Plastic Yankness in Labour Leaders

Neil Kinnock signed the death certificate for his chances of being Prime Minister - and the causes of death listed on the certificate were, number one, not being a half-out-of-the-closet Thatcherite who sucked up to Murdoch, two, being bald, three, ginger, and four, Welsh - when he fist pumped and shouted "Well Alright!" on a public stage. 

David Milliband did the same thing when Paxo asked him if he was 'tough enough to be Prime Minister', and he said "Hell yes, I'm tough enough!" on public television. 

A better answer might have been something like: I don't see that 'being tough' is necessarily part of the job, Jeremy - making tough decisions, yes, but not acting like a character in a gangster film.

Blair was a half-out-of-the-closet Thatcherite who sucked up to Murdoch, but he wasn't bald, ginger or Welsh, and he replaced aitches with glottal stops to try and sound like a man of the people (as all English political leaders do now), rather than making an embarrassing attempt to sound like a Yank.

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Of course, these hysterically over-hopped and violently flavoured beers are designed to be attractive to people who have been weaned on energy drinks and Sunny Delight, and who knock back Jägermeister as if it were an actual drink rather than something for hangovers that smells like pine lavatory cleaner (and probably doesn't taste much different either). 

It's the same with their hearing - the music has to be loud, they're indifferent to sound quality and they all shout, because they've damaged the cells in their inner ears by listening to in-ear bud speakers at max volume from an early age.

AND their sense of smell - the universal popularity of 'fabric conditioners' that smell like they were originally developed at Porton Down, fruit scented (??!!) cleaning products, toilet ducks, blocks and gels mean that they've been surrounded by such an all-pervading haze of 

pungent industrial byproducts, for so long, that the only smells that register are at max volume too. 

Hence the popularity of Lynx-type deodorants that smell like tear gas or urinal blocks, and which actually make your eyes water and your nose smart if your sense of smell works normally.

The Aum Shinrikyo cult's 1995 Tokyo subway atrocity was a grim precedent for the experience of travelling on public transport anywhere today when there's a young man on board. 

Or in a lift. 

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As I've said before, I'm going off beer, part of the reason being the popularity of 'craft beer' brewed by 'craft breweries'. I like English bitter brewed by English breweries like Thwaites or Fullers. When it was real ale brewed by micro breweries, like Dent Bitter, it was still ok. Now 'craft beers' are fashionable, everywhere that does decent beer is too full of young people shouting their heads off and taking all the seats, and the beer they're so keen on is undrinkable - fruit beers, and in Scandinavia, Indian Pale Ales and 'American' Pale Ales that are so bitter they're like sucking a lemon, and, in Britain, 'golden' ales that are SBTLSAL, and taste of chrysanthemum or Lynx deodorant.


The brewers compete to produce the most extreme or bizarre flavour they can, egged on by people who award prizes at beer festivals. It's like single malts versus Irish whiskey and bourbon. 
And beer's too strong now. The default setting for beer in the UK and Czechoslovakia used to be 3.5% or just above, whereas now it starts at 5.

Now look at this:

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/may/30/golden-ales-flavour-of-summer

When I was in  a Young's pub recently I saw that the 'sleeve notes' on the pump badge described Young's bitter as 'the original Pale Ale', and in a Greene King pub, my wife tried their 'Indian Pale Ale', which was nothing of the kind - it was what they until recently sold as bitter. The other ales were IPA Gold, which they used to call IPA, and IPA Reserve, a stronger version of what they used to call bitter.
I also note that of the 50 beers advertised in Wetherspoon's house mag for their recent Real Ale Festival, the descriptions of 26 of them feature the words 'pale', 'golden' or 'amber-coloured'.


Where (or more importantly, when) will this madness end?