our governments. Perhaps novels are powerfully influential, in all the wrong ways.

I love the Roman idea of the forum. The Internet discussion forum is a wonderful invention. The online communities are a lovely place to inhabit.

My writing and debating skils - or lack thereof - were honed in the arena of the online discussion forum. In a way, I did a lot of growing up, by reading, writing, trolling, debating and very often being shot down in flames.

Now, I have brought those writing skills, and the skill of making a reasoned argument expressed in a succinct and persuasive manner, to bear in the world of blogging.

I deliberately chose a non-Wordpress platform, because I wasn't looking for yet another blog and to connect with yet more bloggers. All the bloody comments sections are filled with other bloggers, link building back to their own blogs. It's such a ridiculous echo-chamber of people all clamouring for readers. How can you compose your thoughts and reach conclusions, when embryonic ideas are critiquéd so immediately?

I could have started to write on Medium, and I'm thrilled that my friend whose startup powers this blog, is now working for them. It might sound like intellectual snobbery, but there is a higher standard of writing and comments on Medium, than anywhere else on the 'Net right now.

But really, the biggest win for my blog has been to inform a bunch of my old friends from my discussion forum days, what the hell happened to me when I "went off the rails". It's been an opportunity to defend myself against malicious rumours. It's been an opportunity for me to ward off the shame and sense of failure, for things that happened.

Finally, the nicest thing happened the other day: I met up with a friend at the pub, and he reassured me that I'm still the same person who he knew, all those years ago, before the whole horrid mess in the middle. It's an immense relief to know your personality hasn't changed, your brain hasn't been damaged and the person that friends once knew, still lives and breathes and hasn't been replaced by some demonic creature.

Life is pretty hard without feedback, but equally, it's been useful to write at length without the debate that so ground me down and made me unwell before. It's a horrible thing, to be so misunderstood, and to feel like the people who are supposed to care about you are working against you. It's so hard to argue with multiple people at once. It's so hard to defend yourself against a mob.

Publishing is super powerful. Publishing is like a megaphone, to shout down the bullies.

However, the occasional reality check has very high value.

Tags: #writing #politics #friends

This is a story about conformity...

Why would you ever consent to being graded? Isn't that extremely degrading to have somebody sit in judgement over you and decide where you fit in the pecking order?

We don't have an education system. We are not educating our children.

Instead, we have a system that's designed to give us the best grades we can possibly afford, so that we will have better employment opportunities. Schools are businesses, and they need pupils to get funding, so they can pay all those lovely salaries. Teachers are judged on their students' exam results. Schools are chosen based on their exam results. Universities will offer places to those students with the best exam grades, but universities are money making machines, taking at least £27,000 for an undergraduate degree, from every student. Finally, employers will select prospective employees who have the best grades.

Imagine you gave up your childhood and a few of the prime years of your young adulthood, in order to get "A" grades and a first class degree from a top university. You worked your little socks off from the age of 5 to the age of 21. That's 16 years of hard labour. It wasn't an education. It was an exercise in grading. Your teachers didn't teach you. Instead, you were trained how to pass exams. The whole balance of incentives is such that only the grades matter. You just want the piece of paper at the end of it, so you don't have to take a shitty minimum wage zero hours contract McJob.

So, what happens when you graduate, take a graduate job, and then find what you're doing is utterly pointless bullshit?

What happens when those 16 lost years of your life mean that you're saddled with debt and working some drastically underpaid job that won't even buy you a house anyway?

In the US, every man woman and child has a debt of $60,000, even if they don't even have a bank account and never personally borrowed any money. In the UK the figure is circa £30,000. This is money the government borrowed on your behalf. Even if you're financially prudent, and you don't spend money until you've earned it, that's certainly not what your government is doing.

In order to stand a chance of getting a half decent job, you reckon you need to go to college/university. In the US the average student loan debt is $35,000. In the UK you have to spend £27,000 on tuition alone, for a 3 year degree course. Of course, the UK figure doesn't include the money you need to live on. You can borrow a further £32,000 in order to pay your rent, food, transport and other costs of living at university. Basically, you're going to spunk the best part of £60,000 getting your degree.

