I’m still on holiday. Got back Tuesday, skived off yesterday to… errrr… unpack? Whatever. And today is Joey/Lila day. And a very important one. Because this new term, Joey is no longer in the ‘infants’, but has moved to the junior school!!! Which is a bit like university but with more toys. In fact, he’s basically changed classrooms. As they do every year. Moved ‘further back’ in the building. So when he left the infants, they had a ‘graduation ceremony’. I kid you not. And make a big fuss, as if they’d just signed a contract with PSG for 300 grand a week. But it’s ‘nice for the kids’. And anything that’s good for them must be good for us. Innit?

Andy Burnham made such a good start to being PM that it’s taken me almost 4 weeks before I hate him totally and think he’s the ‘worst prime minister since the last one’. And when you remember the last one; that’s no mean feat. But from starting out all ‘Tony Blair’ and statesmanlike and “I’m really not just another northern scumbag with a grudge against Loondoon, honest”, he’s become a total tosser.

First we had the sanction against Israel, which will come back and bite him hard, you can be sure, and now we have the greatest soundbyte since “we shall fight them on the beaches…” He said: “national security can’t come at the expense of social security”. Which must be some hard-left mantra, or a new tattoo. Because the left are always ‘anti-nuke’ and ‘anti-war’ and big on benefits. What he’s saying is that the money we desperately need to spend on defence cannot come from reducing social security payments in any significant way. No, we must always put the malingerers, the work-shy, the terminally lazy, those poor souls inventing ‘mental health issues’ and the ‘disabled’ who post on Facebook their hot-dog skiing pics, first. I just hope that when the Cossacks come rampaging through Rochdale, because we have no battleships or air defences to stop them, they don’t rape or murder those in the benefits queue. Because the irony would be too sweet to consider. The conflation of social security and national security. INK THAT ON YER FUCKIN’ ARM, BURNHAM!!!

Basically, we are in dire need of defence spending. And the logical place to start would be at welfare payments which are simply astronomical here. About 25% of public expenditure spending. Over 10% of Britain’s GDP!!! Ok, much of which is genuine and essential. Like my pension. But much of it isn’t. There’s industrial sized fraud going on with the benefit system. But like the leaks in the water system, they just go on. And on.

So where can the money come from? We’re honour-bound to spend more on military due to our NATO agreement, and our current tragic level of defencelessness. We can restructure benefits. We can shut a few hospitals down. We can screw over the pensioners one more time. Or we can increase tax.

And if it was only defence we might be ok. But Burnham is ‘old style Labour’. He wants to ‘improve services’. Like he did in Manchester. Which was fine there because his hated London picked up the bill for his excesses and ‘improvements’. But that’s his mindset.

In the week of Rosh Hashannah, the Jewish New Year, when even I get dragged screaming to the synagogue, may God help us all.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx

This pic is of Deauville Town Hall. So beautiful you’d think you were in Milton Keynes.