Читать книгу Scotland’s Jesus - Frankie Boyle - Страница 7

I suppose my political overview is that this five-thousand-year experiment to see what would happen if we let the cunts make all the decisions is going really badly. Anyone who doubts that power corrupts should have a think about what arseholes tall people are.

A key thing in the politics of Britain is the idea of consensus opinion. You see it in comedy where people say such and such a thing shouldn’t be joked about but will joke about it themselves in private. They mean you can’t say it in public because it would outrage consensus opinion. They’ll maintain this even after you do it in a theatre to a few thousand people and nobody gives a shit. Even people in the theatre will laugh and think, ‘You can’t say that in public.’ By which they mean the press will get a hold of it and jump on a stool shrieking and holding their little skirts. So public opinion really is almost synonymous with media opinion, and the dangers of that are pretty obvious.

For a comedian – someone whose job it is to deal with taboos and language – consensus is the idea that you shouldn’t talk about the world as you see it but instead about some socially agreed version. But it shouldn’t be a very hard decision. If you live in one of history’s rare pockets of free speech it’s kind of your duty to use it. Basically, the choice is between drawing freehand and colouring between the lines.

‘Consensus’ is something that most people have to make allowances for, yet, contrary to the word’s literal meaning, most of us have very little say in what it is. The symbolic importance of public opinion is only allowed so long as people themselves are utterly marginalised. What’s your real ability to influence the idea of what public opinion is on an issue? Tweet to two hundred followers, write a letter to the Sun, apply to be in the audience on Question Time? Who gets to decide what the public are saying they’re outraged by or interested in? Well, Rupert Murdoch; corporate think tanks; the BBC. The public’s idea of what the public thinks is almost entirely controlled by vested interests. Interests usually completely contrary to the public interest.

What is party politics in Britain? I mean, what is it? It’s like support groups for a series of hysterical personality disorders that have embezzled other people’s money to hold a competition to find the world’s most boring sentence on board a crashing Zeppelin. Yes, anyone can vote. A fact that warms my heart each election day as I watch people yanking at the polling station door despite the obvious ‘Push’ sign.

People are outraged over plans to increase MPs’ wages. Well, if they’re not allowed to fiddle their expenses anymore then what are they supposed to do? Buy their own Kit Kats? MPs’ current salaries are only £66,396 a year and when you take off how much of that goes towards housing, transport and general living costs, that only leaves them with £66,396 a year. We should remember that MPs do a very difficult job, and they do it very badly.

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The Tories’ role is essentially to make you eat their arseholes and simultaneously sneer at you for not knowing what kind of wine goes best with arsehole. As a Scot, whenever I hear George Osborne speak I instinctively start gathering up my belongings, expecting there’ll be a knock on the door from the local sheriff telling me that this area is to become grazing land for sheep and that we’re to be cleared off by dawn. And when I see Theresa May – wearing those weird clothes of hers – demanding the abolition of human rights I keep thinking I’ve stumbled upon a Star Trek I’ve never seen before (instead of the new version). I only keep watching in the hope that Kirk will come on from the side and punch her in the head. Meanwhile, in the audience Spock screams, ‘MOTHER!’

Osborne’s still insisting he never took cocaine as a student, claiming the only time he snorted at Oxford was when told stories of the troubles of the poor. Osborne on cocaine? Well, there’s the answer to ‘Whatever gave this tit the idea he could run the economy?’ The man is so rich I can’t imagine he’d use a rolled-up twenty. Maybe the deeds to Hertfordshire.

Cocaine makes you arrogant. If I were Osborne I wouldn’t deny my cocaine past, I’d use it as a great excuse to cover for my array of God-given personality defects. I actually think it should be mandatory for the Chancellor to take cocaine, particularly before making the Budget speech. Instead of fiscal plans and growth forecasts he’d spend three hours pitching a screenplay he’s writing about a dog who’s been given his master’s brain.

