THERE'S A GAPING HOLE IN THE MIDST OF THE ENDLESS XENOPHOBIC GOUGH SPOUTED BY TRUMP AND FARAGE.

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INCONVENIENT TERROR TRUTHS NOBODY SEEMS TO WANT TO TALK ABOUT.

A few nights ago I watched the Munich horror unfold as a breaking news story on Sky. It didn't take so very long for me to feel the urge to scream at the TV. It was pretty damned obvious all of the emerging clues were suggesting the perpetrator was some kind of right wing nut as opposed to a fundamentalist ISIS nut. Social media photos showed a lad dressed more for MTV than the mosque. People had already clocked the fact it was the anniversary of the Anders Brevik massacre. And then there was the phone filmed footage of the perp on a car park roof shouting to the skies the fact he was a born and bred German.

Despite all of this emerging truth, the studio anchor continued to quiz his guests about Angela Merkel's catastrophic decision to let in hundreds of thousands of migrants. No doubt the anchor guy had been through hundreds and hundreds of hours of the best media training Rupert Murdoch could lay his hands on. Keep well apart from the breaking story. Sit back and wait. Don't jump to any conclusions you might regret later. In the cold light of day. Once the dust has settled. Once the true facts have emerged.

No chance.

The lad was well and truly wrapped in the fairytale post 9/11, post Brexit world.

There's a nutter on the streets. Let's talk migrants. Because night follows day, right?

And as the thing unfolded, the usual procession of politicians and experts were rolled on and off the screen to peddle the all too familiar party line. Our thoughts are with the families of the victims. Nice and safe. Thank God for the wonderful men and women of the security services who do so much brilliant work to keep us safe. Nice and safe. And of course we will do all we can to help our German/French/American/Belgian allies on this dark, dark day.

And then?

Well then opinions start to divide up a bit. Some will square off their jaws and turn determined faces straight to the camera. Then they will tell us like we are all seven years old how we all need to be tough and find some more buildings in the desert to reduce to rubble. We need to fight with fire. We need nice black and white shots with digital information in the top corner of the screen. This is an arial view of a building in the desert before. Then.... pooooofffffff.... and here is an arial view of a building in the desert after. Bang and the building is gone.

Others take a more considered line than the bomb the bastards back into the Stone Age brigade. They tell us we need more of our taxes to be poured into MI5 and MI6 and GCHQ and Langley and the Pentagon and all those places filled with the heroic spooks who flog themselves 24/7 to keep us safe. And if only we can have more spooks and more satellites and more CCTV and more tapped phones and more intercepted e mails everything will be all right. Course it will. It has to be.

And all the while the serious faced anchors nod their serious nods and they wouldn't in a million years dream of questioning such absolute wisdom. It all just sounds so very, very good and the guys who tell it like it is always have such a lot of letters after their names.

It's just gotta be right, hasn't it? Surely.

Or maybe not.

Take the nutter who drove the truck along the Nice waterfront. Would more spooks and more surveillance really have pegged him as an ISIS main man? Well I presume the spooks must look for a number of key indicators when they are trying to guess who will be the next murderous maniac.

Maybe something like this.

So where's he from?

Tunisia.

Is that a Moslem country?

You bet it is.

OK. So far so good. Maybe we have a live one here. He's from a Muslim country. He's male and he's young. He has brown skin. So let's look deeper.

Has he been to fight in Syria?

No

Iraq?

No

Afghanistan?

No.

Mmmmmm.

Does he go to the Mosque every Friday without fail to chant like a Holywood bad guy?

No.

Well does he at least go sometimes?

No.

Ah. Right.

Well let's check him out another way. Let's imagine him turning up at an Al Queda recruiting office. Let's see if he is their kind of lad. What kind of questions might they ask to check the cut of his jib?

Maybe something like these.

Do you go to mosque every Friday?

No.

Do you go most Fridays?

No

Do you go sometimes?

No

You you EVER go?

No.

Do you eat pork?

Yes.

Do you drink alcohol?

Yes.

Do you take drugs?

Yes.

Do you have friends who are unbelievers?

Yes.

Do you like infidel music?

Yes.

Do you watch the television and movies of the infidels?

Yes.

Do you like to wear the clothes of the infidel?

Yes.

Oh dear oh dear. Not a good set of answers for a wannabe Jihadist. He would be more likely to get himself beheaded than invited along for an all expenses paid stay at a desert training camp.

