RESOLUTION

Is there anybody out there? Doubtful. I made a fleeting return in September and promised a weekly bit of self-gratification publishing, which is what blogging amounts to. And I failed to meet even that modest ambition.

Whilst not blogging, I found myself reverting to that other, traditional, way to vent one's spleen or crack a joke: write to the papers. My modest harvest has been three letters in the Telegraph and another in the Spectator.

2012, however, will be different. Weekly it will be, unless there are no comments. I read a few blogs where no one ever comments but it must be a bit soul-destroying for the poor wretched blogger searching for approbation and cyber friendship and getting fuckall in return.

An update:

Drummer is 7 months old tomorrow. Stops and sits on a short peep of the whistle; sits and stays for ever until called, even as one disappears from view; walks to heel; retrieves to the hand with a soft mouth; starts dummy training properly next week, with directional hand signals; is a perfect pest about wanting to go outside/come inside every five minutes during dark and wet winter evenings.

Am reading Hitch 22. I regretted his death and read all those miles of printed column about him in the days afterwards. Has a just-dead journalist ever prompted so many of his own profession to blog about their friendship with the Great Man immediately?

Am preparing for Cameron to let me down over Europe. Prove me wrong, please.

Turned 50 in November. Just 110 of my closest friends, sat down. Caterers charged like wounded rhino, ruinously expensive. Thank heavens the good old Commander Idle dipped into the cellar and provided shampoo and claret in enough quantity. Willie Austen and his band rocked the joint until 2am. That brilliant party planner Lady Idle and the Idle Girls dazzled all. Memorable stuff.

Walking the line between idleness and salaried employment with enough dexterity to have retained my job in the Incredible Shrinking Banking World.

Forecast for the year ahead:

Euro will blow up in March; Sarko will lose the presidency to a socialist no one has ever heard of, who will beat Marine le Pen by less than 5% of the (low turn out) popular vote in the run off;

Much worse UK economy until 3rd Quarter, which will presumably cause the incompetent self-regarding Olympic organising clowns to claim that they saved the economy. They will be wrong, but believed. Hidden cost of Olympics will eventually come out and the bill will be more than 20 billion;

Vince Cable will collapse under the weight of his own contradictions and resign from the Cabinet. Ed the Adenoid will woo him to Labour, he will prevaricate but then accept, will lose his seat at the next election, and disappear from public view, except in pantomime season;

'Mike' Tindall will be persuaded to wear black leather shoes whilst wearing a suit in the presence of Her Majesty. But he and his wife will call their first-born Troy, or Chantelle;

Imran Khan will be seen as the last hope for Pakistan, or a failed state will ensue, much much worse than the North Koreans or Somalis could ever be;

Kauto Star will win the Cheltenham Gold Cup and be retired as the most popular racehorse of modern times.

A happy new year to anyone who reads this rhubarb.

No End of Spending

I know, I know, the Barclay Bros banned him from the Telegraph and the Speccie for producing much too heady a brew of no-nonsense dry conservatism for the modern pantywaist "centrist" liberal reader, but the bearded mountain man Mark Steyn writes a lot of good common sense from his hideout in New Hampshire. If, like Idle, you don't get bored by drilling down to the pesky numbers, I recommend After America.

Here's a taste:

"The Irish have a useful word for the times - flaithiulacht - which translates to ruinous generosity, invariably with someone else's money. There is nothing virtuous about "caring" "compassionate" "progessives" demonstrating how caring and compassionate and progressive they are by spending money yet to be earned by generations yet to be born"

Envy, Spite, Vindictiveness and.....

...... THE LAW OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES:

"A decent welfare state requires an appropriate balance between carriers and carried. HM Revenue & Customs believes that almost 27 million of our 30 million taxpayers will contribute less than £6,000 per head in income tax this year. Those who have a child in a state school or who make more than passing use of the NHS are likely to be net takers, rather than contributors. So who’s doing the carrying? The ‘squeezed middle’, as ever, will do their share. But those whom we call ‘the rich’ — the top 1 per cent of earners — will contribute an astonishing 28 per cent of total income tax this year. HMRC also identifies a tiny group of the super-rich, upon whom we have become dangerously reliant. These are 14,000 taxpayers earning on average a little over £2 million each. If just one thousand of them were to leave the country, the economy would have to generate 300,000 extra new jobs, paying £20,000 per year to make up the resulting shortfall in the tax take. That would stymie the Government’s growth strategy in one rush to the Departures gate."

