Reason to be Fearful

Someone I know posted something on their Facebook page; it was by someone called Matt Haig and it was an excerpt from his book. This is what I saw:

The world is increasingly designed to depress us. Happiness isn't very good for the economy. If we were happy with what we had, why would we need more?
How do you sell an anti-ageing moisturiser? You make someone worry about ageing. How do you get people to vote for a political party? You make them worry about immigration. How do you get them to buy insurance? By making them worry about everything. How do you get them to have plastic surgery? By highlighting their physical flaws. How do you get them to watch a TV show? By making them worry about missing out. How do you get them to buy a new smartphone? By making them feel like they are being left behind.
To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own non upgraded existence. To be comfortable with our messy, human selves, would not be good for business.

It got me thinking about how misery has become the norm. How the 'world' profits from the unhappiness of everyone and how the media - in all forms - is culpable for the general dehumanisation of people. It does appear that capitalism is the most important thing on the planet and ensuring the very very rich become much much richer is by far the most important goal. People are expendable, the rich are not.

Just this alone would be a reason to be scared for the future, especially people with children and grandchildren. What kind of a future will they have if all they're going to be doing is trying to solve the mess their forefathers have dumped on them? This is pretty much how I see it; the people destroying the planet are happy in the knowledge that their children, grandchildren or great grandchildren will come up with a scientific solution because today's wealthy want to be as rich as Croesus and in a twist on that fable are happy to turn everything they touch into shit to get that wealth.

People have always been expendable and what makes that worse is that so many of us are quite happy to be. The people who say shit like, 'That's the way it is, what's the point in moaning about it' should be the first people tipped into the meat grinders (and probably will be when all the rich have left to eat is the poor). I am also aware that with over 7 billion people on earth that we need to be expendable because we're the planet's biggest threat. I also think we're entering a crucial stage in the life span of capitalism, because capitalists are not stupid and they're probably aware that everything has a lifespan and capitalism is entering its end life - the tipping point won't be what revolutionists hope, it will simply be an extinction event that stops the flow of money and those with the money will know that their lives will change to the degree that they will have to make do with what they have left while living on their well-stocked islands. Their only problem will be finding idiots to do their bidding for the minimum they can get away with - but rest assured, there will always be some fucking wanker prepared to suck a rich person's cock if it means beans for tea...

The reason I have this particular bug up my arse at the moment is simply because I think we were being conned and the people conning us have essentially stopped the charade and don't care who knows any more. This isn't about politics, but if the Covid enquiry has taught us anything it's that the government - Johnson's government - didn't really give a shit about people and were more than happy to share the country's wealth with all their friends, despite knowing that it would all come out one day. The fact they can stand up and tell us there's no money left after wasting literally £130billion over two years should make people never want to vote for them again. With £130bn you could not only fix the NHS you could build 300,000 affordable houses, abolish child poverty and come up with a reasonable way to prevent migrants from wishing to 'invade' our shores en masse. Yet that would be the last thing any of them would do; why solve a problem when you can exploit it, use it and weaponize it to ensure everyone stays fearful of the problem. Stopping people fear for their lives will stop people from going down the xenophobia route and that means there's less money to pilfer.

Take Cop28 in the United Arab Emirates. Just the fact we're holding an annual climate crisis seminar in one of the biggest producers of oil in the world should be laughed at; factor in the news that both the UAE and the Saudi Arabians are using the conference to sell oil to the poorest nations attending should tell you everything you need to know about how fucking altruistic the governments of the rich world  are and how much they care about you. They don't. They simply want to make more money; not to try and solve problems, and that's because once you have everything you still want more. 