Any spook worth his salt would assess all the above information and conclude that here is a lad who is about as likely to be accepted into a Jihadist group as a black lad is likely to be clutched to the bosom of the Ku Klux Klan.

So all the spooking in the world couldn't have done a damn thing to prevent the carnage of the Promenades Des Anglais.

Maybe we all should be building up a very different kind of profile which better describes the nutters who are causing so much death.

Male.

Young.

Tend to be loners.

Not popular at school.

Not very good at school work.

All kinds of mental health issues, especially anxiety, paranoia and depression.

Plenty of time on the dole.

Desperate to find a place to belong, usually street gangs who usually kick them out because they are deemed to be sad losers.

Attempts to self- medicate their ongoing mental health issues by taking every drug they can lay their hands on.

Too much time in their bedroom on their computers.

A growing desperation to be noticed. By anyone. For anything. A gnawing need for attention. Any attention.

Years worth of online cries for help, all of them ignored.

Lads who nobody wants to have a pint with. Lads who never get invited to any parties. Lads who lost every shred of self worth and self confidence in the school playground when all the cool lads took the piss and then took the piss again. Lads who can's find a girl to say yes. Lads who can't find an employer to say yes.

Only no.

No and no and no and no and no.

Until they come up with the nuclear option for attention seeking. Go kill and bunch of people and then kill yourself. Be someone. Be huge. Show all those bastards who took the piss in the playground. Show all the bitches who laughed and walked away giggling at the very thought. Show all those bastards on the other side of the desks who said thanks but no thanks.

All of them.

Every last one.

Drown rejection and anonymity in an ocean of blood.

But do we know these people?

Of course we do. Because at some stage they find their way to the mental health services only to find cuts and staff shortages. They are given some pills and then forgotten. Then we see them again when their drug use puts them into the justice system. They are given some community service and forgotten.

Tossed.

Like so much junk into an overflowing bin complete with hovering wasps.

In my 13 years at First Base I have met at least five of these individuals. They tend to have the same common denominators. Desperate childhoods dominated by violence, usually domestic violence. No mates at school. Bullying and piss taking at school. Rubbish at school. Finding the company of fellow serial losers in the ever welcoming world of drugs. Petty crimes and lousy CV's and not a chance of a job. Mental health problems made a little bit worse every day with constant Skunk and valium use. Right on the edge with brains like a bowl of spaghetti and a raging anger in their bellies. Right on the edge with nothing in their dismal lives they are remotely bothered about losing.

And if one night the rolling news had told the story of one of these guys doing something unspeakable I would not be overly surprised. They are the unexploded bombs.

Thankfully in each case we were able to shout loud enough for mental health treatment to be provided. And with good psychiatry and the right medication, the clear and present danger was slowly but surely pushed back. They were eased back from the edge. They were diffused. They were made safe.

Well.

Safer.

And so we arrive at the inconvenient truth nobody seems to want to speak of much. What is the best thing we can do to stop future acts of horror from appearing on our screens as breaking news?

Easy.

Stop spending so much on spooking and bombing buildings in the desert. Start spending a whole lot more money on mental health services and drug clinics.

But that seems really crap and boring. I mean where's the Jason Bourne in some poxy drug clinic? We are all desperate for the right kind of Holywood bad guys. We want them to hide in those desert buildings so that we can blow them into a millions pieces. We don't want sad misfits who completely flip their lids in the bottomless loneliness of their bedrooms.

At the end of the day the truth is so inconvenient that we just don't want to know it. How can sad places like First Base ever compete with something as completely hip and cool as a Hellfire missile?

No chance.

ALL OVER THE WORLD PIGEONS ARE COMING HOME TO ROOST

In the end his name was Micah Johnson. We have been waiting for Micah Johnson for many, many years. He was always going to arrive. It was always a question of when. Never if. Micah Johnson is the pigeon and the pigeon has come home to roost.

The nightmare Micah Johnson brought to the streets of Dallas has been a recurring nightmare for years and years. The nightmare is born out of a straight forward recipe for disaster. You take a particular group in society and treat them appallingly. You demonise and denigrate them. You make sure they have worse life chances than everyone else. You park them up in ghettos and give policemen a free hand to crack the whip and when they crack the whip too hard, you turn a blind eye.

