Cell Damage

Labour has hit the ground running.

We predicted tax rises. Foresaw the metastasising cancer of Woke shrivelling ever more of our culture and institutions. And prophesied a stalling, sclerotic, economy slipping ever further into the suffocating quagmire of Net Zero, like Artax, the horse in The NeverEnding Story.

What we didn’t anticipate was that Labour would hit the ground running, and go full on Tonto, absolute double nut job bat shit crazy crackers looney tunes, on Week One.

Well. You live and learn.

Our prisons are bursting at the seams, overcrowded with violent criminals and chock full of scumbags, villains, rapists, muggers and thieves.

With only 700 of a potential 84,000 male places currently available.

That’s a lot of crooks. To put it into context, if you set the British Army against Britain’s current prison population, the prisoners would have more than a 10,000 advantage. (84,000 crooks vs 73,520 soldiers)

Over 10,000 of the banged-up are foreign nationals. With Britain’s prisons home to everyone from Albanian crime lords, to West Indian drug barons, Romanian fraudsters, and Pakistani rape gangs.

I suppose it should give us some comfort that even within our creaky, overcrowded, failing penal system, Diversity is Our Strength.

Our new (social) Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood warns of Armageddon, that with nowhere left to put newly convicted crooks, our streets could become flooded with looters, bandits, thieves and dangerous criminals.

So to counter this apocalyptic threat she has announced a brilliant new plan. To release any inmate who has already served 40% of his sentence. And so flood our streets with looters, bandits, thieves and dangerous criminals.

Thank goodness the adults are back in the room.

When Labour said in its manifesto it would  ‘go for growth’ I didn’t realise what it intended to grow, was the number of burglaries, thefts and assaults visited on the innocent British public.

Whoops! Maybe we should have read the small print.

Perhaps it would be nice, if instead of letting out all these criminals to terrorise law abiding Britons, we could deport some of them instead.

But deporting criminals, like winning international football tournaments, or running a basic health service, seems currently beyond our capabilities.

OK. How about we build some more prisons?

But of course we can’t do that either. Because, 1.) we’re Britain, so we can’t build anything.  And 2.) the country is currently experiencing a massive labour shortage. And it’s not like we have a ready-made workforce of over 80,000 people sitting around all day, with nothing to do.

Putting the prison population to work might actually allow inmates to learn some useful skills, which could be helpful when they are inevitably released back into society, by Shabana Mahmood, twenty minutes into their sentence.

After all, a lot of rapists can find it tricky finding a job, and I guess they can’t all go into the police force.

Sure there would be a lot of NIMBYs protesting against a new prison being built in their back garden. But the beauty of my build-it-yourself scheme would be that after a short visit from Grouty, D-Wing’s Stabby Steve, and Big Mo the Acid Thrower, I expect the locals might be quickly ‘persuaded’ to drop any silly objections.

It’s an idea anyway.

Meanwhile our exciting new high octane Chancellor, Rachel Reeves claims to have finally ‘opened the books’ (what is Britain, a tea shop?) and discovered to her horror that the country’s finances are in a far worse state than she could have possibly ever hoped feared. Meaning that Labour will have no choice, come budget day, but make some easy decisions tough choices, and put up our taxes.

Because of course, our government, whether Labour or Tory, only ever entertains one solution when it runs out of our money. And that is, to take more of our money.

The idea that the largest government in seventy years might conceivably think about perhaps maybe possibly spending a teeny tiny bit less of it, never enters our bosses’ minds.

Reeves, a politician with all the charisma of a leaky bus shelter, claims robotically that she wants us all to be ‘secure’. But we are adult humans. Not suitcases on a roof rack.

Life is not secure. And when it comes to freedom vs security. You can have one, or the other, but you cannot have both.

(As an aside. I note my kids are no longer graded A, B, C etc on their schoolwork. Instead they are graded by their teachers on a scale of ‘emerging’, and ‘developing’ through ‘secure’ to ‘exceeding’. Maybe it’s a stretch, but I feel it’s no coincidence that Labour is conversing with voters using the same language teachers use to talk to schoolchildren.)

Of course one of the main reasons we’re skint is that we threw away £450 bn on lockdowns during the overblown covid feardemic terrifying covid pandemic.

An unnecessary, unscientific, and as it predictably turned out, unaffordable, response to an initially frightening virus, which we soon realised, only really targeted the very old, the very fat, and the very ill.

These facts were obvious to all by mid to late 2020, and yet Keir Starmer’s Labour Party continued to demand we lockdown harder, faster and longer than even the timorous trembling Tories would countenance.

Like a Davos sponsored Chicken Little, Starmer spent the entire shameful period panicking foolishly that the sky was falling in, demanding more furlough, more school closures, more PPI, more vaccines, and more money.

Now the cash has run out Labour are predictably up in arms, cursing the Tories for their profligacy.

The other reason there’s no cash left in Reeve’s imaginary ‘books’ is the war in Ukraine. Which was started, we now learn, on purpose, by Nigel Farage.

