Deferred gratification

After almost five years of blogging I have decided to bring Ranting Stan to a conclusion and this will be my last post.

Following Mrs Stan's breakdown and the demands, stress and strain of looking after two teenage boys on my own I made the decision late last year to take early retirement - even though I'm not yet in my mid-fifties. Today is my final day of the work and later this afternoon I will hand in the assorted accoutrement of employment and walk out of the office a free and very happy man.

The house is all paid for (I made the final payment last October - eight years early), I have been prudent and careful with savings and I have followed my father's advice all my life to avoid debt. Consequently, I'm in a position now where I no longer need to work to maintain our lifestyle - although I'm sure I will do something even if it is just to continue my voluntary work.

I confess that I feel a little guilty that I'm doing this at a time when so many others in Britain are facing hardship and a collapse in their living standards. All I can say is that I hope I am wrong in my forecast that we are about to enter a prolonged period of economic turmoil and decline that will match and possibly surpass that of the Great Depression - however, I see no reason to change my assessment.

My advice to anyone who wants to listen is to follow the model I have followed all my life - don't be tempted by easy credit and the prospect of shiny new things. Look after your money, save what you can, only spend what you have to and never, ever build up any debt apart from a mortgage which you can not pay off within one month.

If you do this while you are young enough then you will be able to look forward to an early and comfortable retirement too. It's called deferred gratification and is much underestimated.

I thank you all for taking the time to read and comment on my musings over the last five years and wish you all good health, wealth and happiness.

Thank you and goodbye.

Al Beeb's priorities

Once upon a time - when Britain was still a sane country and the BBC was still a British broadcasting company - the news bulletins would always begin with home news. It didn't matter what was going on in the rest of the world, the news always followed the same pattern - home news, foreign news, sport, weather.

There was only one thing that could shift the priority and that was when some far flung country was struck by a catastrophic natural disaster - floods, hurricanes, volcano or earthquake. No matter what else was going on at home, a natural disaster was always the lead story.

How things have changed. Such is the BBC's interest and fascination in all matters relating to events in the various despotic Moslem states that even a devastating earthquake in New Zealand couldn't distract them from their coverage of events in Libya - even though nobody really has a clue what is going on there.

Let's be honest about this. Libya is a dump of a country whose only connection to Britain is that their government likes to fund and equip terrorists hell bent on causing us harm. New Zealand is a member of the Commonwealth with our Queen as their head of state, a government and legal system based on that of Britain and peopled by people who are very much like us in every respect.

But the BBC decided that Libya was more important?

Why? How on earth can they have come to the decision to put the events of Libya ahead of the disaster in Christchurch - there isn't even a comparison! You can be sure there were high level discussions about which story should lead the main news - and the winner was the story about the Moslem terrorist haven not the country which is so much like our own.

It demonstrates the priorities of Al Beeb perfectly. In their world, the Moslems must always be given priority.

Census-ship

There have been suggestions that this years census will be the last due to the cost incurred.

Now, granted that £500 million is a lot to find while we're making "cuts", but given that the census only takes place once every ten years then in the grand scheme of things it is a drop in the ocean. Are the government really suggesting that we won't be able to afford it in the future? Perhaps they are - in which case they seem to share my view that this "recession" is going to be a little more serious than most think.

However, I don't believe they really believe that. The Tories are signed up to the globalisation fantasy that we in Britain can maintain our high debt, high salary, high living standards based on an economy that is primarily geared to buying stuff and producing nothing.

And under that fantasy they expect us to be living the high life again within a year or two - and that this will continue unabated for the rest of eternity or until global warming consumes us in a fiery hell/watery grave/frozen tomb/dusty disaster (delete as appropriate) whichever comes first.

I suspect the real reason they want to stop doing the census is something else.

Because the fact is that in ten years time it will be impossible to hide the fact that the policies of successive governments over the last 30 years have changed the racial and religious makeup of Britain forever.

The spread of infantilism

I'm sure Katherine Dewar is a very pleasant young girl from a lovely family - and I think her design for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee is quite charming and naively endearing - but am I alone in thinking that it really is not suitable to be the official design for such an event?