At the GQ awards Osborne joked that no teenagers reading GQ wanked over his picture. I think you’re wrong there, George. I think the ones in Pakistan holding machine guns might do. If his current public image is the face that, after careful consideration, Osborne chooses to present to the world, then in reality he must be like a rogue android of Uday Hussain. He behaves as if Ted Bundy – experimenting with meditation – had found his mind conquered by a powerful telepathic crocodile. An amazing person, who, even when regularly advised not to sneer in public, just can’t bring himself not to. The other plausible explanation is that his PR team is headed up by the time-travelling Sherriff of Nottingham. Perhaps the Chancellor’s red box is actually made from Robin Hood’s skin.

Osborne also announced that benefit payments are to be linked to the ability to speak English. So that’s everyone on the dole in Glasgow fucked. Immigrants will lose benefits if they fail to improve their English at the same time as the government has been cutting language courses. It’s got to the stage where immigrants are being taught English from the words spray-painted across their doors. Immigrants will only keep benefits if they take English lessons up to the standard of a nine-year-old. That’s apparently the level necessary to understand barked instruction but with insufficient vocabulary to make it through a tribunal.

Foreign sex workers are being given free English lessons to help them understand the filthy things they’re being asked to do. It’s like a modern Eliza Doolittle: ‘Why, I’ll wager I could take a common streetwalker and turn her into a high-class prostitute!’ It makes you proud to be British that we’re willing to give immigrants a leg-up, as long as they’re long legs attached to sexy bodies that offer inexpensive blowjobs.

The Tories also unveiled the new citizenship test and I’d like to see everyone take it. A question such as ‘Which admiral has a monument in Trafalgar Square?’ would give most X Factor contestants a stroke and enable us to deport the entire cast of TOWIE. At the top of each test would be the most pertinent question of all – ‘Why the fuck would you want to come here?’ They’re also placing tougher restrictions on benefits to immigrants. We don’t want our tax money spent on foreigners; we want it spent on going to the Middle East to pointlessly shoot foreigners.

Of course, what the Tories really think is ‘Why don’t we save time, stop all judicial decisions, the offering of evidence, defence arguments; just deport anyone who doesn’t know that Starburst used to be called Opal Fruits.’ The flaw in the idea that we need to educate immigrants about British history is that a lot of them have a better grasp of it than us, particularly of the bit where the British blew up their granny.

Immigrants often have to do totally different jobs from the ones they trained for in their own country. For instance, the bloke who took my appendix out told me he was a cleaner back in Poland. The guide to the test costs thirteen quid – save your money immigrants. If you want to be British then get pregnant when you’re twelve and state that your greatest ambition is to see Rylan in a shopping centre.

The Tories are like some deranged sex killer who breaks down and tries to confess his crimes at a murder mystery weekend only to have people laugh and applaud at what they assume is his wonderful acting. At every Tory Conference the party outlines its priorities: building a Deathstar; killing Harry Potter; and creating a doorway into our dimension so the Many-Angled Ones can harvest our souls to the accompaniment of several previously unreleased Fleetwood Mac albums.

Boris Johnson usually gives a keynote speech that sounds like a Labrador having a ketamine-induced psychotic episode. And all the Tories speak of the Lib Dems like a celebrity speaks about the heavily sedated sibling they’ve sprung from hospital long enough to make up the numbers on Family Fortunes.

It’s been said that Boris Johnson doesn’t have the skills to become prime minister. He doesn’t seem to have the skills to get dressed, but it happens. Sort of. Many Tories want Boris to lead them into the next election. I wouldn’t trust Boris to lead me into a revolving door.

That said, Boris has done surprisingly well for a man who resembles a bouncy castle with Alzheimer’s. On Mumsnet he described himself as a chocolate digestive: consistent and reliable. And also because rugby players regularly masturbated on him at Eton. If British politics were a film, Boris would be a character they’d put in just to sell toys. A teenager from Lancashire had Boris tattooed on his thigh. He might as well just have had two eyes tattooed on his arse.

It’s amazing that these people can be so self-conscious without ever noticing how dreadful they are. Louise Mensch had a facelift. Hopefully, moving her mouth closer to her brain has helped but I feel terribly let down. I’d always thought she didn’t move her mouth properly because she’d had a stroke. Who cares if she had a facelift? It’s like people talking about whether Hitler dyed his moustache. She’s an anti-abortion feminist, placing her on the list of great feminists somewhere between Peter Sutcliffe and Henry VIII.