And when you are a young guy growing up in a place where youth unemployment is twice the national average where is the 'go to' place to get a paycheck at the end of the month? The army of course. Where the hell else? Always has been, always will be. Maybe it is an official army of a government. So the boy from Easterhouse, Glasgow joins 1 Scots whilst the boy from Cleveland, Ohio signs on the dotted line for the United States Marine Corps. Or maybe it is an unofficial army. So the boy from Karachi joins the Taliban whilst the boy from Kano signs up for Boko Haram.

And then what happens? Well it couldn’t be much more obvious. The young men from the wrong side of the tracks are taught the arts of violence. Professional violence. Maximum violence. They are taught how to deploy their ‘war face’ as they plunge a bayonet into a straw model of whoever is the enemy of the time.

Maybe they will get to put their new skills into practice on battlefields from Helmand Province to Fallujah. Or maybe the skills they have been taught will simply be put away for a rainy day.

Unsurprisingly governments have always had sleepless nights when they take so many screwed over kids and invest tens of thousands of pounds and dollars into teaching them the art of deploying efficient death. What happens once they have taken off their uniforms and returned to the ghettos from whence they came? What if they get even more pissed of about being poor and unemployed and pushed about by the cops? What if they decide enough is enough?

The most surprising thing is that it has taken so long for Micah Johnson to make the nightmare come true. The American Government was more or less convinced there would be a hundred Micah Johnsons way back in 1967. Statistics emerged which prompted the black citizens of Detroit to set the city alight. The stats were stark and hard for the White House to answer.

8% of the population of the USA was black.

8% of the army fighting in Vietnam was black.

So fair enough.

But…….

25% of the soldiers killed in the jungles and paddy fields of Vietnam were black.

It was a hard discrepancy to explain away. Were black soldiers being used as cannon fodder? And the White House couldn’t find a way to explain it away. Instead they tackled the Detroit riot with every ounce of maximum force they could put on the streets. They put out the fires. They locked a lot of lads up for a very long time. They went back to having their nightmares.

And finally the nightmare has become a reality nearly half a century later.

The Micah Johnson story is in many ways the story of our times as pigeons are coming home to roost all over the world. All the festering garbage which has been swept under the carpet for years and years and years is starting to crawl out from under. And those who have become so accustomed to being in control are discovering to their horror that that control is a thing of the past. Everywhere you look there is anger looking for a channel like the water from an overflowing drain.

Everywhere we look we see what was not supposed to happen is happening all the time. The rage is blind and beyond logic. A couple of weeks ago pissed off people from Hartlepool and Burnley and Stoke and Walsall voted ‘Leave’. Was it because they were perturbed by the democratic deficit implicit in the beaurocratic structures of Brussels? Aye right. Instead it was a straight up and down two fingers job. Pissed off people took the opportunity to let the world know just how pissed off they are. At immigrants. At closed down factories. At benefit sanctions. At no more Woolworths. At everything.

I saw one young lad from Hartlepool interviewed about his decision to put his cross in the 'Leave' box. He grinned a grin of triumph and said he couldn't wait for all the immigrants to be sent home and for the town’s factories to be re-opened. Poor sod.

And what are all these millions of pissed off people about to get? They are about to get a shiny new leader selected by 150.000 blue rinse Tories from the south of England. The reward for the great vote for 'Leave' might well be a born again ex banker who God has taught to hate abortion and gay people. The sainted Andrea has a crystal clear vision of how she will make everything better in these troubled times. Andrea absolutely vows to overturn the foxhunting ban. Andrea is determined to ban pessimism. I wonder how the good folk of Hartlepool are going to feel about that? The immigrants they hate so much will no doubt up sticks and find work somewhere else. Because there will be even less work to be had in Hartlepool. And all those factories? Has God instructed Andrea of open them all back up to provide jobs for all at £10 an hour? Or will more pigeons come home to roost?

I had business down in England last week. And it felt odd. I drove 300 miles south on the M6 and the M65 and the M62 and the A1. I drove past the towns where 17 million had taken the chance to vent their fury. The tower blocks of Blackburn and Oldham and Rochdale and Halifax and Pontefract and Doncaster and Newark. And the place where I grew up suddenly felt like a foreign place. The border at Gretna felt more like a real border than it has ever felt before. I filled up with fuel at a service station near Peterborough. It was shiny place filled with canned music and overpriced everything. Behind the counter were three East European women. Young women. And to say they were putting 150% into their work wouldn’t begin to do them justice. Imagine walking onto the Porsche stand at the Motor Show. Imagine the kind of young women Porsche would hire to present their high end brand to the world. Imagine their demeanour. Well that was the demeanour of the three women behind the counter of the petrol station near Peterborough. And there was a part of me that hated myself for going so far out of my way to smile back and be as friendly as possible. And a part of me hated the country for making these young women feel they had to show everyone they were not the wicked immigrants of the gospel according to Nigel and Boris.

