I don’t know if Reform UK MP Sarah Pochin has been to Scarborough, but she won’t like what was written in the sand.

Pochin is the MP for Runcorn. What Runcorn did to deserve her is a mystery. Only it isn’t really. She squeezed in by six votes – a perfect illustration of why voting matters.

Anyway, Pochin swallowed the poisoned pint with enthusiasm. Inhaled the noxious nicotine. Or indulged in whatever it is that Nigel Farage gets his MPs hooked on. Mabe it’s vin rage bought by the caseload. One sniff or sip, and they are addicted.

Pochin, above, has proved to be a quick learner. On being elected by six people, she filmed herself for her YouTube channel saying that Greenway Road in her constituency was riddled with crime and social unrest because of illegal immigrants. BBC North West Tonight sent a reporter to interview locals on the street who said that wasn’t true and it was a lovely place to live.

Now she’s gone on Talk TV and said: “It drives me mad when I see adverts full of black people, full of Asian people.” It does what? It you lived through the 1970s, you might think you’d suffered a bang to the head and gone back there.

Responding to a viewer who complained about the demographics of advertising, Pochin said: “It doesn’t reflect our society”, adding, “your average white person, average white family is… not represented any more”.

Advertising is a notoriously hard-headed, nay cynical, industry that uses tricks and artifice to sell us things we probably don’t need. The notion that advertising bosses would fill adverts with black or Asian faces just to adhere to imagined woke guidelines is just madness. No, it’s whatever works for them or their clients.

And their choices reflect the changing face of society. That’s why they don’t sell washing powder by featuring a family of Ku Klux clan members (“It really washes whiter”).

Once nearly all the faces in adverts were white. And outside of the ads comedians were relaxed about making racist jokes.

We all thought we’d moved on. Until Farage started dragging us back a vile mile. In those days there were mass marches against the National Front. If you want a reference, think Reform UK but without the darkly donated US millions, the slavishly devoted BBC, or wall-to-wall social media.

What Farage does is make racism seem acceptable while pretending he is doing nothing of the sort. And he always has a hissy fit if anyone suggests he or his party is racist.

He held a press conference the other day, and the one before that. He can’t help himself. And the papers and the BBC trundle along, knowing there’ll be a lazy headline to hand.

In this press conference he said his MP’s remarks about adverts had been ‘ugly’ but not ‘deliberately’ racist. Oh, yeah. Pull the other one, it’s got a racist joke on it.

You can look up what Farage said if you wish. But the pattern is now long established. Farage is asked if someone in his party might be a teensy bit racist and he splutters, “How very dare you”, or something equally preposterous.

It was taken out of context, he’ll say. The context being that they said something that was racist. The thing is, Nigel, we saw or heard the racist thing. We know it was racist. And we see what you’re doing. You may pretend to decry the racist thing, but the racist thing was already in the headlines by then. Nasty job done.

Actually, I’ve no idea if Nigel Farage is a racist. But he certainly knows how to attract them. How to stir them up.

Let’s hand over now to the veteran Tory grandee Michael Heseltine, above. At 92, he is making a comeback, according to the Times. He has harsh words for Nigel Farage and Reform, whose policies remind him of Oswald Mosley and Enoch Powell.

Never thought I’d say this, but hurrah for Hezza.

As for Keir Starmer, he woke up enough to accuse Pochin of ‘shocking racism’ and to criticise Farage for showing ‘no leadership’.

Well, yes. But one disappointment with this Labour government is the way it has stuck to Tory or Reform UK rules of engagement over migration. Squint and you’d be hard pushed to tell the difference. With such a large majority behind him, Starmer could have framed the whole debate differently. Instead he just carried on putting all the blame on the four per cent of migrants who arrive here by small boats.

I spotted the Scarborough beach photograph on Threads. In a sorry sign of the times, the positive comments below the post were undermined by Reform UK knuckleheads being rude and offensive. As is often the way, they had few or no followers and had barely posted.

Then again, they might not even exist. The Eastleigh News reported that Reform UK’s Hamble Valley branch posted a page with the headline: “Real people – not career politicians”. This was apparently taken down after it appeared that some of those real people in the photograph had been created using artificial intelligence.

Image by Erik Lucatero from Pixabay

I was skimming an article when three words popped out of the grey text. They were “continuous partial attention”.

That pings a bell, I thought, pausing only to pick up my iPhone and scan social media, check my three email addresses and see if anything new had crawled out from beneath the news stone.

And I don’t even work any more, or hardly at all.

The article in the Guardian’s Saturday magazine was by Sophie McBain and had the headline, ‘Welcome to the golden age of stupidity.’ Technological advances are shrinking IQ scores, leading to brain rot, and “making it hard to work, remember, think and function”, apparently.

New technologies from the printed word onwards have always weathered such accusations, but is the advent of artificial intelligence only going to make matters worse?

A question to which the poached halves of my brain can only respond with an elongated ‘err’ followed by an ‘umm’.

I can’t yet claim to understand artificial intelligence, you see. We seem to be at the stage where everyone nods wisely and mutters ‘artificial intelligence’ without exactly knowing what it means or how it will affect our lives.

