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Wonder why Boris Johnson’s gone quiet all of a sudden, while his fellow Conservatives discuss the sanctity of marriage?

Bless them. They’re not very bright, the Tory faithful, are they? They certainly don’t have much of a grasp of modern history, just like their pitiful education secretary.

I’m sure Brothers and Sisters of this place have a better idea of the subject. Do we all remember the grand announcement of John Major’s back to basics moral crusade? Oh yes we do. And the hilarity that followed, as Tory after Tory shuffled across the media stage, trousers round ankles, clutching various amusing sexual aids in one hand and bulging brown envelopes in the other, trailing assorted bastard children and mistresses and rent boys like a comet’s tail.

Do we all remember William Hague and his baseball cap and his pound note, displaying as much of a grasp of the general electorate’s intelligence as John Prescott had of the English language?

The poor swivel-eyed loons who make up the membership, and many of the MPs, of the Tory Party, clearly don’t remember these disasters. They seem locked in a time warp: back they go, pontificating about the sanctity of marriage, railing against the Europe that brings them peace and trade.

Well, I love it. As Cameron and his Eton friends in 10 Downing Street are obviously all too painfully and publicly aware, this sort of Bufton Tufton-ism is massively popular with the grass-roots blue rinses, and makes the Tories look utterly ridiculous to the rest of us. We must hope nothing changes, for if the Tuftons carry on like this the party will spiral into another decade in the wilderness.

Mr and Mrs Bufton Tufton don’t like Europe and they don’t like gay marriage. Or even the idea of allowing heterosexual couples to have civil partnerships like gay couples.

Well, as I wrote six months ago, I never cease to be amazed at the number of people who believe a life is well spent if it is dedicated to preventing other people from living.

The Christians believe sodomites are damned to hellfire for all eternity by God, in his great mercy.

Tory MPs, some of whom also profess to be Christians, believe gay marriage would threaten the sacred institution of heterosexual marriage – you know, the institution that, at the moment, is affected by record divorce rates. Maybe gay marriage would be as much a threat to the institution of heterosexual marriage as, oh, I don’t know, say – poverty? Unemployment? Housing difficulties? Health problems? Children’s needs?

Together, instead of working out ways to enable married couples, unmarried couples, singles, straights, gays, black people, pink people, any people, to live happy and fulfilled lives, right-wing Tories and evangelical Christians would sooner spend their time, money and energy preventing all those people from doing things that would make them happy.

You could spend a lot of time quoting passages from the Bible at these freaks. You know, the ones in which Jesus preaches a gospel of inclusion, love, forgiveness, acceptance, tolerance.

They don’t want to listen. They don’t even get the bit about rich people, camels and eyes of needles. They only want to listen to their Old Testament God, the smiting one, the one the bigots have quoted all these years in the hope that anybody who doesn’t agree with their plans for making money gets a big sharp merciful spike up the jacksie, pronto, and hurry up with the kindling round the stake, Reverend Father.

As for the Tories who believe that people in love will somehow weaken the institution created to unite people in love… well. True colours will out, won’t they? This is the real Tory party – the one that makes the rules and to hell with you if you don’t follow them, the one that sets the moral parameters of our lives. Imagine! A moral landscape set by a party that believes it is wrong to help the sick and the poor and the old! A moral landscape set by a party that believes it is wrong to be in love!

The Tories are big on preaching light-handed government, keeping the state out of our lives – but what is hands-off-government, freeing-people-from-the-shackles-of-the-state, about saying who can and can’t get married?

As I may have pointed out, the Tuftons are really not very bright. They believe what’s got us all into this economic mess is poor people living on benefits in a culture of dependency. The facts? Don’t bother about them.

For example, it’s so very much easier for a Tufton to believe the myth that generations of families have never bothered to work because they live a life of luxury on benefits. The truth? The truth is this:

“The academics Paul Gregg and Lindsay MacMillan looked at the Labour Force Survey, the large-scale survey of households from which we get most of our statistics about who’s in work. In households with two or more generations of working age, there were only 0.3 per cent where neither generation had ever worked. In a third of these, the member of the younger generation had been out of work for less than a year.

“When they looked at longer-term data, they found that only 1 per cent of sons in the families they tracked had never worked by the time they were 29. What’s more, while sons whose fathers had experienced unemployment were more likely to be unemployed, this only applied where there were few jobs in the local labour market. So ‘inter-generational worklessness’ is much more likely to be explained by a lack of jobs than a lack of a ‘work ethic’.”