The sight of the ‘Welcome to Scotland’ sign felt different this time. Completely different. Like sanctuary.

And of course the pigeons are about to come home to roost here. Will anyone seriously want to be ‘Better Together’ this time around? Some will I guess. But not enough. Not this time. This time the cord will be cut. This time the pigeons will finally come home to roost.

The hundredth anniversary of the Battle of the Somme has been all over the media over the last couple of weeks. And a statistic has dusted itself down and appeared here and there on Twitter. The statistic is eerily similar to the statistic that saw Detroit burn back in 1967.

Percentage of Scots in British population 1914 – 1918?

8%

Percentage of Scots in the British Army 1914 – 1918?

8%

Percentage of Scots in the death roll of the British Army 1914 – 1918?

25%

We can see this statistic engraved on war memorials all over the Britain. Have a look for yourself. Look at the number of names carved in stone in a small English village. Count them. Then look at the names on the memorial in a Scottish village of the same size. And count them. And compare the two numbers. It is truly shocking. 

It wasn't an easy statistic for the British Establishment to explain away. Just like the very same set of numbers were never something Lyndon Johnson could explain to the black population of America in 1967.

When the pigeons finally came home to roost for the American Establishment, they came in the form of Micah Johnson.

Thankfully our pigeons will not require semi automatic weaponry to announce themselves. Our pigeons will require nothing more than hundreds of thousands of ticks in the box that says ‘Yes’.

Will there be enough this time around?

Oh yeah. There’ll be enough. There’ll be more than enough. Can you hear the sound of flapping wings coming ever closer? 

 

I can. 

THE BALLAD OF TONY - A SHORT STORY FROM BREXIT BRITAIN.

ONE

Tony stares at the pint in front of him. Two thirds full. One third empty. It's one glass among many. Most of them empty. Some of them full. Some of them with fag buts floating in the dregs. All of them blurred.

Shit...

He just about makes it to the cubicle and throws up seven hours worth of ale. Into a pan clogged with paper.

"That's the way lad. Better out than fucking in.”

“Yeah.”

Back to the table and his fellow night riders. Familiar faces now so much older. Faces he used to see every single day of his life. Back in the day. When they were men of the Council. The maintenance team. The Famous Four. Taking the piss over open copies of the Sun and full Monty breakfast rolls from Tina's. Who shagged who. Who battered who. How shit are the Town? The easy morning routine of Page Three talk. Wouldn't mind shagging that...

Another time. A better time. Before the cuts. Before voluntary redundancy. Before everything was subbed out to bastards from Poland and Lithuania for the sake of efficiency savings. Before his life turned to shit.

The Famous Four. Not so famous any more. Just a bunch of sad looking old bastards. Tony and Mobbo and Stu and Frank. Christ. And here we all are again. Back in the saddle. Back in the Black Bull for a lock in. Back making out we count for something.

Why? Because Mobbo sorted it. Mobbo. Always the top dog. The alpha male. Mobbo who used to rob everything that wasn't screwed down and shared out the proceeds. Mobbo who always seems at home chatting away in the corner with hard looking lads from out of town. Mobbo who flaunts his new BMW and adorns himdelf in gold. Mobbo with a different brassy looking tart on his arm every weekend. Mobbo with a pocket full of twenties. Mobbo who had rung round and told them not to worry about the brass because he was paying. For old times sake. For the Famous Four. Mobbo the only one of them at home with ten pints in him. Still gym fit and gym tanned in his tight T shirt. Still doing alright then are you Mobbo? Aye. Fucking right. You know. Bit of this. Bit of that. Packets of fags that taste like dry camel shit for £4. Litres of 50% proof vodka for a fiver a bottle. Anything and everything. Rumours of big blokes talking Russian or something. Rumours about Mobbo now in the smack game. All kinds of rumours and a fat roll of twenties. Don't worry about brass lads. I'm in the fucking chair tonight. King Mobbo. Bling Mobbo.

