Respect ma Authoritah.

You will respect ma authoritah!

(Picture disrespectfully nabbed from here and meddled with)

I've been Christmas shopping. No, I didn't go outside. I got my credit card drunk enough to agree, and did it online. Meanwhile the snow is deepening and the evil children are still wandering about instead of being at school learning about equality in biology. Pity they aren't learning anything else. Actually, these days, not being in school might improve their education. Schools must be terrified - out of their control, those kids might learn stuff! My God, they might even pick up a book!

They might realise that finding a new form of metabolism on Earth, while interesting, tells them nothing at all about life on other planets. There might be other forms of life out there. They might be visiting us in flying discs. If they are, what can we offer them? Technology they discarded centuries ago? The EU has appointed someone to deal with the aliens, if they ever ask to be 'taken to our leader'. Does the EU imagine that a race that can travel through space will be impressed by a species that has been as far as their own Moon and can't find it in themselves to try again, never mind go further? They will laugh at those idiot authoritarians whose arrogance puts them above all others. As we do.

Our leaders demand respect. They see no need to earn it. Simply wearing the right badge makes them respected, they believe. They are no different to those gangsters who demand 'respect' and then beat you up to enforce it. No different at all.

Julian Assange has been remanded in custody because 'judges believe he might abscond'. His face has appeared in every newspaper and on every computer screen. He cannot abscond without dramatic and expensive surgery. Dick Puddlecote has covered the one real thing that the Wikileaks fiasco has revealed about those who call themselves our superiors. That they will do anything to silence dissent and attack those who embarrass them. You think the Islamists are bad? They are amateurs. The political death threats are far more likely to come true than any mad Mullah's babblings.

Nobody believes Julian Assange can vanish. He is not held for the risk of his disappearance. He is held to tell us that if we don't behave, we will be dealt with.

Every day, this blog is visited by the Ministry of Justice in The Hague. Why? Probably because I am in the Total Politics lists and those are convenient watch lists. Hello, Justice People. No crimes here, I'm afraid. I've seen you for a long time so I'm careful about that. Oh, and I've never been to Sweden so don't even think it.

I was brought up to respect my elders. I still do, tempered with the knowledge that even though all my elders know stuff from before I was born, some of them are still idiots. Respect cannot be automatic. I do not respect anyone who demands respect. I respect those who have earned it. Few of those in Government are my elders and fewer have earned anything more than contempt. As for the EU, they have earned nothing. Everything they have, they have stolen.

The courts? Contempt of court should be a duty, not a crime. They punished CatBinWoman and then let a dog-batterer off with a slap on the wrist. The RSPCA pursue a year-old video of a cat being comfortably enclosed in paper and let the dog-beater go. Shouldn't dogs be forming their own pressure groups and demanding minority status by now?

Cameron and Clegg think they are respected. They believe that the mere fact of their position commands respect. It does not. Ask the Brown Gorgon, if you can find it. Ask the Tiny Blur who has to have bodyguards wherever he goes because he is so respected by everyone. Ask even Thatcher, of whom many on the left are crying out for her death even though she hasn't been Prime Monster for decades. There is no automatic respect for any Prime Monster, any Prime Monster's Pal or indeed any politician at all. There is, thanks to more than a decade of reducing the youth to feral, no respect for anyone who doesn't have access to a knife or a gun.

This and the previous governments have deliberately destroyed respect. If you smoke, you are scum. If you are overweight, you are scum. If you drink, you are scum. If you like ready meals, salt or fat, you are scum. If you drive, you are scum. If you are attacked by Ferals they have rights and you don't. If you embarrass the ruling class, no bail, but if you are part of the ruling class and are filmed abusing an animal, off you go.

These people demand respect like Jamaican gangsters but they do nothing to earn it. They do everything they can to make themselves impossible to like, never mind respect, but they expect it anyway.

They might have Authoritah, for now, but they will never have respect.

Not mine, anyway.