Right Turn

I don't know about you, but I spent a large part of yesterday shouting abuse at TV coverage of the Tory party conference. Seeing all those horrible bastards gathered together in one place I was left lamenting the absence of a modern day Claus von Stauffenberg - someone prepared to risk his own life by taking an explosive-filled briefcase into Hitler's briefing room in an attempt to assassinate the dictator. I searched the conference coverage in vain for a glimpse of a one-handed man with a black eye patch and wearing a Nazi uniform, carrying a suspicious package into the conference. Whilst Nazi uniforms aren't unusual at Tory conferences, there were no eye patches in evidence. I guess I'll just have to be patient and wait until next year's conference. But what's so bad about these evil corrupt bastards who have seized power in a political coup, that has driven you to advocate their mass assassination, (even if only in jest - once again, for the benefit of law-enforcement and other morons who might be reading, I'm not really suggesting anyone blow up the Tory conference, it's merely a satirical conceit), I hear you ask.

To be honest, it isn't any one thing. Rather it is the cumulative effect of being exposed to the lunatic proclamations of various right-wing nutters as they desperately try to cling to power. Take that cock-end of a Transport Secretary, Phil Hammond, for instance. as if his moronic utterings about rail travel - apparently it's now just the preserve of the relatively wealthy, and that's OK - the other day, now we have him promising to raise the speed limit to 80mph om motorways. Now, I have no intention of rehashing all the environmental and road safety arguments against this, others can do that better, what appalled me was the 'reasoning' behind this 'policy'. His first response to criticism was to try and claim that the existing speed limit was out of date - apparently it was devised 'in the 1960s, when the speed dial only went up to 70mph'. What the fuck kind of argument is that? Leaving aside the fact that, even in the 1960s, there plenty of production cars in the UK that not only had speedometers which went well above 100mph, they could also actually achieve those speeds. By that same logic, we shouldn't be setting the new speed limit at 80mph, surely? I mean, the speedo in my car goes up to 140mph, (the car can't achieve that speed, it's just the standard instrument that Ford installs in UK Mondeos), many go higher, so any new speed limit should reflect that, by Hammond's logic.

However, better was to come. He followed that piece of reasoning up with the truly astounding observation that as many people were habitually breaking the existing limit, then a change in the law would simply bring them back into legality! Why I'm surprised by this cavalier disregard for the entire concept of actually enforcing laws on the part of a Tory minister, I really don't know. After all, it is the guided by the same logic 'Gorgeous' George Osborne has already used to justify the possible abolition of the top tax rate - so many people are evading it, so we might as well just drop it. Clearly, the new orthodoxy is law making by consensus - if you don't like a law, just ignore it, as nobody in government will support its enforcement. Obviously, this is the approach that supporters of the decriminalisation of drugs should be using - so many people are shooting up, smoking spliffs, snorting coke and the like, on a regular basis, we might just as well change the drug laws to make their activities legal. Of course, it will help if you can show that a significant proportion of these law-breakers are high-earning city types. which shouldn't be too difficult when it comes to cocaine abuse. Getting back to the speed limit, I'm not sure which group of voters the Tories think they can woo with this 'policy' - I mean, Jeremy Clarkson and the other Top Gear cunts are all Tory shits already, aren't they?