The Linux Extremist

It’s a sign of impending middle age, but I enjoy watching television programmes about property: Relocation, Relocation, Property Ladder, Grand Designs, you name it, when I land on a channel that’s featuring something involving renovating a house or moving to a new location, I find it compelling. It may be the tinkerer in me: the idea of turning, say, a crap 1960’s council house into a luxury development is similar to what Linux does to old PCs.

My lady likes these shows as well; she’s the kind of person who looks in various house and home magazines, looking for ideas on how to stick an additional toilet into a ridiculously small place, among other things.

So, we were watching Property Ladder last night; the programme featured a rather irritatingly nice family that were developing and selling houses for a profit. Think of Disney Does Real Estate and you have a fair idea of what it was like. Sarah Beeny, the presenter, said “they’ve cleared a £58,000 profit…before tax.”

My lady seized upon that. “That’s the first time she’s said the phrase ‘before tax’ - if it’s a second home, it’s subject to capital gains.”

As I regard property development for profit as being a more complicated way to commit suicide than taking arsenic, I hadn’t really thought about it before. Loads of people have bought houses and then redeveloped them under the assumption that at most, they’d have to pay 10% to the government on their gains. For those in other countries, you may not have heard that Gordon Brown recently raised this tax to 18%.

Hitherto, I thought that Gordon Brown just might win the next general election, whenever that may be. Yes, his government is full of corrupt wankers who have all the morality of a lobotomised weasel on meth. For goodness sake, any decent human being realises that taking money from a businessman who wants to donate anonymously has at least the air of dodginess about it, and given that they’re supposed to be in public service (cough, cough), they shouldn’t do it. We could live with that if it was accompanied by an air of competence and self-criticism. We’ve seen neither.

First take self-criticism. Speaking for myself, whenever the presenter on Sky News or BBC News says they have someone from the government on to defend some indefensible mistake, I get a sense of a dread. Few inspire more loathing in me than Hazel Blears: she has a smile that is as plastered on as that of the Joker from Batman. She tries to appear like she’s one of the “ordinary working folk” from her constituency of Salford, but you know that she’s got Sancerre in her fridge and if she ate a doner kebab, her head would explode. Furthermore she’s wound up so tight that you’d like to see her handed over to a crew of Liberian sailors who had been at sea without female companionship for 6 months, possibly the only way that would shake loose what’s been bunged up in her.

In precise tones, she always carries on, says that the government is competent and knows what it is doing even when the banking system is near collapse, the economy is plumbing depths that the passengers of the Titanic would recognise, and youth crime is such that a television presenter like Jeremy Clarkson can’t shake one of the little scrotes that’s bothering him by the scruff the neck, without thinking, “Oh crap, am I going to get done for this?”

Perhaps the most disgusting element of all is that Labour seems to think it is entitled to stay in power forever. Funny, I thought we lived in a democracy. Sort of, anyway. Part of the idea is that power should change hands from time to time. As much as I was cynical about New Labour in 1997, it was clear that the Tories were showing signs of wear and tear after 17 years; it wasn’t good for democracy that they were in power forever. At least the Tories went more gently into that good night. Labour thinks it can replace a charismatic leader with one who has to duct tape his smile into place and magically make it so they stay in office till the end of time.

Fortunately, they have made the fatal mistake of jacking up capital gains tax. So much of our economy is based on madness with housing; they just shot at all the little developers like the nice but irritating family. They shot at the small business owner. They shot at the people working in finance and all those who depend on them. And they’re not showing any signs of remorse, they’re just trotting out Hazel Blears.

Labour is done. Yes, yes, the pundits say they can come back from this. Pundits generally speaking live in London and hang out at dinner parties with people who discuss this very seriously no doubt. The view out here in the provinces is a bit different: they are dead, dog meat, and should lie down and accept the inevitable. Gordo plotted and schemed to become Prime Minister to the point that I wouldn’t be surprised if sacrificing the lukewarm blood of babies to Satan was involved. In the end it was futile; the sell by date has expired, all that remains is the long walk to the graveyard.

This is not to say things will get much better with anyone else. Generally speaking, decisive governments tend to anger people. For example, President Sarkozy in France just told the unions to bog off, and there’s a lot of unhappiness with him. Bush was decisive in getting rid of Saddam Hussein, now the entire world is angry at him to the point that they forget how the porky guy (who used to have chemical weapons) gassed the Kurds. Given this, most politicians try to just muddle on and not do anything courageous. So the recession will not be called off, and we will get just as fed up with the new lot as we did with the old one. But given that we are imperfect people, we should expect governments to be just as frail, ignorant and ridiculous as the rest of us. All of it springs to mind what Churchill once reportedly said - democracy was the worst form of government….except compared to all the others.

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