Dennis Sewell, Spectator

Vince and Cleggy might be expected to understand the Laffer Curve, but frankly they are not interested in maximising UK tax revenue. Oh no. They want "an important symbolic measure”. I'll tell you what that reminds me of:

Peter Cook-Cable, as an RAF officer, says to the lower-ranking Perkins (Jonathan Miller-Clegg):

…it's a pyschological thing, Perkins, rather like a game of football. You know how in a game of football ten men often play better than eleven?

Perkins Yes, sir.

Cable Perkins, we are asking you to be that one man. I want you to lay down your life, Perkins. We need a futile gesture at this stage. It will raise the whole tone of the war. Get up in a crate, Perkins, pop over to Bremen, take a shufti, don’t come back.

Goodbye, Perkins. God, I wish I was going too.

Perkins Goodbye, sir – or is it – au revoir?,’

Cable No, Perkins."

PS Dan is on the case today as well.

Meet the Drummer

My first ever blog post was a picture of my noble hound Piper (rip).

Here are some pics of his successor, Drummer. Picked up from Inverness-shire a month ago.
It is too early to say if he can hold a candle to his predecessor, but the signs are good.

There is no shortage of character, he is correctly put together, and will make a decent-sized hound, judging by his feet and ears.

Photo number two (not posed) suggests peg-dog quality on the shooting field is perhaps not beyond him.

A joyous addition to the Idle household.

The State We Are In

Bill, it's 280 days since I last posted on here, so it has no readers except you. Here's a rant against some current pet hates:

I blame all governments since 1965 for the recent riots, especially the last Labour bunch of liars and hypocrites. If you open the borders to immigrants, don't be surprised if they take all the low-paying jobs and leave you with three million unemployed. If you pay British yoof to be unemployed drug dealers, chancers and anti-social urban scum, don't be surprised if they stay unemployed drug dealers, chancers, etc. If you offer a council flat to a 17 year old slag when she becomes pregnant, don't be surprised if she gets up the duff and embarks on the life journey of a single-parent on benefits.

This isn't rocket science.

I blame Greenspan and Brown for the economic meltdown. If you flood the world with cheap money, you know what the banks and government departments will do with it - you just don't know which wall they are going to do it against. Blaming the bankers is like blaming the syringe instead of the drug pusher. 'Sir' Mervyn King, Bernanke, Merkel and Sarkozy have proved themselves incapable of dealing with the situation and have lost the confidence of the markets. They should resign immediately.

I blame Cameron for the fact that almost all government policy is made worse by the coalition with the Liberals, who are utterly useless and are demonstrating why they have been out of power for nearly 100 years. Cameron should have walked it in 2010, but his liberal tendency and his belief in big government has resulted in a party that no longer offers a traditional Conservative policy choice. Oh, and he lied to us about an EU treaty referendum.

I blame Osbourne for, first, being such a twerp as to sign up to Brown's 2008-2011 spending plans, and second, for spending more money in each month of his first year as Chancellor than even the hapless Darling had spent the year before. Cuts? There ARE no cuts, unless you are a soldier, in which case there have been plenty. Osbourne must cut taxes and spending aggressively, starting today. Of course the 50% tax level should go, it doesn't raise any money, but people on £115,000 income in the 40% bracket are paying over 60% in direct taxation - this is madness!

The police? Probably the worst-led institution in Britain, and has been for many years. Why do we award a knighthood to people when we appoint them as Commissioner of the Met, rather than wait and see if they are any good? Ian Blair (LORD Blair now, can you believe it?) was a disaster and barely honest, and the latest one, Stevenson, nearly as bad. Neither deserves an honour. We should have given the job to the American with a good record from NY and LA. Should have been a no-brainer. And he wouldn't have demanded a knighthood.

The Olympics - a ruinously expensive exercise in narcissism by Seb Coe, who ludicrously was given a peerage for being the 'advisor' to William Hague's disastrous leadership (and judo partner, nudge nudge). Good runner, Seb (though for some reason I preferred Ovett), but completely useless at politics and now, we learn to our cost, incapable of budgetting for an Olympics and selling tickets to ordinary fans and taxpayers. Mark my words, 'Lord' Coe will never be short of a lucrative directorship from Olympic corporate sponsors, aka his cronies. He should be buried in the foundations of the Olympic Handball Arena, as an example to future enthusiastic eejits who come up with ways of spending £12bn of taxpayers' money.

The RFU chiefs? Cretins. National Rail companies? Thieves and incompetents. The BBC? Smug overpaid metropolitan champagne socialists. The Church of England? Poofs, political activists and moral cowards.

So that's the Villains. I might do a post on Heroes in a day or two, but it will be a short one.....