The biggest existential threat to the planet isn't just climate change it's the effects of climate change on populations - it is expected that up to 1 billion people might have their homes destroyed and that means 1 billion climate refugees seeking new homes. Do you know what the biggest issue with the western world is at the moment? Refugees or economic migrants. The Netherlands, a country most people with intelligence assume is one of the most liberal countries on the planet, have just voted in a right wing anti-immigration zealot. A lot of people might baulk at the rise of the right in politics, but that's because we're constantly having the threat of immigrants shoved down our throats - if it's bad at the moment imagination what another billion people queuing up to get in your country will be like, these people who will steal your jobs and put extra pressure on public services, this is what is going to happen, oh and don't forget to buy more fossil fuel or electric cars or books...

The other biggest threat to the future of mankind, other than the promotion of hate, is actually these yearly climate crisis soirees - an excuse for ministers to jet in from wherever they are to enjoy a week's hospitality before promising nothing and flying home to carry on whatever mass destruction they have planned. And no this isn't a conspiracy theory because this isn't what I believe it's what is going on under your noses at the moment, you just don't choose to see it because your life is already shit and you don't want it to become even worse, even though it always does.

We [Don't] Care A Lot

My paternal grandmother, Alice Maher, was Jewish. I just want to put that out, in the public forum, before anything else. She may have been a lapsed Jew, but London, before, during and after, the Second World War wasn't as safe a place for Jewish people as you might imagine. It wasn't Germany, but they faced as much hate and segregation from some quarters as any Jews in Germany, Poland, Hungary or France. The plight of the Jewish people has, it seems, always been a struggle.

Imagine being mainly white and yet persecuted for being a religion that for many centuries has been a label to detest? Yet, here we are in the 21st century and the same thing appears to be happening to the world's largest organised religion. Muslims, especially since the turn of the century, have become the race and religion to be treated with distrust; to be sceptical about, to make up all kinds of bullshit about to reinforce people's beliefs. In the USA, there are white Christians murdering anyone, with high powered assault weapons and yet the American people are incapable of coming up with a solution to stop it and simply offer their hopes and prayers that 'God' will eventually stop the senseless killings.

The Republic of Ireland is an independent country apart from the bit at the top, which is part of the United Kingdom. It has been part of the UK for 800 years, when the British invaded Ireland and decided it was theirs. For centuries it was ruled by the British and it wasn't until 1921 when they finally escaped their captors and forged their own independent country, apart from the bit at the top... 

Imagine, if you will, that island of Ireland. Imagine that despite the Republic gaining its independence, the North decided that the area of land it had wasn't big enough, so gradually over the decades it took bits and pieces; starting with, say, Donegal, which is also at the top and to the west. Then it moved onto Louth and then Monaghan and then by the 1950s it took Cavan and Leitrim. Not content with having all of North Ireland, the British then took Connacht and moved down the west coast of Ireland 'repatriating' it and returning it to British rule until in 2000 when all that was left of an independent Ireland was Dublin, Wexford, Munster and most of Kerry - the rest were called the British Ireland Territories and the British weren't content; they still wanted lots of what was left.

Imagine this happening and it getting the full backing of the United States, and all the major European countries and as a result any dissenting voice coming out of Independent Ireland was either silenced or isolated so it sounded like feeble excuses, especially given that the Irish Liberation Organisation had been labelled a terrorist organisation and were not recognised by anyone apart from those crazy Irish people, who seem to have elected the political wing of these 'murdering terrorists' who have the audacity to challenge and fight the invading British armies...

This scenario is essentially what has happened in the Middle East since the Balfour Declaration in 1917, when the British acknowledged the right of the Jewish people to have a Middle Eastern homeland and from that point on, especially after World War Two and then the Six-Day War in 1967. In fact since that short-lived Arab-Israeli war in 1967, the Israeli governments have slowly but surely driven the Palestinian people out of their homeland and 'settled' in areas that they believe was their ancient home and their birth right to regain. While this has happened, the West has steadfastly ignored everything the Israelis have done and whenever the region gets into the news it's because Palestinians - either the PLO or now Hamas - have dared fight back against the oppression they have suffered since 1948. The example I gave you above about Ireland is essentially what has happened in the Middle East; Israel was smaller than Palestine in 1948, by 2023 there's probably going to be a region comparatively the size of Yorkshire in the UK that is for Palestinians, everywhere else has been 'settled' by the Israeli people and they do this with the full backing of the USA, the UK, most of Europe and a large percentage of 'important' countries in the world.