Twat.

Stu. Stu with the worst life in the world. Stu who was always a bit quiet and now just about silent. Stu the carer who stays home and looks after his mum who last got out of bed in 2012. Stu with eyes as bleak as an abused dog. Stu in his sad looking golfing jacket from Matalan. Stu still with four full pints in front of him. Stu who was the first to chuck his guts up in the bogs. Sad bastard Stu.

Frank. Frank who once upon a time had always been the first to pull. Frank who once upon a time had strutted his stuff on the dance floor of the Mecca. Frank who never had his face away from a mirror. Not any more. Bald now. Bald and fat and divorced and angry at everything and everyone. His bitch of an ex whom hounded him for alimony. His bastard kids who never stopped bleating for cash. And most of all the Paki bastard who ran the cab firm and gave Frank all the shit jobs. Frank the stuck record. Frank who hated everything and everyone.

And Tony? The last into the Famous Four who had been the first out. How's things with you Tone? Oh you know. Same old same old. Fair to shite. Still with Trace? Yeah. Just about. Working? Yeah just about. Zero hours. You know. That distribution place out on Ringway. Alright is it? Nah. Crap. Sometimes I get 40 hours. More often I'm lucky to get ten. You need to be Polish to be guaranteed forty. Well cheer up you miserable old twat. That's all about to change, yeah? You never know, Mobbo. You never know.

And when it had been midnight they hadn't known. At midnight it had still been nothing much more than an excuse for being out on the lash. Then came Sunderland and the whole of the Black Bull was on its feet and punching the air and bouncing to the song YouTube had brought back from the glass strewn pavements of Marseilles.

“We're all voting out...

We're all voting out...

Fuck off Europe.....

We're all voting out....”

Then it had been town after town. Towns like their town. The shit towns. One by one until it was an avalanche. And Mobbo had played it large and got one in for the whole pub.

Stu says he off now. Best get back. Best make sure his mum's alright.

Frank says he's off too. On an early one. Later lads.

Mobbo stretches and shrugs. Fair enough. We'll do it again lads. Roll back the fucking years.

A deserted table loaded with glasses. Some full. Most empty. Some with dregs filled with docked fags.

TWO

Shit.

Shit shit shit shit shit.....

Tony's phone says it's almost half past nine. And Tony's phone has no reason to lie about it. Which makes it two and half hours after the it was seven o'clock. When he had been due to start his shift.

Shit.

He tries to focus his eyes and to focus his life. He's on the sofa. Why is he on the sofa? Because his bitch of a wife told him to go on the sofa. Told him he was a disgrace. Said she wasn't having him anywhere near him. Told him to make sure he had a bucket handy.

Shit.

He roots around in the vague hope of finding a spare fag. Under all the unopened envelopes. Under all the stacked up debt. Under all the stacked up threats.

No chance.

Get some on the way in. Then he sees them. More scratch cards. A pile of them. Ten of them. Scratched and tossed. Rage rises up his throat. How many times....

Shit.

Later. It needs to be later. It has to be later. That bitch.....

THREE

He checks his phone again and not surprisingly his phone hasn't changed its mind. It's ten past ten. It's a complete disaster.

Shit. Just wing it.

Onto the floor. Into his place. He nods to the others on the line. And nobody is about to acknowledge. Well what a fucking surprise. Its like being in Poland. Bastards....

A tap on the shoulder

“Office is want you. Now.”

'Office is want you'. What kind of fucking English is that? Polish English. 

Twats.

Eyes are on him. All the way. From the floor to the iron stairs. Up the stairs by the white painted breeze block wall. Onto the steel mezzanine floor. Second door along.

'Human Resources'.

Knock.

“Come.”

Magda. Magda with her swept back hair and her bright red lips. Magda with her large glasses and her posh bitch suit. Magda with her big white teeth and her soft leather briefcase and her super neat desktop.

“Please, you can sit.”

He can sit. Course he can fucking sit. He sits. And she doesn't bother to look up. Her eyes are fixed on the desktop and her voice sounds like an answerphone.

“Mr Holland, you have already had two verbal warnings for being late for allotted shift. Now is third time. So I give you written warning, OK? This one, OK? You can take please...”

And she is sliding an envelope at him with her orange painted nails and still she isn't bothering to look up....

And all of a sudden something breaks open in his head. It just does.

All of a sudden he is on his feet and he is shouting and pointing.

