Ameliorating The UK

This week I was quite surprised to learn that friends of mine who are nowhere near as ‘terminally online’ as I am - and I’m quite strict with myself in that regard anyway - knew all about Amelia. I thought I was telling them something new and interesting, but they already knew and had been sharing the memes.

In case you’ve only just wakened from a post-Christmas coma, Amelia was a character invented by some UK government think wank tank to tackle THE most pressing problem in the UK today; the rise of far-right extremism and the radicalisation of young white men.

It’s like watching your house burn and being more worried that you’ve left the upstairs light on.

Now, I’m not a gamer so forgive me if my references are a little outdated, but they hit upon a genius idea. What are the yoof interested in? Games. Aha - so we’ll create an educational game coz that’ll definitely work and we can steer them away from nasty stuff like loving your country and culture.

Here in the UK we’re allowed to love and fawn over every other culture except our own.

The ‘game’ they created was like a questionnaire. No, scratch that, it was a questionnaire. You were given options and if you made the ‘wrong’ choice there was some kind of little red meter that showed you how close you were to becoming Hitler¹. And as part of this ‘game’ they introduced Amelia.

You were playing ‘Charlie’ and, surprisingly, you could only choose a boy or girl version of the Charlie character - although, naturally, you were one of those “they/them” fucktards whichever you chose.

Call of Duty, it wasn’t. It was like one of those online corporate ‘training’ exercises they make you do². And like those training exercises it was irredeemably dull. You see, when your mates call you and ask if you fancy a Call of Duty sesh that night with everyone - kebab and/or pizza and beer included - you aren’t going to answer with “No thanks, I’d rather nail my testicles to the table”.

Not so with Charlie - nailing your testicles to a table is by far the preferable option when faced with playing a game of ‘Charlie’.

But one of the characters they introduced to help Charlie become a good little right-thinking state puppet was Amelia. Oh dear. She was supposed to represent the dark side - the nasty far-right bigoty one. You were supposed to not like her, eventually³. Even in the crappy game graphics they chose, Amelia is a feisty and attractive young girl with character.

What’s not to like?

And, just like that, the myth of Amelia was born. She has become the figurehead for an awful lot of seething resentment and anger. The UK government really don’t understand just how much anger there is out there. They (seem to) think it’s all just callow yoof with the wrong colour skin (i.e. white) being seduced by the Tatosphere. But it’s much more widespread than that. I hear it every day, from men and women alike - often quietly expressed, as is our cultural norm, but it’s very apparent if you know our cultural tendencies.

When someone from the UK says “How interesting”, often in a seemingly upbeat manner, you can lay odds that what they’re actually thinking is along the lines of “You’re an absolute tit. Please leave me alone”

The downside of this, of course, is that it can sometimes be difficult to express genuine interest.

What Amelia seems to have induced is a quite different Call of Duty. She has become like a modern day Boudicca, albeit a fictional one, resisting the Imperial might. She has stirred the imagination and appealed to our spirit and, far from being seen as a negative thing, she is being seen as positive. Very positive. Whether this all fizzles out remains to be seen - but they played with fire here and got burned because, like all such ‘elites’, they don’t properly understand us or what drives us.

It’s not hatred, although they will tell you it is; it’s love. Love of one’s home, one’s way of life. It’s a love of things we hold very dear - safety, family, decency, good-natured ribbing, sardonic humour, and, let’s face it, talking about the weather. We see all of these things crumbling before our eyes, and we don’t like it.

We’re not happy at all that the government seems insanely hell-bent on filling up the UK with a whole bunch of SMR⁴ people.

And even if they behaved themselves and could actually keep their dicks in their pants, why should the UK be like the homeless shelter for the entire fucking world?

We can barely afford a decent cut of meat - so why the fuck are we paying for a whole bunch of (statistically) useless fuckers to come and live here?

Excuse my language - I’m violating my own cultural norms here - but I might be just a tad angry about what our governments over the last 25 years have done to the UK⁵.

I’m very supportive of immigration. But there’s a big difference between immigration and Immigration™. I love it when people from across the world, whatever their skin colour or religion, come to the UK and want to muck in with the rest of us and make a go of it; people who respect what the UK has to offer and who might even have new ideas to make things better.

Immigration, like so many other things, should be subject to a cost/benefit analysis - and on both a collective and individual basis. You really don’t want to be importing Mustafa al-Rapey from Afghanistan do you? Abdul al-Engineer from Afghanistan, now - that might be a different matter, provided he’s not been infected with the Taliban virus.

But let’s look on the bright side. By the time these deranged dunderheads in power (and, God forbid, they remain in power) manage to entirely turn off our power in pursuit of their Nut Zero buffoonery, most immigrants will probably think “Sod that for a game of Jihad, we’re fucking cold - let’s go home”

What Amelia represents, however fleetingly, is hope. Hope that things can be better with enough resolve. Hope in ourselves, as a nation, once again. Such things are not to be sniffed at.

What’s one word that describes the current UK government in the UK? Can’t tell you, but it sure as fuck isn’t “hope”. Hope in our future, hope in ourselves, hope in our country - these are the last things you think of when listening to AI Starmer⁶.

In these dark and dangerous times we all need a little ameliorating - but failing that I’d just settle for a bit of Amelia.

1. It was a little meter to show how close you were to being referred to PREVENT which is a UK scheme to identify potential radicalization early and to take steps to, erm, prevent it

2. There’s always at least one goofball in the office who takes it seriously and it’s easy enough to twist their arm to give you the right answers

3. The choice of Amelia was interesting. I think they were trying to say that evil can lurk in attractive packages - so beware. At least they avoided some crude Andrew Tato-man mash-up as the baddie. As we now know, it has backfired somewhat spectacularly

4. Statistically More Rapey

5. The average yearly net migration figures for the UK running up to 2000 stood at around 4,000. They’ve risen by close to 10,000% of that figure in the last 25 years. Yes, you read that right. An increase of around ten thousand percent. Even with the recognition that net migration is an imperfect metric, this colossal increase is well out of order

6. Artificial Intelligence as a descriptor here? Well, I suppose 1 out of 2 ain’t bad