But that truth can be oh-so-easily dismissed, because it was reported in The Guardian.

A couple of times recently, I’ve had conversations in which people talk about people on benefits having it too easy, and the Tories having the right idea – you know, the sort of people who believe the answer to economic problems is to kick the weak, rather than get the rich, who’ve got richer, to do something like, oh, I don’t know, say… pay their taxes?

I ask what they want us to do with the poor, the old, the sick, the disabled, the children. Help them less? Not help them at all? How much help would satisfy the Tuftons? A fiver a week? A tenner? What would they have us explain to the blameless children of an unemployed person receiving their tenner a week? There are not often answers.

Iain Duncan Smith founded a think tank – now don’t laugh – called the Centre for Social Justice, which today reported that 6.8 million people, including 1.8 million children, have been trapped in poverty by worklessness, living in jobless ghettos, mainly in the north, but not exclusively. In Rhyl, apparently, 67% of people aged 16-24 have no job. Welfare spending per head can be as high as £6,279.

Now, there is an intelligent reaction to this, isn’t there? What is needed to prevent this tragedy, this scandal? Jobs. Very obvious. Jobs need investment to create them, people working in them need a living wage. Very clear answer.

What will Tufton Duncan Smith conclude? That these feckless ghetto idlers need to have their benefits cut, that welfare needs reform, that absolutely anything needs to be done rather than collect a few billion in unpaid tax from his corporate chums and use it to invest in jobs in that horrible north country where people are far too intelligent to ever vote Tory.

He could go further. He could cancel the ridiculous high speed rail investment that even his own government’s experts warn will not have as much beneficial effect as is claimed, and spread that money more evenly around the country, targeting the joblessness his Tuftons so deeply despise… but he and his friends have made a lot of promises to their corporate chums whose snouts are already deep in the high speed trough.

“Welfare spending can be as high as £6,279 a head”. Here, there are two reactions. The obvious, sensible one is: how can anybody live these days on £6k? I would hate to live like that. And the Tufton reaction is: look at the life of luxury those freeloading scroungers are living on their massive, massive incomes! £6k! That’s a fortune! What are they complaining about? Cut it! Give them less! Let them eat… well, whatever they can get for under £6k. Horse, isn’t it? Or walrus?

Even today, there are comments on the Daily Mail’s website railing against the creation of a “lifestyle choice for the bone idol (sic) and the spongers”. A lifestyle choice. £6k. Some choice. Somebody – I kid you not, and were it not the Daily Mail I’d think this was ironic – suggests making claimants wear a star on their clothes.

Another says, presumably unaware of the irony in the comments about taxes: “Cant believe that the government keeps paying lazy scroungers week after week to do nothing on the back of hard working peoples taxes. Its pathetic. Get tough Cameron!!!!!!!!!” (I think Michael Gove needs to have a word with this one about use of English).

Good grief. How did we ever get to this stage, where the truth is a lie and lies are truth and people hate other people so much and Christian Tories, who think gay people in love are wrong, get away with supporting the bits of the Bible they like and ignoring all the stuff about good Samaritans and camels? How did we ever stoop so low?

Which brings us to…

Stooping so low brings us neatly to Michael Gove, which is about as low as a politician can get. He’s one of the Euro-dinosaurs, and he now has even the moderate National Association of Head Teachers declaring no confidence in him. When will he have the self-awareness, the decency, to go? And who will be the politician who has the guts to place education in the hands of educators, not dogma-driven swivel-eyed loons?

Life has begun…

For Brother Hamster, the shackles of age have snapped shut around his ankles. The old duffer reached a significant milestone amid great celebration at the weekend, though I’m not sure he was very much aware of what was going on.

The music at the Hamster festivities was fantastic: Brother Fiddle gave us a really lovely set, including a specially and appropriately adapted Hangover Blues for the birthday old boy, and then everybody else turned the amps all the way up to 11 and left me thinking just how much talent and ability there is out there to be celebrated. Anything that can persuade Brothers and Sisters of this place to strut their funky stuff has to be good.

You can catch Brother Fiddle at the Wadebridge Folk Festival, in the acoustic tent, this August 24 at 3pm, by the way. And you can catch Brother Hamster, who we must all thank for a wonderful party, in the local geriatric department.

Language, language

This is not for the faint of language, but Sister Wizard Woman urges us all to look up the Malaysian translation of the word “faraj”, as in Nigel. I gather it may accurately sum up Scottish views of him. You have been warned.