So, you've spent 16 years of your life, having no life - your nose has been stuck in those books and you've been doing all your homework - and you're £90,000 in debt. Imagine you met the love of your life at university, you both graduated and you'd like to have a couple of kids. That means your household is going to be £240,000 in debt, before you even take out a mortgage. That's £60,000 of government debt for your two kids, £60,000 of government debt for you and your other half, and £120,000 for your two university degrees. God damn! You'd better get a job and start paying that debt off, because you haven't worked a day in your life at this point, even though you're now 22 years old.

Because you worked so damn hard to pass your 11+ exam, your grammar school entrance exam, or private school entrance exam, your GCSEs, your A-levels, your university entrance exam, your final year exams, your dissertation... you're pretty heavily invested now, aren't you? You gave up playing outside in the sunshine with your friends so you could do extra Latin and calculus. You gave up swigging cider in the park and shagging in a bush, so that you could be at home poring over your books. You gave up being debt free, so you could now have a £60,000 student loan like a millstone around your neck.

Guess what? Even having a good degree from a good university isn't enough. You probably need to become a lawyer or an accountant to set yourself apart from the McJob fodder. Lawyers in the US run up student debts in excess of $100,000. Here in the UK, you're going to have to pay an extra 2 years of tuition and living expenses, before you can even get a job in a law firm. You're going to pay the the law school £21,000 in tuition fees, plus you'll need another £20,000 for rent and living expenses, while you study. So, your student debt is now £100,000 before you even enter one of the professions.

Even a graduate with first-class honours from Oxford or Cambridge is not a professional. Having read classics does not seem immediately useful, given the lack of living people who speak Latin or Ancient Greek. While you have clearly marked yourself out as 'clever' in a rather abstract sense, you're not obviously employable because of your education. It is merely your grades that make you attractive to prospective employers.

Is it even very clever, to spend so much of your parents money on a private or public school education, squander your childhood on homework and piano recitals, saddle yourself with the best part of £100k of student debt, and then have the prospect of doing legal or accountancy work to help billionaires avoid paying tax.

The more you invest the more exposed you are. You're not going to take some lowly entry-level job, because you've got a goddam degree dontcha know? You're not going to question how absolutely dreadful the work is that you're doing, and how appalling the salary is, because it's a graduate job apparently. The job spec said "must have 2:1 degree from respected institution" so therefore it must be a good job, right?

Yeah, at least you're not flipping burgers for a living.

But, can you buy a house?

Nope.

You were conned. You studied hard for 16 long years. You stressed yourself to bits over every exam. Writing your dissertation was pure agony. You were so worried that you were going to fail. You could have failed at any moment. You could have failed to get into a good secondary school. You could have screwed up your GCSEs. You could have screwed up your A-levels. You could have screwed up your finals. You could have screwed up your dissertation.

You were so damn relieved on graduation day. Sure, it felt good to have your picture taken holding a scroll of parchment tied up with a red ribbon, wearing a black gown and a mortar board. Your mum has that picture of you up on the wall in the downstairs toilet. Every houseguest sees that photo of you, a fresh-faced 21 year old graduate, proudly clutching the bit of paper you worked hard for 16 years to get. They imagine that you must be terribly clever but little do they know that you're now working some dreadful office job, copying and pasting numbers in spreadsheets, like some kind of factory worker.

Maybe you were a bit smarter and you realised that everybody's got a damn degree these days. Perhaps you did a masters, a PGCE, went to law school, studied accountancy. Now you have a profession. You're a teacher, a lawyer, an accountant.

You studied the extra years. You did the training. You took the shitty entry-level salary. Now you're a qualified professional. You're a member of The Law Society, you're a chartered accountant, you've got Qualified Teacher Status (QTS). Guess what? You still can't buy a fucking house.

My suggestion is this: if your parents have money, don't fucking work your bollocks off and study hard. Get your parents to buy you a house and give you some money. You don't need to work. The world does not need any more corporate lawyers.

If you don't come from a wealthy family, for God's sake don't waste the prime years of your life following the same path as all the other drones. There's no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. School, university, graduate jobs... it's all just a miserable path that leads to debt and misplaced gratitude for a 'better' quality job, which is actually nothing of the sort.