A fantastic example of the bubbles we live in can be found if you trawl through social media and the comments sections of all the major UK newspapers. We have been indoctrinated so well over the last 50+ years that we now think of Palestinians as 'Muslim terrorists' even if they're just young children and we also think that Israel has an almost God given right to annihilate them; almost as if they're really just an infestation rather than being the indigenous race. Everywhere we look or listen to it's about the poor Israelis and how they're suffering. It's pure indoctrination, the same way that the west has demonised left wing politics as communism or how socialism is a bad thing and like anti-Muslim rhetoric, the sheep will believe what they're told by those with a vested interest in people believing them.

What Hamas did on October 7th was a heinous and cowardly act of aggression, probably akin in many ways to a mass suicide bombing. Palestine was going to be assimilated inside the next 20 years anyhow; the Israeli government have been looking for an excuse to raze the place to the floor to make occupying it much easier and allow other countries to come in and rebuild it for them, thus cementing the brilliant relationship between Israel and its Western allies. What Hamas did was essentially sacrifice its own people so that the world would start to look at Israel in a different way. The problem is despite the hundreds of thousands of people who have marched in protest last weekend, the rest of the world doesn't care. We've had 22 years of constant bombardment from the press about wicked, extremist or bonkers Muslims, so in many eyes around the world this is just pay back for all the terrorism caused by Muslims - which, of course, represents less than 10% of all actual terrorism caused since 11th September 2001, but why let facts get in the way of hatred?

The unbelievable silence from world leaders about the mass murder of women and children in Gaza, dismissed away by the flimsiest of excuses, 'there were Hamas fighters in that hospital' and the acceptance that anything the murderous IDF or the Nazi Likud party tells us and the scepticism from the same world leaders at the amount of women and children who have died in Gaza is reprehensible; it's like anathema against Palestine because they exist and it would be far more convenient if they didn't.

However, if you look at social media or news media or newspaper comments sections you will see that if you support Palestine you're the enemy - you're anti-Semitic - as well; because people don't see other people, they see terrorists and if children die it's one less future terrorist for their own children to worry about. If Israel says that a hospital bombing killing hundreds of people was caused by a rogue Hamas missile that malfunctioned and landed in the courtyard which as well as containing 1000 refugees also has a explosives dump, then people will believe that flimsy excuse because people will believe that Palestinians sleep with their missiles as pillows. They don't believe that Israel is capable of committing the kind of atrocities that the Nazis committed against them, despite extreme Zionists stating in their holy book the Talmud that no gentile (non Jew) is important and their lives don't matter.

Social media and comments section show that most people support Israel, despite there apparently being 78% of the population supporting an immediate ceasefire on humanitarian grounds; the problem is half of that number want a ceasefire because they're fed up with Palestine filling up the news and current affairs programmes; they're fed up with it being all over their newspapers and on-line, just the same way as people have almost already forgotten the Ukraine crisis - out of sight, out of mind. People don't really care; especially not when there's a cost of living crisis, or when there's a zombie government doing nothing for them but seemingly raising interest rates, food prices and everything else while turning a blind eye to the profiteers wringing their last drops of profit out of people before the Labour Party come into power and might possibly stop that (which they won't). People don't care. They didn't really care when they put Ukrainian flags on their Facebook pages; the gammons in this country were happy for Ukrainians to come here as refugees because a) we weren't having that many and b) they weren't brown and didn't worship a God they were unfamiliar with. People don't really care and they regard the actual people that do as 'woke' or 'lefties' - that is how numb a large part of humanity has become to the lives of people who are dying.