Even our government has been at it, suggesting that AI will make everything better and ‘grow the economy’, to call on those dullard words from the political lexicon.

Well, maybe, but has anyone bothered yet to read the terms and conditions, or is it just like always, where you tick the box at the end of a scree of words you don’t read, thinking oh, it’ll be all right.

But let’s settle for now with this notion that using artificial intelligence rather than our own intelligence might be damaging. To borrow the hackneyed phrase ‘use it or lose it’, it seems reasonable to suppose that asking AI to do everything for us won’t stretch our own brains much.

Thinking round a problem is an ancient skill, something humans are good at.

The tech consultant and academic Linda Stone term coined the term ‘continuous partial attention’ in the late 90s after noticing how her students “seemed to be trying to do 20 things at once”.

This notion of being continually but shallowly distracted resonates with me, not least because sometimes this blog is composed of bits and pieces found on social media (once Twitter as was, now mostly Threads), alongside snippets of news, stories clipped from newsprint, words half-heard on the radio.

That’ll make a piece, the distraction motor known as my brain pipes up, just as something else is spotted. Then the newspaper I was half-reading is dropped, or the TV programme I was half-watching no longer grabs my attention, later leading me ask, annoyingly, “What just happened there?”

There is always something in the blog snippet drawer, where potential items live, or mostly go to die. And look, oh, that actor we were wondering about, she was in that thing we liked, the one on BBC4, or Channel 4, or maybe ITV, possibly Netflix.

This digital splintering of our attention span, this need to glance away from what we are doing, risks leaving us unable to adsorb anything at all, doesn’t it?

Our smartphones are amazing slim tablets of everything. But they also give us the cheap hit of knowledge when all we’ve done is Google a question and received an instant answer. That’s miraculous in a sense, but the lack of effort involved is worrying, as too it out-sourcing our knowledge to US corporations.

Still, those of us old enough to know better can remember when life was different, grainier, less instant.

Today’s young people have no such experience, as has been shown in the new series of Channel 4’s Educating Yorkshire, above. The students are very attached to their smart phones; one sparky girl was even suspended and sent home rather than give up her phone for the school day.

For the teaching staff at Thornhill Community Academy in Dewsbury, first seen on TV 12 years ago, the most significant changes have been around mobiles and mental health.

Headteacher Matthew Burton is quoted below from a BBC website feature about the series:

“On the whole, there’s a lot more access to the internet and there are a lot more challenges around teenage mental health and anxiety. On the flip side of that, young people these days are much more attuned to their own mental health and how they’re feeling and are able to ask for the help they need, so we’re really proud of them.”

It’s a wonderful series, well worth a watch, mostly to be reminded of the wit, spirit and undying cussedness of teenagers.

As for this particular blog, it was composed almost without distraction or even one peek in the oddments drawer, leaving all those rancid leftover scraps about Trump and Farage untouched for now.

The Time cover Trump hates

I discovered the word kakistocracy and thought, wow, I’ll be using that as often as possible, then forgot all about it.

Meaning “government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state”, it is drawn from the superlative of the Greek word for bad.

If you were to say that President Trump’s administration is deeply deserving of the label, I wouldn’t disagree.

But maybe we need another word or phrase to encompass a politician considered wildly unsuitable for the role he holds – and yet everyone he meets seems compelled to say what a sound and swell guy he is.

Perhaps psychotic sycophancy fits the bill, as the first word suggests losing some contact with reality – while the second suggests you are, to clatter downstairs to the linguistic basement, a terrible arse-licker.

Some still love Trump, while others, in the US and abroad, now gaze in abject puzzlement, wondering how such a morally dubious, imperious, misogynistic, vainglorious dunderhead could twice have become president.

A dunderhead, should that page have loosened in your dictionary, is an informal word for a stupid person; a splendid word, even if Trump is not that so much as a man totally unencumbered by knowledge.

A man who knows better than everyone else even though he knows nothing. Then again, perhaps a mock-monarch intent on grabbing all the power there is, while seemingly amassing as much wealth as possible for himself and his family, is less of a dunderhead than those who voted for him.

As we know to the vanishing point of boredom, Trump’s every graceless speech is embossed with cheap studs of boastfulness and wrapped in gold ribbons of self-regard.

Mind you, he’s had a good week, having brought eternal peace to the world, or something. It would require a deeper brain mine to examine in detail the agreement between Israel and Hamas to end the fighting in Gaza and release hostages. Is it a peace deal, another ceasefire or a shifty smudge somewhere between?

Even a shallow-brained observer might peer through the reality-TV-style braggadocio and fear everything could fall apart if the pressure isn’t maintained. Trump is interested in bragging rights rather than details, so it could happen. And he bores easily, much as the rest of us do when forced to listen to him.

One detail mentioned by many observers is that Trump’s deal is essentially the same as one agreed ten months ago by President Biden – but Trump wanted that deal delayed until he was president. As did Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

Follow this argument to its grisly conclusion and you see leaders who were apparently prepared to keep the deaths mounting in Gaza for their own political ends. Again, deeper brains than mine will determine the truth of that allegation; but how shocking if true.