The Tories have done a brilliant job while in power. The UK has suffered the worst fall in living standards since the Second World War. I’d add an ‘apparently’ to that as I’m not convinced downgrading from Sainsbury’s to Asda quite compares with picking dead relatives out of the rubble. Cameron says it’s time for Britain to show the world what it’s made of. Though I’m not sure exactly what you can knock together out of debt and diabetes. He wants Britons to wrap themselves up in the flag – if you’re living abroad I’d first quickly check it’s not on fire. It was Oscar Wilde who once wrote that ‘patriotism is the virtue of the vicious’, but I suspect only as it was hard to find a publisher back then who’d print the word ‘cunt’.

Still, at least the government’s got its priorities right. Removing the 50p top-earner tax rate. It’s just logic. Give the rich more money and they can ensure that troublesome youths are kept busy as gardeners, cooks and grouse-beaters.

The stories these automatonic politicians release to humanise themselves are always dispiriting. Cameron claims he’s completed every level of Angry Birds. Critics say Mrs Thatcher didn’t waste her time playing video games. A pity. Maybe if Atari had pulled their finger out with their tennis-game graphics the crab-nibbled eye sockets of hundreds of teenage Argentine conscripts wouldn’t now be staring mournfully through the barnacle-encrusted portholes of the General Belgrano.

David Cameron says he no longer cares about being popular. Well, that’s handy. Cameron doesn’t mind being unpopular because steering through the agenda of big business is more important to him than his political career and, like Blair, business will reward him amply when he goes. Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez died and thousands of Venezuelans came out to mourn his death; if David Cameron died the biggest outpouring would be against the news over-running when we wanted to watch The One Show. If Cameron died tomorrow so few people would turn up you’d be able to cater the funeral with a packet of Monster Munch.

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I was shocked to hear of the death of Lady Thatcher. They say the good die young, so I’d just assumed she was immortal. But we must look at the positives. By all accounts, everyone now has a little more leg room around that big oval table at SPECTRE HQ. Sadly, many of her friends weren’t able to attend the funeral as they’ve been hanged at war crime tribunals. She was cremated. That’s what happens when you leave nobody in Britain who actually knows how to dig any more. The funeral brought central London to a standstill. The last time she managed that was the poll tax riots. I was all for a lavish, publically funded cremation. Right up until she died.

It’s never a tragedy when a Tory dies. The tragedy is that they never truly lived. I’m not sure that Margaret Thatcher got many women into politics, in the same way that Myra Hindley didn’t get a lot of women into hiking. All that Thatcher achieved was to ensure that people living in garbage camps a hundred years from now are going to think that Hitler was a woman.

A friend said of her that in retirement ‘the nice side of her came out’, something that only took eighty-five years and three strokes. It was speculated that Thatcher left an estate valued at £66 million in her will. It appears that she made her money by investing in a plastic-surgery company just before the Falklands War. She actually survived two attempts on her life. One being the Brighton bomb, the other when her assailant, after wrestling her onto an altar, stabbed the Daggers of Megiddo into her chest in the incorrect sequence.

Thatcher was desperate to end the days of governments bailing out lame-duck businesses, determined that they should stand on their own two feet. Hence the big switch from manufacturing to banking. Nick Clegg said, ‘She drew lines we are navigating today’, mainly as we weave our way home round the various companies digging up our gas pipes.

Several MPs mentioned Thatcher’s beguiling sexuality. They say she had the ankles of a twenty-year-old – they were paperweights given as a gift by her chum General Pinochet. She did always come across as a very cold woman – I can’t help feeling sorry for poor old Denis. Going down on her must have been like licking a lamp-post in winter.

Many of Thatcher’s friends were quite emotional at the funeral. I think I saw a tear forming in the burning eye of Sauron, and when it was time for the cremation Simon Weston threw himself on, for old times’ sake. The political guest list was a damning indictment of the inefficiency of the IRA. The only thing John Major ever did of note was having sex with Edwina Currie and not getting his head ripped off like a male praying mantis. I was surprised to see Sarah Ferguson there; I’d have thought she’d have sold her ticket on eBay. Fergie had a great time, though. She could finally sit in a room full of dictators without worrying if any of them worked for the News of the World.