If the UK allowed Palestinian refugees, which it probably wouldn't, how long before they get labelled 'economic migrants' or are pilloried because they have mobile phones or Nike trainers? How long before the faux fascists in this country start supporting the eradication of all Palestinians, in the same way that many of them felt we should shoot asylum seekers in the channel and let the French clean up the bodies? Saying you care is a whole lot different than actually caring. We live in a country where people don't even like their own neighbours and have been indoctrinated with a 'shop they neighbour' mentality, especially if they feel their neighbours have something these ignorant heartless bastards don't have.

But I'm getting away from the point - no country has any justification to target children or hospitals regardless of what they believe, especially not with missiles against a country that doesn't have a navy, an air force or an existing proper army. Yes, Hamas might be bankrolled by Iran, who we regard as our enemies, but Israel have state of the art weapons technology, sold to them by the UK and the USA, which they are using to kill children and then when challenged they feign incredulity and get angry that gentiles could be so harsh by criticising their right to defend their stolen country. 

But what's the point of telling you this; of explaining the actual facts of the situation and the reasons for why this has happened when most of you simply don't care? Maybe we need to be under threat before people start to realise that our leaders allow genocide as long as it suits their political aims and purposes. Maybe it's time people started to look at the bigger picture, explore the history, ask why this has happened rather than shout angrily at some 'rag head' or 'wog' they don't want to understand or sympathise with. The human race is lauded for its humanity, so where is that humanity when innocents are dying?

We're All Going to Burn (or Freeze)

Dump your Green credentials and you'll be elected. That's the message Rishi Sunak is being fed by many people in his party. If you're a sensible, intelligent person you'll see this as a crazy, short-sighted message, but the problem isn't with you, it's not really with the climate change deniers, the problem lies in the perception that India, Brazil, Nigeria, USA, Russia and many other economic powerhouses just aren't doing enough so why should I. What is the point of individuals being green if it equates to a grain of sand on a massive beach?

I can't answer that. 

You might wonder what the point of this is then? Well, just recently I've been doing that exercise in futility by trying to argue with climate change deniers and given we've just had a fucking awful July it makes arguing on the side of climate change very difficult, mainly because people are stupid and can't see that climate change is probably responsible for us having a shit July and could be responsible for our own island's future climate crisis because there's a chance the gulf stream might disappear and if that happens our weather will be more Iceland than England and that will be a huge shock to the system.

Yet people don't want to believe it. They don't want electric cars, they don't want heat pumps, they don't want to spend any money on green things when entire countries are flipping the middle finger to scientists and other people trying to save the planet. The Death Cult of Deniers is actually winning; I know that seems strange considering the amount of EVs you see on the road, but that isn't a fair comparison because you can see a lot of football supporters at a game but that doesn't mean the entire country is a fan of football. The thing is you just have to look at the Uxbridge by-election to see that the wealthier you are the less likely you're going to support changes for the climate; the problem is until that result came through we thought it was just the 40% of the country who aren't wealthy, can't afford green things and were poorly educated thought that way. The truth is green people are in the minority and we don't have a government or a government in waiting that wants to commit to green policies because it's not a vote winner.

That means the Tories issuing 200 more North Sea oil exploration licences; opening a coal mine in Cumbria and spending years denying licences to off shore wind farms, because it seems the country would rather look at the sea than look at wind turbines providing them with cheap green energy. The internet has allowed conspiracy theories to gain ground to the point where people would rather believe bullshit than accept that the world might be dying. Ask them about how this will affect their children or grandchildren and you might as well be asking how an air fryer works in Albanian. The thing about denial is if you're in denial you'll deny everything.

I can say that we're doomed and attach that to many things such as governments, the rise of fascism or the growth of idiocy, but in reality we are doomed because the planet is going to fuck up badly and those least affected by it will refuse to believe it's anything but weather. The growing number of climate change deniers in the UK look outside their windows and see the rain and think, 'It's a load of bollocks.' How do you convince people using experts when they want to believe the guy down the pub more?

People like me and my peers are going to be dead by the time it gets really worse (or at least I hope so) and we're going to need the children of the world to say NO, but given the amount of scepticism out there I'm not sure young people are going to be immune from this kind of indoctrination.