Psychotic sycophancy, by the way, seems to be a quality Trump values in those he employs. Steven Cheung, the White House’s director of communications, wrote that Trump would “continue making peace deals, ending wars and saving lives”. Adding, as if that weren’t plenty already, “He has the heart of a humanitarian, and there will never be anyone like him who can move mountains with the sheer force of his will.”

You might quibble that many politicians from many countries worked on that deal, while Trump slapped his name on it. But those of us who detest the man can at least concede that he got this deal, if that’s what it is, over the line.

Still, all that bullying talk, pleading and shameless lobbying to be given the Nobel Peace Prize was and remains demeaning and pathetic. Asking for something so often and so loudly should trigger an immediate disqualification.

Death and misery all round, and Trump seemed most concerned about whether or not he won a ‘gold star’ from Norway. In the event the prize went to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina (who promptly announced that Trump ‘deserved it more’, for heaven’s sake).

There has been some uplift for the anti-Trumpers in that photograph just used by Time magazine for its cover. The story inside is a glowing report, but Trump still wasn’t happy. The vain old fool just hates the photograph, calling it “may be the Worst of All Time”.

Taken with the sun behind his head, the photograph peers up from below, putting emphasis on his crumpled concertina neck, and peeping beneath his carefully arranged coiffure to suggest the bald head within. A sly way to poke fun at Trump while celebrating him.

Oh, and incidentally, the ear hit by an assassin’s bullet appears to be in splendid nick, should you be wondering.

Leadenhall Market

JUST back from a weekend in London, that infamous hellhole. I took a spare Rolex in case one was stolen. That’s a joke, naturally, as I am more likely to wrap a cobra round my wrist than a Rolex.

It has to be said that the lawless ruined city of Nigel Farage’s stove-top imagination, that seething place of rampant wokeness and people cowering indoors for fear of being robbed, or perhaps for fear of bumping into Mr Farage out with a GBN microphone and a phalanx of bodyguards, was looking on top form.

Fearlessly did we walk the streets of Southwark on the Friday afternoon to the Old Operating Theatre and Herb Garret.

On the way there we stumbled on Crossbones Graveyard and Memorial Gardens. This post-medieval graveyard stands in memory to the 15,000 paupers thought to be buried there. A magically chaotic place, part garden, part artwork, almost at the gleaming foot of the Shard.

The woman on the door directed us over the road to Red Cross Garden, designed by the Victorian social reformer Octavia Hill, one of three founders of the National Trust, another good discovery.

The Old Operating Theatre offers a fascinating delve into surgical history and is only occasionally gruesome. It’s housed in the attic of the early eighteenth-century church of the Old St Thomas’ Hospital, and the operating theatre itself stands as a medical chapel.

The second part of the museum’s name refers to the drying of herbs, although you have to admit that Herb Garret would be a cool name for a jazz musician.

On Saturday morning we went early to Borough Market before the arrival of the lawless mobs (otherwise known as people from all over the world having a good time).

After that we crossed the river to the City, visiting St Dunstan in the East, above. The church, built around 1100, was severely damaged in 1666 by the Great Fire of London, then bombed in the Blitz of 1941. The ruins now form an enchanting place of peace and greenery, with shining towers all around.

After that it was on to Leadenhall Market a grand covered market, where we had a grand cup of coffee.

The City looked amazing in the sunshine, and this visit upturned my preconceptions. I’d always believed there are now too many sky-scrapers, those glittering monuments to the inequities of capitalism (or something else equally woke). Well, perhaps. But here’s the thing – these giddying, glass-spun structures look amazing next to old London, and they befit a capital city; don’t they?

A walk over Millennium Bridge, above, another great architectural achievement, took us briefly to Tate Modern, before going to see Twelfth Night at the Globe theatre. The tickets were a birthday present for me from our three grown-up children, and the production was properly funny and delightful.

We spent our last day getting lost on the way to Kew Gardens, thanks to incompetence, and also to Waterloo station shutting the moment we stepped through its portals.

But we got there in the end. Kew was wonderful. The tree-top walk is a great addition since my only previous visit somewhere down a crevice in time.

I was a student in London, lived there for ten years or so, and love to return to this city of many cultures and people.

Although the usual suspects bellow that the capital is becoming more dangerous, the crime figures indicate otherwise. Listen instead to the senior police commander Andrew Featherstone, who said to the Guardian the other day that there was “no doubt” it suited “some people, organisations and others” to suggest London was crime ridden.

“When you look at the actual facts, that is not true,” said Featherstone.

Ah, yes – actual facts. You know, things that are known or proved to be true. As we know, politicians of the right constantly deny facts and twist the truth into any shape that suits their purposes (a certain US president even fabricates lies in order to send troops into cities he disfavours).

London has its problems, where doesn’t, but the right-whingers hate London because it’s a multicultural city that works – and as such stands as a riposte to everything their mean souls hold dear.

We’ll be back. My only gripe, incidentally, concerns the shortage of decent pubs around Blackfriars. A beer desert but never mind.

Yes, exactly that…