The conflict has caused a completely unpredictable shock to the world’s energy supply. I say unpredictable, it was predicted, by Donald Trump, but he’s a baddie, and we don’t listen to those.

A shame really, because Trump was entirely correct. Though when he pointed out that by relying on Russian energy, Germany, and thus Europe, was fast becoming a hostage to Vladimir Putin, the Germans literally laughed in his face.

Credit where it’s due, Labour’s mantra of growth has been laudable. But if Britain is to build anything, make anything, or create anything, it needs two things, cheap energy and energy security. And whatever the apostles of Net Zero, like Subsidy King Dale Vince, tell you, that cannot come from renewables. At least not for now.

This week Edred Whittingham, the posh Just Stop Oil idiot who covered himself, and a green baize table, with orange powder at the World Snooker Championship, was sentenced to 180 hours community service.

So congratulations Eggdread, you not only got to ruin the snooker and piss off the proles, you received a zero hours custodial sentence, and most shockingly of all, persuaded the British government to adopt exactly the policy you and your brain dead, cry baby, ambo blocking mates have been demanding all along.

Because muppet faced Energy Secretary Ed Miliband has literally, Just Stopped Oil.

By ordering an immediate ban on drilling in new North Sea oil fields.

Ed Miliband is like a verruca you thought had been frozen, burned and blitzed back in 2015, but just keeps popping up again.

So instead of generating the energy we need, responsibly at home, we are now offshoring our energy production, and much of our industry, to countries like China and India, which are reliant on dirty, coal fired power stations.

You aren’t helping make the planet ‘greener’ Ed, in fact you are doing the opposite. Literally increasing the amount of pollution in the world.

During the election we were presented with a united, disciplined Labour party. It had put infighting, splits and internecine conflict behind it, as it became laser focused on the issue at hand. Gaining power.

Less than two weeks in, and the cracks are already beginning to show.

Keir Starmer faces a rebellion from the left. A demand that he immediately turns on the spending taps. Because according to the orc like hordes of Labour back benchers, it’s ‘unfair’ that you aren’t paying for other people’s kids.

I mean. You are paying for some of their kids, but sorry Greedy Guts, that’s not enough. Warm hearted, generous, Labour MPs are demanding you pay for all of them.

By abolishing the two child cap on Universal Credit.

Meanwhile some far right Tory loons have shown their true colours by claiming that kids should be fed, watered and clothed by their own parents.

I know, right?!! The Conservatives may be routed, but still fascism lives on.

Of course Britain’s population is falling below replacement rate. So on one level, encouraging Britons to have more kids is a great idea.

Although instead of uprating benefits, it might be cheaper, more fun, and more effective to simply subsidise fluffy handcuffs, Barry White CDs, (ask your nan) and bottles of Prosecco.

But the reason people aren’t having kids isn’t because Universal Credit is too stingy.

It’s because wages are so depressed that most young people can’t afford to buy a home, settle down together, and start a family.

In today’s Britain, only the very rich, and until the introduction of the cap, the very poor, could afford to have a big family. Or increasingly, any children at all.

But according to Labour MP Kim Johnson, the two-child benefit cap

“…..is cruel, punitive and is pushing struggling families into further poverty.”

What’s cruel and punitive is forcing a hard working family, which is struggling hard to pay its own bills, to subsidise someone else’s choices.

Can’t afford kids. Don’t have kids. Sorry. I know. I’m a monster.

Look, I’ve written before how I abhor many on the Right’s dismissal of people on benefits as ‘scroungers’.  Especially since most are simply making rational choices based on the hand they have been dealt, by elites infinitely more powerful, richer, and influential than they will ever be.

But government shouldn’t be subsidising people on benefits to have loads of children. It should be working its backside off to create an economic landscape where everyone, no matter their background, can earn a decent enough wage, to support their family themselves. It’s basic stuff.

The Resolution Foundation estimates that lifting the cap would cost £2.5bn.

Maybe we could have afforded it if we had’t just chased away all the rich foreigners , while inviting the world’s poor to turn up in dinghies to make use of our once ample hotel and jail space.

Which brings us back to the problem of our overflowing prisons and what to do about it.

Here’s an idea.

Keir Starmer has already cancelled the unworkable Tory plan to ship Britain’s asylum seekers to Rwanda. But since we’ve already paid for the accommodation, (and the Rwandan government is rightly refusing to give us a refund), we must surely now have the option to send our excess prison population there instead.

It’s win, win for everyone.

Though on second thoughts, scrap that.

Maybe we, the tiny, put upon, shivering, minority of law abiding, burgled, mugged, over taxed, routinely fined, and generally abused Brits, should take the opportunity to leave it all behind, and move to Rwanda ourselves.

After all, judging from Starmer’s first week in power, Rwanda could turn out to be a warmer, richer, freer, safer, fairer and better place to bring up our kids, than Britain is ever going to be, under Labour.

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