Enjoy the planet, over the next ten years it's going to change beyond all recognition; there will be so many refugees - because of the climate crisis that doesn't exist - the gammons will be having aneurysms on a daily basis. The world will change and that change will be its death. It might take a couple of hundred years, but we're at the start of an extinction event, I just hope the planet survives the end of mankind.

You Can't Trust Labour

I would never have believed at any point in my life where I would have said 'you can't trust Labour'. It's anathema; not just unlikely but unfathomable. Me, a lifelong socialist and lefty, looking at the Labour Party and thinking, 'Thank fuck I live in Scotland and have an alternative party to vote for.'

Obi Wan Keir Starmer lied his way to the top job - very much the way Boris Johnson lied to everybody to try and keep his job - and over the last three years every single one of his promises have been ditched in favour of what appears to be slightly watered down versions of what we've been getting for the last 13 years. This might appeal to a small section of floating voters or Tory voters not happy with how their party has swung so far right they make fascists seem like nice guys, but it doesn't appeal to a hardcore group of Labour supporters who feel Starmer has sold out far more than Tony Blair ever did.

So what have they done now that has driven me to writing this?

Well, not a lot in the last week or so; nothing has happened specifically to make me so anti-Labour, but a lot of things have happened in the last 12 months that has left a bitter taste in my mouth. Take North of Tyne mayor Jamie Driscoll as the perfect example of everything that is wrong about Labour at the moment. Driscoll is enormously popular in his area even amongst Tory voters. Yes, he's a bit of a Corbyn supporter and is most definitely left wing, but his success rate in the area is second to none, hence why he is extremely popular and, get this, for a politician he's also a really nice guy (just listen to him on You Tube or anywhere else you can find him). He was invited by his local arts centre to interview enormously successful, Oscar nominated film director Ken Loach - famous also for being an ardent campaigner for Labour and extremely anti-Tory. This is the man who made the shockingly brilliant and horrible film I, Daniel Blake and is passionate about having a fairer society...

Ken Loach is a friend of Jeremy Corbyn. He also publicly said that he felt the antisemitism row that the press foisted on Labour during Corbyn's reign was largely made up and was blown out of proportion by certain factions of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) who were prepared to lose elections to rid the party of Corbyn. This has made Loach toxic to the new Labour and he was summarily expelled from the party he'd been a member of for over 50 years. Jamie Driscoll was invited to interview and talk to Loach about his film career and subsequently Driscoll was deselected by Labour and will not fight for re-election with their support - he's effectively been kicked out of the party.

The reasons given were simple: he was on stage with Loach, he should have challenged the director - now in his 80s - about his pro-Corbyn and new Labour stance instead of, you know, talking to him about his films, which is why he, Driscoll and everyone else was there. This was an arts event not something that warranted being hijacked by politics. Driscoll's defence was simple, he was invited to talk about films not politics and the audience were there to see a film director not to see him attacked for supporting a friend. This was dismissed by Labour's chiefs without the right to appeal.

Or how about Neal Lawson, 44 years a member of the party who was expelled by the party for tweeting 'Grown up politics' to LibDem Layla Moran when she said her party would stand aside at a by-election to allow a Green candidate a better chance of unseating the Tory party. His 'grown up politics' remark wasn't even really in support of anything apart from treating politics how it should be rather than how it is.

Lawson who runs the cross-party progressive campaign organisation Compass, said that Labour had been "captured by a clique … behaving like playground bullies". In an attack on the Labour leadership, Lawson claimed that Starmer had chosen "the Rupert Murdoch path to power over the progressive majority route". In their defence, the top dogs on the Shadow cabinet all came out and essentially accused Lawson of supporting another party - blatantly not true - and therefore he needs to be kicked out. This is trial by affiliation; Lawson was something of a Corbyn fan, however he was a fan of the proposed policies rather than the bearded allotmenteer. 