I've been saying for years that the way our society is becoming so childish bothers me, but I could at least console myself that the royal family managed to retain a degree of adult dignity and gravitas - with the exception of the self-indulgent and very childish Duchess of York. Now it seems even the Queen has succumbed to the rampant infantilism that is infecting our nation.

Let's all just grow up, start behaving like adults and leave childish things to children.

Being a conservative and not a Conservative

On of the frustrations of being a conservative is that as soon as you tell anyone that you are a conservative they immediately make all sorts of assumptions about you - and they are usually wrong.

Among the most frustrating of those are that you -

- don't believe in workers rights or improving their working conditions
- think that every service or business should be privately owned/run
- have a slavish devotion to the free market/free trade
- disagree with state intervention
- always vote Tory

Absolutely none of these are true in my case and I suspect it is the same for millions of conservatives up and down the country.

For starters, conservatives can be left and right of the political spectrum - I know that my political opinions cross the divide in many areas, but just because I think that, for instance, some services and businesses are best owned and run by the state doesn't make me any less a conservative and certainly doesn't make me a rabid Trotskyite. Be honest, does anyone think, for example, that our armed forces would be better owned and run as a private enterprise?

Sure, I'm certain there a good number of wannabe despots and revolutionaries who think that having their own private army would be a good thing, but the majority of us accept that when it comes to the defence of our nation then perhaps it's right to leave that to the government.

The truth is that most of us are conservatives - in some way or another. Very few of us apply the idea of radicalism to our own lives. We buy conservative cars in conservative colours, wear conservative clothes and are conservative in our taste.

So why then do we suddenly think that radicalism is a good thing with politics when it is something that we shun from our lives in virtually every other respect? Where does this obsession with "change" come from when so few of us want to apply change to our everyday lives?

If radicalism and change is such a good thing - why are so many people content to stay in the same job for years and, if they do change jobs, stay in the same industry doing basically the same thing? Why aren't people who advocate radical change prepared to quit their jobs - whatever it is - and start doing something entirely different?

The answer is obvious - they are conservative. They prefer to stick with what they know because what they know works and pays. Yes, sometimes taking a massive risk, chucking in your job and starting something completely new and different pays off - but most of the time it doesn't.

You know that if you find a particular career path that sticking to it will bring gradual improvements to your life. Sometimes you will make a modest change by trying a different employer, but it will still be basically the same thing and it is a change you can make without too much risk to the progress of your career. The same principle applies to national and political progress.

This is why I am a conservative and why I am proud to say I am a conservative - because I know that it works. Being a conservative means understanding the simple point that real progress is made by small, modest, incremental changes to tried and trusted methods rather than radical changes and leaps into the unknown.

I know that - and I suspect that 90% of people who claim they are "progressives" know that too.

And yet they think that somehow it is different when it comes to politics.

Weird.

Marriage and the "Big Society"

The title of this post was going to be something along the lines of "flogging a dead horse" - but given the events at Newbury racecourse this weekend I decided against it. However, as David Cameron tries to revive his grand plan for "The Big Society" it would have been rather apt.

To be honest, I never quite understood this "Big Society" idea - I think the overall concept of a big society is right, but I think Mr Cameron's idea of how it would work, was at best, misguided and, at worst, deluded.

Mr Cameron seemed to think that as cuts to council provided services took effect, volunteer groups would step in to take over. In a way, he is right - they will - but it will be existing voluntary and charity groups that do this and with little or no extra resources.

The idea that tax paying citizens will accept the idea that they are expected to both provide the funds for a service through taxation AND do the work themselves is, as I said, misguided. Unless they see an appreciable drop in what they are paying the council then why would they be happy about dipping once more into the dwindling funds in their pockets to provide the service they already pay the council to provide?

It just didn't make sense to me.

Worse still, though, is that Cameron seems to completely misunderstand how society works.

