Kill Skill (says Phil)

When I was doing my A-levels, the guy in charge of sixth form studies at the time was named Phil (and that is his real name: usually when I refer to acquaintances in my articles, I pseudonymise them, but Phil doesn't deserve it).

Phil made it abundantly clear throughout my two-year tenure at the college - a further education institution located in the Midlands town of Newcastle-under-Lyme - that he didn't like me.

He even refused to have me in his tutor group in my second year, despite the fact I'd been assigned to him.

Please bear in mind that Phil had never taught me, nor had we ever interacted in any way (beyond his giving me undisguised scowls of contempt whenever we passed in the corridor).

So why didn't he like me?

My other teachers did, and I received reliably good feedback and high predicted grades.

I had a pretty good idea of why Phil didn't, but it was explicitly confirmed on A-level results day, when my classmates and I all went to the local pub with some of our teachers to celebrate.

I had sat four A-levels, in English, Philosophy, Media Studies (it was hard, ok!) and Psychology, and received AAAB, the second-best results in the college.

Nevertheless, at the celebratory event, the aforementioned Phil went around effusively congratulating everyone else, yet said nothing to me.

This was noticed by a friend of mine who - emboldened by a bolstering brace of Bacardi Breezers - confronted him, and demanded:

"Can I just ask, Phil, why you're congratulating all these people who got Cs and Ds, but have said nothing to Miri, who got As?"

"Because," he snapped, quick as a flash. "Their Ds mean a lot more than her As do."

You know why, right?

The clue was in the opening paragraphs, regarding the location of the college, Newcastle-under-Lyme, which is one of the most deprived areas of the country and very working-class, whereas I came from a middle-class background and lived on the local university campus with my lecturer father.

So, you see, I was regarded by Phil as exceptionally "privileged" and therefore to be held in contempt, all my achievements to be dismissed only as evidence of my sickeningly unfair advantages in life.

That's why he didn't like me, and the fact that I was regarded as bright and capable by my teachers - information which was fed back to him as head of Sixth Form - intensified his dislike ever further. (I'm not imagining or exaggerating any of this, as it was all confirmed to me by the guy who had to have me in his tutor group when Phil refused.)

It was of no consequence to Phil that I hadn't been to any "posh" private school (and indeed attended a state school so bad it was put in Ofsted Special Measures), nor had I actually grown up with my university lecturing father, having only seen him 4 days per month following my parents divorce when I was 7 (I had only moved back to live with him weeks before I began my A-level course).

My childhood was really not what most would describe as "privileged", involving as it did multiple house moves around dubious parts of Manchester with my single, low-income mother, including a four-year stint in a Buddhist commune... (come on, you didn't really think my childhood could have been normal!? You'll have to wait for the autobiography for the full story though...).

Phil didn't know any of this, nor did he care to: he just knew what my father's job was and that I didn't have a particularly pronounced local accent, and from this drew his own conclusions.

In reality, the reason I did well in my A-levels was nothing to do with any "unearned privilege" or "unfair advantage", it was a reflection of one thing and one thing only: my own hard work. I went to all the same classes as my classmates did, had access to all the same resources, and had no extra advantages such as private tuition.

The reason certain classmates of mine did less well is because they didn't work as hard as I did.

(Which is also the reason I failed nearly half of my own GCSEs, so I know how it is.)

It's as simple as that, but such straightforward, stating-the-obvious home truths are anathema to the psychotic anti-human cult known as "socialism".

Something of which we have all just been brutally reminded with their jaw-droppingly extraordinary reaction to the farmers' inheritance tax.

If you've missed the latest social-media-saturating squabble of the moment, here is the basic outline:

The UK Labour Party announced in the budget that it would be applying inheritance taxes to farms worth over £1 million, a tax from which farmers were previously exempt, as the exemption enabled them to pass the farm on without being crushed by a crippling tax bill that would have necessitated the sale of the farm to meet.

As farming typically yields a very small profit margin, exceptionally few - if any - farmers would ever have had the money in the bank to pay this bill.

You'd think this - and why so many people, farmers or not, are so outraged by the sudden change - is a pretty simple concept to grasp, but, extraordinarily, vast swathes of the left cannot, and think the issue is, in fact, about exorbitantly wealthy land barons "wanting to swerve tax on the fat wads they pass on to their dopey kids" (quoting that great luminary of eloquence and political insight, Terry Christian, there. Terry Christian, by the way, despite gaining admission to a university - what a privileged bastard! - was expelled for never turning up, which illustrates exactly what I said earlier - people do poorly academically when they don't put in the effort, not because of a middle-class conspiracy to oppress them).

The furiously fulminating left wing actually cannot comprehend the concept of "asset-rich and cash-poor" and that a farm's "wealth" can only be released to settle a tax bill by selling, and thus losing, it.

They are instead blinded by their own vicious, vacuous envy, believing these "rich fookers" are lavishing undeserved fortunes on spoilt brat kids.

It's exactly the same attitude that Sixth Form Phil exhibited towards me, and it runs rampantly unchecked on the left.

Yet it's even worse than leftists simply being economically illiterate, because if and when you are actually able to get them to comprehend that farmers are not passing on wealth, but a business, and that the only way therefore for their descendants to settle the huge tax bill they will be landed with, is to sell said business, you get:

"So what? Good! Nobody left me a farm. I've got nothing. So these privileged douches shouldn't have anything either."