I'm financially incentivised to stay doing what I'm doing, because I can buy a house and afford to have my family live in considerable comfort. My earning potential is a function of how able I am to say "fuck your shit" and go and get a better contract elsewhere, because I'm not driven by fear: fear that I have invested 16+ years of my life in a pointless piece of paper; fear that I have £60k to £100k of student debt that needs to be paid back; fear that I've been measured, graded, and that I know my place.

I don't know my place, because I never allowed myself to be graded. If somebody is turning me into a commodity, then I change my role. I'm very hard to pigeon hole. I'm very hard to label. I'll brand myself up as whatever I need to be in order to get the job, instead of harking back to my most recent academic or professional qualification. I have no qualms at saying "this bullshit job just ain't worth the pittance you pay" because I don't have this fetish for "graduate" or "professional" work.

In some narrow niche, you'll find that there's somebody who wants it worse than you. You'll find that somebody is prepared to study harder, longer, put more effort in. If you enter into the arms race, you'll find yourself competing in a completely unnecessary battle for something that's been created with artificial scarcity. Grades are not a precious rare metal dug out of the ground. There's a finite amount of gold on the planet, but there is no shortage of "A" grades or bullshit jobs.

The professional bodies are there to limit the numbers of people becoming lawyers, accountants, doctors, teachers and a whole host of other jobs that are better paid than flipping burgers. The only reason why those professions pay more than minimum wage is because artificial scarcity is created, by limiting the number of people who can qualify and practice those trades.

I never let my schooling interfere with my education. I taught myself how to program a computer, with the help of a couple of schoolfriends. I don't advise becoming a programmer today, because it's a crowded market, but there'll be something better that your kids can be doing instead of their damn homework. There's something you can be doing better than saving up money to help get your kids through university: buy them a damn car and a house, because they're never going to be able to afford things on their own, with the way things are going.

The education system was there to break our will and our sense of individuality, and prepare us for the workhouses. The education system is used for societal control. Your government wants obedient debt-laden citizens, who are grateful for a shitty made-up job. The plutocrats who rule your life want cheap labour, even though you think you've got a prestigious well-paid job. In actual fact, you know your place, and you have no social mobility at all.

We're moving beyond the era of the CV with your exam grades and other qualifications on there. The idea of sifting and sorting everybody, like grains of sand, ending up with the very finest particles graded right up to the grittier stuff... this is a flawed model.

Take your average super indebted grad today. Could they rewire a house? Could they fix the plumbing? Can they cook a fine meal? Could they organise an event? Can they lead people? Can they mend a car? Can they dress a wound? What are they like on a mountain? What are they like out at sea? What are they like in a crisis?

We're churning out people who are only good for one thing: regurgitating established facts and ideas. Parroting answers they've learned but don't understand. Passing exams.

Our kids these days don't pass exams because they've reasoned the answers from their knowledge and experience. Our kids these days don't make theoretical deductions. We have an exam passing machine that teaches our children how to pass tests, as opposed to educating them.

Everything's going to hell in a handcart because original ideas and critical thinking have no place in our education system or the world of bullshit jobs. We spend at least 16 years brainwashing our 'best and brightest' to be exam passers, box tickers, compliant little drones who all think and act the same way. The homogeny of bland corporate wage-slaves, churned out by the cookie-cutter 'education' system is frightening.

When sufficient numbers of people realise that they've been conned into giving away their youth, in return for a soul-destroying desk job that's mind-numbingly boring, but yet they can't buy a house, there's going to be rioting that far exceeds the disruption we saw in 2011, when it was the disadvantaged youths who took to the streets to protest their lack of opportunities and general contempt that is held for the underclass.

Debt will not prop things up forever. Without a wirtschaftswunder - debt forgiveness - the capitalists will destroy everything by demanding their pound of flesh. Empires always fall when debts are not forgiven and the proletariat are crushed by the weight of the idle elites who live in decadent luxury, while ordinary people struggle.

Teach your kids practical things. Let them play. Don't make them do their homework. Don't force them to practice an instrument "because it will look good on their university application". A new world is coming, and moulding kids in the shape of every other underpaid, underemployed corporate drone is not going to do them any favours.

Tags: #childhood #education #capitalism #politics