Society is not some top down imposition from the government - it begins with a small group of people with a shared interest in achieving something that improves their lives in some respect. As more and more of these small groups of people begin to recognise that they share a common interest with other small groups of people that "society" grows - what starts in one house spreads to a whole street and then a neighbourhood and then the town and, ultimately, across the nation.

That is how society works and it starts in one place and one place only - the traditional family.

The traditional, stable family unit is the building block of any functioning society which is why, in every civilization that has ever existed regardless of its origins, marriage between a man and a woman has been the most obvious, single common factor.

And we live in a country where that traditional family has been undermined and marginalised for decades by the actions, laws and aims of successive governments - Labour and Tory - without exception.

This is the point Mr Cameron's "Big Society" misses completely. Until he has done something to rectify the growing problem of family breakdown and the increasing marginalisation of the traditional family then his "Big Society" ain't ever going to work.

And to suppose otherwise is simply deluded.

Intent and purpose

I understand that the government's new "Freedom Bill" will, amongst other things, ban car clamping on private land. I'm all in favour of that, but also think they should go further and just ban car clamping.

I mean - clamping a car defies all logic.

If a car is parked somewhere it shouldn't be then that must mean that by being there it is causing an obstruction - whether that is blocking a private resident's parking bay or the traffic flow through a town centre - so to disable the vehicle in such a way that it can not be moved and thus prolong the obstruction strikes me as self-defeating.

Unless, of course, the point of parking restrictions and regulation is not to keep motorists and pedestrians safe, but to raise revenue?

Answers on a postcard to Nick, Clegg c/o 10 Downing Street.

Right and proper

Have you ever watched those property shows so beloved of daytime TV? In some of them you'll find some couple who want to move to some particular spot such as the Cotswolds and live in a typical Cotswold village. They'll talk about how they want the "traditional" village pub, village community and shops and so on.

The presenter then takes them around 3 or 4 typically Cotswold properties and the couple moan "this isn't what we're really looking for" before going on to explain they wanted something more modern and contemporary.

Duh! What did they expect to find in a typical Cotswold village?

In some of these shows you'll then find some over indulged couple who decide to build their dream home in just such a beauty spot - thus erecting a grotesque concrete and glass carbuncle that looks more out of place than Harriet Harman at an English Defence League meeting.

Although I have no idea what sort of property he lives in, I suspect that Peter Oborne is a little like those people judging by his latest ramblings in The Telegraph.

Mr Oborne, like those people who build monstrous carbuncles in the heart of English countryside or expect to find the latest Wimpey "CopyCat" red brick mock Tudor mansion in the centre of a Cotswold stone village as he seems to think that the environment should adapt to the demands of the newcomer rather than vice versa.

What Mr Oborne - and his kindred spirits in the liberal media - fails to grasp is that if you change the environment you spoil the very thing that made that environment attractive to those incomers in the first place. You can not have a typical Cotswold village if you allow people to build what they want, where they want it.

Similarly, you can not have a modern, liberal (traditional - not progressive) western democracy and give concessions to Islamic demands. They are totally incompatible - and this is the point which Mr Oborne refuses to grasp.

Like any other immigrants, Moslems were welcome to come to Britain as long as they understood that they had to adapt to this country and not expect it to adapt it to them. Once they started coming here in floods rather than dribs and drabs then that changed the whole dynamic and now they expect - not want, expect - us to change to suit them.

Mr Oborne dismisses this lazily as "Islamophobia" which it most certainly isn't - it is a rational response to unreasonable demands made by a group of people who were allowed into this country by a government who never asked us if that was what we wanted.

Well, we don't want it and to tell those who do to get lost is not "Islamophobia" - it is the only sensible thing to do. Just as the incumbents of a Cotswold village will fight tooth and nail to prevent a newcomer changing their village for ever then so the people of England are telling the Moslems newcomers that if they want to live here they adapt themselves AND their religion to suit our culture, our landscape and our traditions.

If we allow them to change it then we will lose the very thing that made it so attractive in the first place - but more than that, we will lose something that our fathers and grandfathers fought and died to preserve and which our ancestors spent a thousand years building.

Wanting to prevent that is not irrational - it is the only proper response.