Sleight of Hand!

We have all, no doubt, seen some spectacular magic tricks in our time. But surely none as great as the sleight of hand that our and other governments manage to pull on a daily basis.

I have been watching various programmes about the year just gone and was astonished to see just how clever the powers that be are at hiding important issues while whipping the masses into a frenzy about piffle!

I have written before about how you are kept with a sense of fear by the thought police, so you are more malleable and easier to persuade to give up your rights. Let's look at immigration: it is true that we as an island do not have the infrastructure for mass immigration. Yet by legal means lots of people have settled here and are making a life for themselves by working hard and contributing to our society. Until a well-thought-out plan is devised by sensible intelligent people this will always be the case, as we are part of the EU. Whether this is good or bad is another debate. But what you see on the news day in day out is not the hard-working immigrants, but the desperate people hanging under lorries in Calais. How many programmes have you seen about this? I bet you there's at least one a week. This is designed to create fear about how we are being overrun by illegal immigrants. They aren't the only immigrants over here and not paying tax, though. We shall get to them later.

We have also seen, all this year, old, has-been disc jockeys being paraded before the media, their lives being dissected with tabloid scalpels. The masses are hungry to hear all the salacious gossip about their hedonistic lives. But the truth is yes, there were a few that were low life scum bags. But most of them were just men of their time. Just look at all the awful re-runs of the "Carry On" films and you can see that their behaviour was quite acceptable back in the day. Now of course we don't behave like that anymore unless we work in the House of Commons! (Just look at the outbursts from MPs at policemen or taxi drivers or about women.)

But while we are whipping ourselves up into a frenzy about a few uncle groper type DJ's, what about the bankers that have brought the world to its knees? Where is their punishment? We have recently had the guys from (I think) the Royal bank of Scotland (it could have been another bank, they are all the same.) They played the currency market, bringing it crashing down, and the banks were fined a couple of billion pounds for letting their little boys play out without supervision. They made billions of pounds, and the two billion had already been factored in because they knew they would be caught! Seen anything about that in the news lately? Have their lives been dissected for all to see? Has the media done undercover stings on the banks such as the fake sheikh stings it does on hapless fading celebrities? We are told that quantitative easing is working, but for whom? Most of the money the government are issuing is going to the richest 5% of the country. We are coming out of recession but our debts are getting larger and working people are becoming reliant on food banks! They say they want to help small businesses, but how small? I'm self-employed and things are getting more difficult for me, because I work in education, which is in effect being cut. I also work with small companies, which, like me, also find the going tough. Do the government regard Lloyds as a small company, because they and the other banks are the only businesses they ever seem to bale out and help!

They also bang on about sales such as 'Black Friday' or whatever day it's on then tell you just how much money it has generated for the economy, which is all well and good. But as Aldi and Lidl have proven, our economy have been artificially inflated for a long time by conglomerates. The supermarkets, though they will never admit it, have worked with each other to fix prices for ages. If they can afford to drop prices for one day a year I'm sure they could even them out over the year, instead of over inflating them just before a sale to make you think you have a bargain on old stock.

We are told over and over about the threat of a terrorist attack which could happen. But although we have been placed on a higher alert, Theresa May says there is no need to worry, as information suggests there is no attack imminent. Yet we hear about young men being arrested for terrorism on a regular basis. Is it me, or have other people noticed that our secret service is becoming not so secret? Why would they release the info about terrorists they have arrested? Is it to keep us, the great unwashed on our toes? Watch out peep, another law to save your sorry little arse is on its way!

And what about all the benefit cheats? Well I do agree that we should make the Royals give all their benefits back, as they are all able to work. How many programmes have you seen this year telling you that people on the dole are low-down, idle scroungers? Most of the people they featured had drink or drug problems and were not a proper representation of the masses of people that are out of work through no fault of their own. And don't give me that shit that unemployment is dropping! People have been put on courses or swapped to other benefits to massage the figures.

When we go on about benefit cheats, should we not also include tax avoiders? Go after Google or Starbucks: they have done the country out of far more money than all the benefit cheats put together. Or should we not mention that, and turn away instead, to mock the people who need help most in our society?

Up until recently we hated Al-Assad the president of Syria for chemically enhancing his own people! We were on the side of those good righteous rebels who were fighting against him. But, guess what! Those rebels had a makeover, and gave themselves a name that sounds like a savings plan, Isis! We now hate them and love Al-Assad who is fighting against them.

People mocked Orwell and his idea about the thought police, but he was right about quite a lot of things. The thought police have put a big invisible ring through our noses and pull us away from what they don't want us to see, and have fed us on a diet of crap. We like to poke fun at Farage and his true Conservative party! But the old Tories are loving it, he gets all the mocking while they implement his ideas, which they have wanted to do for years.

We have comedians wanting to bring politics to the masses, but they have no alternatives. But the powers that be let all the spotlight fall onto people like Russell Brand, and Farage because while we are all getting into a lather about them and their ideas the government is free to do what it wants: like all good magicians they let you look at what they want you to see, while hiding the real trick from you. In a way Russell Brand is right. Why should you vote? I know by not voting you have no say in how things are run, but do you really have a say? All the parties, no matter how much they protest otherwise, are the same, it's still old school tie politics. The system has to change and, like Brand, I can bang on about it, but I don't have a definitive answer to it, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't work out an alternative.

But on a brighter note, I bought my wife a tablet for Christmas for £30. It was left over stock from Black whatever day, so I can tell everybody about my magnificent bargain! The rest of Christmas has cost me a small fortune though. See, sleight of hand!