A great piece! Worth reading.....



I’ve given the matter a great deal of thought all week, and I’m afraid
I’ve decided that it’s no good putting Peter Mandelson in a prison.
I’m afraid he will have to be tied to the front of a van and driven
round the country until he isn’t alive any more. He announced last
week that middle-class children will simply not be allowed into the
country’s top universities even
if they have 4,000 A-levels, because all the places will be taken by
Albanians and guillemots and whatever other stupid bandwagon the
conniving idiot has leapt on.

I hate Peter Mandelson. I hate his fondness for extremely pale blue
jeans and I hate that preposterous moustache he used to sport in the
days when he didn’t bother trying to cover up his left-wing
fanaticism. I hate the way he quite literally lords it over us even
though he’s resigned in disgrace twice, and now holds an important
decision-making job for which he was not elected. Mostly, though, I
hate him because his one-man war on the bright and the witty and the
successful means that half my friends now seem to be taking leave of
their senses.

There’s talk of emigration in the air. It’s everywhere I go. Parties.
Work.In the supermarket. My daughter is working herself half to death
to get good grades at GSCE and can’t see the point because she won’t
be going to university, because she doesn’t have a beak or flippers or
a qualification in washing windscreens at the lights. She wonders,
often, why we don’t live
in America .

Then you have the chaps and chapesses who can’t stand the constant
raids on their wallets and their privacy. They can’t understand why
they are taxed at 50% on their income and then taxed again for driving
into the nation’s capital. They can’t understand what happened to the
hunt for the weapons of mass destruction. They can’t understand
anything. They see the Highway Wombles in those brand new 4x4s that
they paid for, and they see the M4 bus lane and they see the speed
cameras and the community support officers and they see the Albanians
stealing their wheelbarrows and nothing can be done because it’s
racist.

And they see Alistair Darling handing over £4,350 of their money to
not sortout the banking crisis that he doesn’t understand because he’s
a small-town solicitor, and they see the stupid war on drugs and the
war on drink and the war on smoking and the war on hunting and the war
on fun and the war on scientists and the obsession with the climate
and the price of train fares soaring past £1,000 and the Guardian
power-brokers getting uppity about one shot baboon and not uppity at
all about all the dead soldiers in Afghanistan, and how they got rid
of Blair only to find the lying twerp is now going to come back even
more powerful than ever, and they think, “I’ve had enough of this. I’m
off.”



It’s a lovely idea, to get out of this stupid, Fairtrade,
Brown-stained, Mandelson-skewed, equal-opportunities, multicultural,
carbon-neutral, trendily left, regionally assembled, big-government,
trilingual, mosque-drenched, all-the-pigs-are-equal, property-is-theft
hellhole and set up shop somewhere else. But where?

You can’t go to France because you need to complete 17 forms in
triplicate every time you want to build a greenhouse, and you can’t go
to Switzerland because you will be reported to your neighbours by the
police and subsequently shot in the head if you don’t sweep your lawn
properly, and you can’t go to Italy because you’ll soon tire of waking
up in the morning to
find a horse’s head in your bed because you forgot to give a man called Don
a bundle of used notes for “organising” a plumber.

You can’t go to Australia because it’s full of things that will eat
you, you can’t go to New Zealand because they don’t accept anyone who
is more than 40 and you can’t go to Monte Carlo because they don’t
accept anyone who has less than 40 mill. And you can’t go to Spain
because you’re not called Del and you weren’t involved in the
Walthamstow blag. And you can’t go to Germany ... because you just
can’t.

The Caribbean sounds tempting, but there is no work, which means that
one day, whether you like it or not, you’ll end up like all the other
expats,  with a nose like a burst beetroot, wondering if it’s okay to
have a small sharpener at 10 in the morning. And, as I keep explaining
to my daughter, we  can’t go to America because if you catch a cold
over there, the health  system is designed in such a way that you end
up without a house. Or dead.
 Canada’s full of people pretending to be French, South Africa’s too
risky,  Russia’s worse and everywhere else is too full of snow, too
full of flies or  too full of people who want to cut your head off on
the internet. So you can  dream all you like about upping sticks and
moving to a country that doesn’t  help itself to half of everything
you earn and then spend the money it gets on bus lanes and
advertisements about the dangers of salt. But wherever you
 go you’ll wind up an alcoholic or dead or bored or in a cellar, in an
orange jumpsuit, gently wetting yourself on the web. All of these
things are worse  than being persecuted for eating a sandwich at the
wheel.

 I see no reason to be miserable. Yes, Britain now is worse than it’s
been  for decades, but the lunatics who’ve made it so ghastly are on
their way  out. Soon, they will be back in Hackney with their South
African  nuclear-free peace polenta. And instead the show will be run
by a bloke  whose dad has a wallpaper shop and possibly, terrifyingly,
a twerp in
 Belgium whose fruitless game of hunt-the-WMD has netted him £15m on
the  lecture circuit.


So actually I do see a reason to be miserable. Which is why I think
it’s a good idea to tie Peter Mandelson to a van. Such an act would be
cruel and barbaric and inhuman. But it would at least cheer everyone
up a bit.