“No it isn't OK you fucking Polish cow. Not OK, right. You're not telling me what to fucking do and pushing your fucking envelopes at me. You can fuck right off. Didn't you watch last night you stupid cow? We all voted out which means it's time for you to fuck off back home....”

But now there are hands on him. Strong hands and strong arms and hard faces. Dragging him out of the office and along the steel mezzanine floor and down the steel stairs and across the shop floor.

Smirking faces. Gloating faces.

Out of the door. Onto the ground. The tarmac ground. The soaking wet tarmac ground. Grazed hands and oil all over his jeans. Rain in his eyes. And two of them standing over him. Bigger than him. Stronger than him. Laughter in their eyes.

“Go on. You can just fuck off, OK?”

FOUR

Later. Later after hours of shit. Later after supping a bottle and a half of Mobbo's vodka in the park. Later after all day in the rain. Later after throwing up and throwing up again. Later after hour after hour of picking apart just how shit his life is. Magda and scratch cards and the smug look on Mobbos' face and the pile of bills and those two hard faced bastards with the laughter in their eyes.

Pissed beyond pissed. Blundering in the rain. Staggering in the rain. In the rain as the Town Hall rang out nine and then ten and then eleven and then twelve and then one. Pictures of scratch cards and bills and Magda and hard faced bastards with laughter in their eyes.

A shop front. Familiar in the rain and the orange light.

'POLSKIE SKLEP'

Everywhere. Like cockroaches. Like the rain. Like all the shit in his shit life. And now he is a man with a plan. A breeze block from the building site over the road. An armful of rubbish from an overflowing bin. A last drag on one of Mobbo's shitty fags.

Breeze block through the window.

Rubbish through the window.

The rest of the Mobbo vodka through the window.

Onto the rubbish.

Lighted paper through the window.

Onto the the rubbish.

Wummmfffffph.

Nice. Fucking excellent nice. Maybe he should run? But he can't be bothered to run. Sick of fucking running. Just fuck it. Stay and watch as the yellow becomes orange. Stay and watch as the smoke pours through the broken glass. Stay and watch as the blue light mixes in with the orange light. Stay and watch and piss himself laughing as the sirens howl in at him through the night. Through the rain.

Stay and watch because who gives a shit.

And how is he to know there is a first floor flat? And how is he to know that there is a young mum from Katowice in the first floor flat? And how is he to know there are two young sisters from Katowice in the first floor flat? And how is he to know the lock on the back door of the first floor flat is all rusted up......?

How is he to know any of that......?

SOMETHING TRULY HISTORICAL IS HAPPENING. AS IN RIGHT NOW. ODDLY ENOUGH NOBODY SEEMS TO BE TALKING ABOUT IT.

I have always found it an interesting exercise to imagine how the times we live in will look in a hundred years time. When I did this the other day, it occurred to me that we are living through one of the greatest turning points in the whole of human history. Right now. Dramatic stuff, right? The funny thing is that absolutely nobody is talking about it.

Let's take a glance into a crystal ball and imagine what might be going down a year from now. The whole EU disengagement process will be well and truly under way. The news will show Prime Minister Teresa May arriving Berlin alongside her Secretary of State for Brexit, Angela Leadsom. Waiting to meet them for formal handshakes and photographs is the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel. In the background, voices from home are snapping at May and Leadsom's heels. Scotland's First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon is well along with the task of easing her people towards the UK exit door. In Belfast, First Minister Arlene Forster demands that the border question is properly addressed. Trade Union Congress leader Francis O'Grady and Labour leader Angela Eagle angrily insist that the rights of British workers must not be forgotten. Meanwhile other voices urge the Brits and Germans to make nice for the sake of the world's economic stability. Christine Lagarde tells it as it is as far as the IMF are concerned. President Hilary Clinton speaks out for the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave...

Get the picture? Sure you do. Here are the most powerful people in the world and every last once of them is a woman. Fair enough, one or two of these predictions might not come true, but then again my fictional scenario it is far from inconceivable.

What does it mean? I reckon it means that after many thousands of years human beings have finally caught up with nature. Cast your mind back to one of those documentaries we have all watched about a pride of lions on the Serengeti plains. What is the role of the females? Basically they call all the shots. They run the railroad. They do the hunting. They determine who gets to eat first and how much. They decide whether or not the pride should move on or stay put. They sort out the cubs and oversee the training of the coming generation. And the male? Well he doesn't hunt and has no say in the day to day running of the pride. He is kind off of to one side looking vaguely grumpy about life and he tends to get even grumpier when the cubs come over to him to take the piss. He gets to eat when the female bosses allow him to eat.