I replied to woman who made this statement as follows: "You "have nothing" (except an internet connection, iPhone, house to live in, clothes to wear, & free time to argue with strangers on Twitter), but would like to have even less by putting farmers out of business so vast conglomerates can control the food supply?"

Socialists like to tell us that they're just about equality, justice, fairness, and all the rest of it, but this episode has ripped off this socially acceptable mask and revealed the vicious, snarling real face underneath.

Socialists want "equality" insofar as they want us all equally in the gutter: they want us all equally poverty-stricken, hopeless, and helpless, wholly dependent on the "benevolence" of Daddy Government to save us.

They despise such things as entrepreneurship, innovation, legacy, self-sufficiency, hard work, and most of all what they despise (I've learned this many times over my life) is skill.

That's what they really hate, and that's what they're really lashing out against. They see skilled people reaping the benefits of the skills they have put in thousands of hours of work in order to develop, and it triggers disfiguring, uncontrollable envy.

Skill isn't compatible with socialism, because possessing a skill means you're not "just the same as (just as worthless as) everyone else". In some respects, in terms of the particular aptitude you have, you are better.

Not "better" as in more worthy in the eyes of God or whatever, but better at the thing you're good at, which has reflected in positive ways in your own life, meaning you are enjoying more advantages and success than the skilfully-challenged socialist.

But rather than react to this by trying to improve their own skillset and rise to your level, the socialist reacts by trying to decimate the advantages your skill has brought you, and bring you down into the gutter with them.

For example, the reason farmers are able to successfully pass on their farms to their children over many generations is because those children have been intensively trained from their earliest years to learn the intricate practices of farm work. By the time they are adults and their parents die, they have undertaken tens of thousands of hours of intensive farm labour, enabling them to develop the complex and multifaceted skillset essential to competently running a farm.

In the same timeframe farmers' kids are doing this, meanwhile, the child of the average leftist is stupefying themselves in front of screens whilst developing a gender identity disorder, and that isn't even hyperbole or exaggeration. That's the general trajectory for an urban leftist family these days. The kids either become transgender, develop an eating disorder, or acquire a drug problem. Not infrequently, all three...

They then have catastrophically unstable and unsuccessful adult lives, unable to hold down decent jobs or relationships, and who do their socialist parents blame?

Farmers, apparently.

And thus find the solution to be to ruthlessly steal everything these farming families have so painstakingly worked for over so many generations, so "my Sammie can have a go instead".

The particularly perfidious Will Hutton apparently finds this unabashed government land-grab very encouraging, because it will "allow younger generations with new ideas to enter the field".

What younger generations?

Not those who have been born and raised to the farm life, as Mr. Hutton wishes to steal their farms from them.

So who?

A 21-year-old transgendered blue-haired communist?

You can't just graduate from Swindon Ring Road University with your degree in Representation of Queer Vegans in 12th Century Bolivian Art and decide to become a farmer.

You need a complex set of skills.

You know, the ones farmers have been raising their children for centuries to have...

But like I said, socialists hate skills. I know it initially appears that it's money (that is, other people having it) that they hate, but really it's not, because where did that money come from?

It came from having some sort of skill. Even if you initially inherited some of your money, or a family business, in order to maintain and grow these things, rather than squander and collapse them, you must have significant skill.

Socialists can't bear that idea, because it reveals the inescapable and fundamental truth that if you're failing in life, it's not automatically the fault of the "evil rich". Unless you've got a severe illness or disability limiting you, then failure is generally because you haven't developed sufficient skills to succeed.

Is it easy to do this?

No, of course it's not, and the game is certainly rigged against us in many ways.

Yet it's far from impossible, and billions of people have done it, overcoming all sorts of profound obstacles, set-backs, and struggles on the way.

It's hard to skill up, and I'm not just talking about professional skills and qualifications, but equally essential personal skills, such as the ability to be assertive, to refuse to be exploited, to set boundaries, and so on (many people who are bright and hardworking still struggle to become successful because they haven't mastered the aforementioned skills, and I speak from experience).

To face up to your own flaws and deficits and commit to putting in the hard work and long hours to acquire the skills you need, is hard.

Much easier to just steal the fruits of others' skills instead.

And that's socialism in a nutshell. The refusal to become adequately skilled to earn their own success, which is why they display an open and visceral hatred to those who are skilled.

That's why, when these types encounter those who possess a skill, then instead of it inspiring them to try to rise to that person's level, they display only a desperate desire to drag the other person down to theirs.

Because of course that's the only way we can ever be "equal". We can never all be equally skilled or equally able, there will always be vast chasms of difference in these areas, but we can certainly all be equally in the gutter, so that's what socialists/communists ultimately want.

The only good thing to come out of the farmers' tax scandal, then, is that after decades of denying it, socialists have shown us irrefutably and undeniably, what they really are: jealous, spiteful, skill-free parasites.

Although, in the interests of balance, it's only fair to mention that Terry Christian feels this episode has exposed me, too: as a "sad supplicant surf... slurp arsing the super wealthy".

As always, I leave it to my readers' discernment to conclude who has made the more compelling case…

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