Low Life

Wednesday, 18th February 2009

Anger management

The other night, Jim, a pub landlord, was complaining angrily to me about the government. I listened but said nothing. Then he produced a newspaper clipping. It was an article about the British army’s latest sniper rifle. It had a range of, I forget what — two miles? In the wrong hands, said Jim, it would be possible for someone to lean out of an upstairs window in Lambeth and pot a New Labour politician fumbling for his car keys in the members’ car park of the House of Commons. In fact, I was looking at the wrong hands right now, he said, spreading them on the bar. Would I like to sponsor him on an assassination spree?

Actually, I detest this political class so much I think it’s making me mentally ill. From first thing in the morning, when I switch on my radio, until last thing at night, I’m in a permanent state of anger at this relentless assault on rationality, on decency, on the nation’s fund of good will. Have you ever heard such bare-faced lies from grown-ups before, or listened to such embarrassingly hollow denials? In modern times, has an English governing class ever before had such contempt for the people? And been so lacking in wit, style, good humour and courage? I’d really like to know.

‘The revolution we have made is a total one. It has encompassed every area of public life and fundamentally restructured them all. It has completely changed and restructured people’s relationships to each other, to the state, to questions of existence,’ wrote Joseph Goebbels in 1933, speaking on behalf of that other fabulously cynical client state, run by that other leftist, bohemian, race-obsessed clique. The revolution imagined and imposed by this current lot has involved fewer torchlight parades, but has been every bit as grandiose and almost as fatuous. To begin with, it was quite amusing to have a brand-new secular religion, based on a John Lennon song, imposed from above and enforced by legal statutes. The new value-free language that went with it was a bit of a laugh, too. Now the joke is on us and on our children and on their children. We’re ruined, apparently, and we’ve cashed in our freedoms to boot.

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Tomas

February 19th, 2009 8:18am Report this comment

Your second paragraph hit the spot.
By the way if you are short of a few bob happy to subscribe as a sponsor perhaps under the auspices of "Publicans for Political Progress"

Roger Carr

February 20th, 2009 11:51am Report this comment

"And I keep quiet because if I’m not mad, sweet heaven, and things are as wrong as they look to me, then I must save my breath for the long and bitter struggle ahead."
Beautiful, Jeremy... but sad.

John Savage

February 20th, 2009 8:22pm Report this comment

This is wonderful piece. Not only accurate but lyrical. Let's have more.

It seems as though the UK is currently governed by a conqueror but buds of resistance are beginning to show. Now where the bloody hell is David Cameron?

Martin Denning

February 24th, 2009 5:40pm Report this comment

Jeremy
Of all the brilliant pieces you have written for the Spectator, this has to be the best. Like you I hate the lying bastards and all they have done and are doing to ruin this country. Choked and speechless with rage describes it - which is why I am grateful to you for putting it into far better words than I could do.
Thank you.

Kasyan Bartlett

February 26th, 2009 6:16am Report this comment

Thank you for articulating what I have long felt. Much obliged.

simon

February 26th, 2009 1:21pm Report this comment

A beautifully written piece that needs wider circulation. We are like spectators at an appalling mugging hoping an election will come round quick enough to restore our sanity.

Jens Knocke

March 1st, 2009 1:15pm Report this comment

I read this yesterday evening (we get the Spectator with a long delay here), and in bed I stupidly read p.67 in "Ennemis publics", Michel Houellebecq / Bernard-Henry Lévy, where Houellebecq stresses his father's "impératif", namely to be dependent on nobody.

So I woke up at 5am unable to sleep again.