In fact the poor old sod only has two roles in life. To breed the next generation and to fight off other males who come along to challenge his territory.

And this is how things work in just about every mammal society. For some reason human beings have bucked this trend and for thousands of years it has been the males of the species who have called all the shots. When you think about it, that is exactly what they have done in the most literal sense. Called shots. Waged war. Allowed their testosterone fueled urges to wreak centuries worth of havoc.

So why have we chosen such a different course from the rest of our fellow mammals? Is it because our human males are so much stronger than the males in other groups of mammals? I don't think so. Try going up to an eighty stone silverback gorilla and tell him he is a weakling. Instead we have justified the top dog status of our males through a long list of completely artificial rules. Basically, religious rules. Woman have been deemed to be inferior by most of the world's religions. Islamic women are required to hide their faces from all but their husbands whilst Christian women are not allowed to aspire to become bishops. It has mainly been religious rules which have backed up decisions like depriving women of the vote or the right to fight in the front line of shooting wars. Once you get away from all the biblical/Koranic tosh, none of this stuff stands up to any kind of scrutiny. Who would you prefer to have beside you in the trenches when the bad guys are coming at you – Jess Ennis or the overweight bloke from the Post Office who smokes forty a day?

All the stuff about the 'fair' sex who are so weak and need so much looking after has always been bollocks and slowly but surely as the centuries have rolled by it has been exposed as exactly that. The odd thing is how hard society finds it to admit it. Not many people were able withstand Gestapo torture. Not a single one of this extraordinary group was male. Every single one was female. Fairer sex? Aye right. Tough as old boot leather more like. When it comes to dealing with the outer extremes of pain, women are Premier League to our male Championship. This is hardly surprising of course. They have to give birth: we don't. It makes a lot of logical evolutionary sense for them to be well and truly harder and braver than we are.

Over the last hundred years or so, the grip of religion has become ever weaker all across the western world. Over the same period, law after law has been passed to move us closer to gender equality, both in the home and the work place. Once this equality has been granted, the female side of our species has hit the outside lane of the track and run past us males as if we weren't there. The gap is becoming wider with every passing year. Check out the A level results when they come out. The girls are pulling so far ahead of the lads that it is almost impossible to ignore any more. A couple of months ago we were visited by some students from the University Of Georgia State. I asked about this. Last year 70% of new admissions were female. This year it was on target to be 75%. The university authorities are worried about it and planning to introduce some king of positive discrimination for lads. Imagine it. If you are female and you want to come our university, you need at least three straight A's. If you are male, three B's will be plenty.

It is worth looking at the craziness of the post Brexit world as if it was one of those Serengeti lion documentaries. Look at idiotic, strutting behaviour of the males. Corbyn and Cameron and Farage and Johnson, wounded old lions roaring in anger at being removed from their place in the pack. Lots of noise and not a drop either calmness or basic common sense. They have been so hell bent on winning their pathetic turf wars they have neither noticed nor cared that the country is going to hell in a handcart. And once the crisis threatened to become overwhelming, they ran and hid like utter cowards.

And then? Then all of a sudden we started to hear calm female voices fill the void. Female voices with carefully thought through plans for clearing up the mess created by all the vanity and testosterone. Maybe we agree with these plans, maybe we don't. But at least there is some competence and courage. Now that the lionesses are taking charge of the situation, things are slowly but surely becoming less chaotic.

So what will happen now we have finally arrived at this historic tipping point? I think for those of us lucky enough to live in the liberal West, it is all good news. Less war and more carefully thought out government. What's there not to like? Sadly this will only be half of the story. We will become ever more divided from vast areas of the rest of humanity. There is no sign of girls losing their second class status in places where totalitarian regimes call the shots or where the bullying voice of Islam or Catholicism drowns out all others.

We are entering a whole new epoch. It will be the Venus of the West against the Mars of the rest. For what it's worth, my money is well and truly on Venus.

Two and a half thousand years ago a really, really smart guy from Ancient Greece saw all of this coming. He was Socrates. And here is what he said.

'Once made equal to man, woman becomes his superior.'

Smart cookie!