Osborne cried. The world thinks George Osborne is a sensitive soul. Coincidentally, the man who sold him his new contact lenses has turned up dead in a forest. I think the stress of lying to us about having no money made him finally crack when the man in the silver cape stepped into the gold box. Osborne can apparently produce tears at will, just by picturing his policies’ effects on the weakest in society . . . safe in the knowledge no one watching could differentiate between tears of sadness, and ones of joy. Of course, the saddest part of the funeral is when the curtain shuts around the body. I just have to be grateful that I found Amanda Thatcher’s hotel window in the first place.

Seeing Cameron and Clegg united despite their warring parties reminds me of Romeo and Juliet – in that I hope this ends with them both killing themselves. The deputy prime minister now holds weekly radio phone-ins. So there you go – an answer to the question, ‘Could any radio DJ be less popular right now than Dave Lee Travis?’ It’s not all bad though – as part of this job swap the Secretary of State for Business is now Tim Westwood. I can see this sneaking into other aspects of Clegg’s life – when Cameron was reading a speech the other day Clegg punctuated it by shouting out ‘Shabba’.

Clegg wants to create more construction opportunities to give young Brits jobs. I wonder how many media graduates it takes to make a docusoap about the qualified builders that will have to be brought in from Poland? He also wants to raise the speed limit to 80 mph – so that his motorcade can pass through any British city without being destroyed by angry locals.

The Lib Dems are now so extinct they’ll exist only as a memory on I Hate the Noughties, being recalled animatedly but slightly inaccurately by Russell Kane in a segment even shorter than the one about me. Most people hate all three major parties. You’d do as well to put your X straight on to the polling booth and have the country run by a collection of portable balsa-wood cubicles.

A poll revealed the Lib Dems face becoming a political irrelevance right across the UK, not just in coalition meetings. As far as the coalition goes the Lib Dems now have leverage directly comparable to trying to open a five-litre tin of emulsion with a lolly stick.

It came as no surprise that MPs voted to keep the Lords – they were never going to get rid of a second house. Nick Clegg’s worried without Lords reform he’ll achieve nothing in this parliament. Of course you will Nick. At the very least you’ll have destroyed your party.

As for Ed Miliband he has emerged as a leader more faceless than a highly buffed marble statue of a baby’s arse, whose idea of passion is undoing the top button of his pyjamas. It’s strange that he’s so forgettable because he’s got a face so weird it could make a police horse cry. I’d like to make different jokes about Miliband but we know so little about him it would literally be easier to put together a five-page Match.com profile for coastal fog.

At least no one can accuse Labour of a lack of policies or vision. I certainly felt the spirit of Nye Bevan sweep the party conference when Ed Balls rallied his troops with his proposal to part-fund a temporary reduction in stamp duty with money he hopes to raise by selling off the 4G phone network. 4G is going to be a boost for business. Salesmen tend to be way more focused in meetings if they have the technology needed to crack one off in a lay-by beforehand. Miliband has revealed he’s afraid his young sons can access violent porn on his smartphone. To prevent this from happening do what I do – before giving the phone to the kids make sure you’ve deleted the contents of the history page.

I was surprised to learn Ed Miliband went to the same primary school as Boris Johnson. I’d naturally assumed both were failed prototypes for a Geppetto-like toymaker before he successfully made a real boy. Miliband’s parents fled Nazi Germany. But let’s not forget Cameron’s forebears were some of the first to describe Hitler as a monster – after he drank claret with the fish course when over for dinner.

Ed says he wants to make us ‘One Nation’. Sadly that nation is Greece. We are united in one nation, one nation that thinks ‘Not Ed . . . Anyone but Ed.’ Sixty-three per cent of Labour supporters say he’s not fit to be in Number 10. But he needn’t worry; that never seems to have been particularly important.

Predictably, at the party conference the delegates stood for the leader’s ovation with the weary disinterest and emotional disconnect of a nine-year-old Catholic boy unbuttoning his shorts for choir practice. Yet he shouldn’t feel too smug. It’s a fine line between a standing ovation and everyone just wanting to be first out of the room.

