Parallel Universe

I woke up this morning to the realisation that quantum theory is no longer a theory. That we are in fact already living in a parallel universe. Now, I have to wonder, when did the time-line I am on divide from the one I was previously on?

Evidence: tonight on BBC2, a documentary about how the British Intelligence services in the 1960s and 1970s were convinced that Britain's Prime Minister was a Soviet spy, and secretly planned to put Louis Mountbatten in charge of the country.

So that's when all was right with the world, and the British Establishment was bonkers paranoid with the security services running riot, accountable to nobody.

Then we had the Thatch years, and the controversy over Peter Wright's Spy Catcher, which I was always delighted to see on those South Bank bookstalls. This was in the early 80s, before the innernet, and yet they still couldn't successfully suppress a (pretty crappy) book. Reading it now, almost the most outrageous thing about it is the way in which a pretty ordinary, plodding civil servant technician type becomes Assistant Director of MI5. These are the people in charge of our security?

During the Thatch years, it's pretty clear that the time-line is solid. Michael Foot as opposition leader? Check. Neil Kinnock falling over on the beach? Check. The Sun newspaper rabidly against the political party that best represents its readers' interests? Check.

But now look at the evidence:

Several Labour Government ministers embroiled in financial scandals, swapping pension fund quantities of money around like it was so much spit. Mandelson (property loan); Blunkett (undeclared company directorship); Jowell (another property loan); even the Prime Ministrone himself (dodgy dealings over property again); and now the whole Labour Party is revealed to have accepted massive loans which the Party's own treasurer claims to know nothing about.

Plausible deniability? Or parallel universe?

More evidence: last night, a Labour government relied on Tory votes to push through legislation that proposes to carve up the education system into mini fiefdoms. What will follow, inevitably, is the usual money trough for contractors and marketeers, as schools waste money replicating efforts instead of pooling resources, and have to advertise themselves in order to fill places. Your local schools will become brands competing against each other in their efforts not to have to accept little Adam Deficit Disorder, and Harry Hyperactive, Stephie Stupid and Tara Teenage Pregnancy.

Personally, I thought I voted Labour in 1997 to stop the creeping application of dodgy market principles into inappropriate areas. It's one thing for the capitalists to waste money competing against each other over future DVD formats, but quite another when I see what I thought was my no-brainer local hospital taking out a 4-page colour wraparound supplement in the local paper to tell us all how great it is. What next? The primary school I live next door to, sending me a glossy brochure to tell me how wonderful (and convenient) it is?

It's a parallel universe, I tell you, and the division of the time-line has to have occurred the moment that John Smith keeled over and died.

Two months later Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party by a landslide, beating John Prescott, who became deputy leader...

And the missing name is... Gordon Brown who might well have succeeded Smith as leader if Smith had lived and succeeded, if you know what I mean.

Gordon Brown is a proper Labour politician. You know: why have one rate of tax when you can have seven? That kind of thing. But instead of becoming leader he was stitched up by a Labour Pod Person and put in charge of the economy, where he can't do any real harm, because it's all out of his hands.