• • •

At a luxury five-star golfing resort in Northern Ireland the G8 leaders discussed plans to tackle world poverty, in much the way as you’d try to solve the AIDS crisis in a brothel. Syria was high on the G8 agenda. As far as arming the rebels goes, I think it’s a good idea. As it must be some help militarily if our troops know exactly what’s being used against them in eighteen months’ time. We can arm the Syrian rebels just like we armed Afghanistan, with an agreement to pop back after twenty years to show them our new range of weaponry tastefully displayed in the roof of the local primary school.

The US claimed they would only arm moderate rebel groups, although it’s possible these groups are only behaving moderately because they don’t have weapons. How do you arm moderate rebels? With some strong coffee and the email address of the Guardian editor?

Frosty relations with Vladimir Putin and the Russians led to a slight alteration to the cutlery layout – at dinner it went fish knife, steak knife, Geiger counter. Putin wanted to show off his rippling physique in the lough next door. Surely time to deploy a rolled-up sock. I always do this when swimming – as you tend to get the pool to yourself if people think you’ve shat yourself. Cameron issued Putin with the ultimatum that unless he helps oust President Assad he will be forced to do nothing.

Cameron was called weak for not condemning Putin’s re-election. In fairness, Cameron criticising dodgy election results would be like Richard Hammond calling someone a bead-wearing prick. Labour has criticised Cameron for being ‘weak’, and that means something coming from a party led by a man with the strength of a stick of month-old celery. Putin wept during his victory speech, a combination of raw emotion and tear gas wafting over from where the police were battering his delighted electorate.

Putin’s had some work done around his eyes. I’m told he got all the laughter lines from repeatedly watching footage of the Chechen capital Grozny being indiscriminately bombed to rubble. I confess I’ve had the bags removed from under my eyes. Not for appearance; my pet mouse was just desperate for a leather armchair. This sort of thing does have its place. Friends of mine have a little boy and, without wishing to sound cruel, he had a massive nose. They got him plastic surgery and you barely even notice it now. You’re too busy staring at his double-D tits.

Cameron travelled round India on his ‘Sorry about that’ tour. Dave went to promote trade, and to order a new chequebook after running out of patience listening to Beethoven while on hold for ninety minutes. At the start of his trip Cameron was struck by the visible poverty. And told the driver to take a more scenic route to Heathrow next time. Dave laid a wreath at the site of a massacre of three hundred protestors by British troops in 1919. And as a further mark of respect he waited a full hour before embarking on his sales pitch for the UK arms industry. Nick was left running the country. Though by now even he knows it’s the equivalent of sticking a Fisher-Price steering wheel in the back seat in front of a toddler.

India is like an old couple that has won the lottery and Cameron just happened to ‘pop by’ with the head of HSBC to see if there’s any gardening he can help them with or if they need anything from the shops. While in India, David wore a bandana, went barefoot and made a chapatti. So, that should make up for years of colonial rule and the Amritsar massacre.

Cameron’s going to divert money from the foreign aid budget to defence, by cleverly rebranding missions as ‘conflict prevention’. Fair enough. After all, the more people that die in military activity, the less there are left to need aid. But the charities aren’t happy. There must be some kind of compromise. Surely it’s not beyond us to invent a gun that fires rice.

Then Cameron and Prince Harry appeared together in the US. They were promoting the UK, although they missed the chance to use the slogan, ‘Never a better time to visit . . . as right now we’re not there.’ They toured New York on a double-decker bus, allegedly the first time since last year’s trip to Vegas Harry had heard someone shout, ‘Room for one more on top!’ Presumably, the idea of sending over a prince and a millionaire Etonian to try to persuade US businesses to invest in the UK was to make them think they can slash labour costs as we’ve still got feudalism. The Prime Minister announced Britain has clinched a deal with a US drugs giant to become a global test site for medicines. A global test site for medicines? That sounds pretty sinister. We could unwittingly become a nation of compliant drones, medicated to be distracted by shiny irrelevance while our rulers do as they please. When did they start?