This and stuff like this has been going on for months now as the right wing of the Labour Party purges everyone who is left of centre, and with prejudice. That's bad enough, but start to look at Obi Wan Keir's top dogs - Rachel Reeves, the Shadow Chancellor, she advocates austerity as a way of balancing books; she's actually voted in favour of a number of Tory proposals. Or Wes Streeting, who positions himself as a working class kid from a council estate, but he's a career politician who, like his hero Tony Blair, would represent any party if he thought he had a sniff of power. Streeting is the ONLY politician currently in parliament at the moment who has publicly stated that parts of the NHS need to be sold off to private companies. Not even Jacob Fucking Rees Mogg has ever said that out loud.

The list of broken promises before they get into power is horrendously long and includes backtracking on the nationalisation of certain industries, the creation of a country-owned energy company or the refusal to abolish some of the Tories' more abhorrent and distasteful bills such as the right to protest and the so-called illegal immigrants bill. This is a Labour Party that is targeting racists, bigots and intolerant arseholes for votes while throwing genuine Labour supporters under the bus claiming there's money for the NHS now we've left Europe.

Oh and speaking of Europe. In a recent Gallop poll it was estimated that over two thirds of the people who voted Leave in the EU referendum would vote to remain if it was held now. Even some anti-Euro Tory MPs are admitting Brexit hasn't worked and we're suffering because of it, yet Starmer still talks about making Brexit work. The majority of Labour voters in 2016 voted to remain, in 2023 the majority of Labour voters would like us to re-establish closer links to Europe, maybe even rejoin eventually, but Labour are following this populist bullshit of making something work that clearly doesn't work and ignoring the fact the only way it can work is through closer ties and that means being in the single customs market or accepting certain rules and regulations on health and safety and Obi Wan Keir isn't even considering going through that door.

What is the difference now between the Tories and Labour? Well, the Tories aren't Tories any longer, that boat sailed after David Cameron fucked the country up and then ran away; what we now have is a neo-fascist libertarian government with populist policies that appeal to racists, bigots and the ignorant, while Labour has morphed into a form of moderate one nation Tories. Almost every left wing idea has been purged or been thrown under the aforementioned bus in favour of populist lite policies and rhetoric that sits uncomfortably with people who regard themselves as a bit socialist. 

But... if we don't get behind Labour the Tories will win again... I doubt it. The Tories are so unpopular now a dead cat could stand against 50% of their sitting MPs and win. The majority of people are fed up with them and their one-sided policies. However, while social media tends to be dictated to by 'bubbles' of likeminded individuals and there are huge swathes of ex-Labour voters who are looking for viable alternatives or are mobilising people to vote tactically at the next GE. Labour will win the election but they might have to do some deals or, more likely, a large number of seats won't be won because they will go to the Liberals, the Green or Independents. Just look at a recent council by-election in Newham, east London. The sitting Labour councillor was deselected and stood as an independent and won 43% of the vote, shaving 25% off the Labour share and forcing Newham council to re-evaluate as it has becomes perilously close to being a No Overall Control council. This could be reflected at a GE, especially in Labour areas with close ties to unions and the left wing of the party.

The problem is the press, who for years have warned us about the dangers of Labour, are now warming towards them because they're offering NOTHING different and they see themselves being unharmed by a Labour government, much like they did when Tony Blair came along and while the press don't have the sway they once did, there are many people out there who will read blogs like this or see independent headlines bemoaning the actions of the party and they'll dismiss them the same way they dismissed all the allegations against Boris Johnson, because it's what they want to believe rather than what the facts tell them. 

If I was still in England I'd be looking at what the alternatives for the seat I reside in are and whether they stand a chance of winning, especially if there was an alternative to Labour or Conservative that stand a chance and if that was the case I'd be urging people to vote tactically, primarily to get rid of the Tories (because they need a decade in opposition), but also to ensure Labour doesn't get an overall majority. This country needs a progressive centre left alliance, with the Greens, SNP and possibly the LidDems ensuring Starmer and his pink Tories don't allow the injustices and unfairness we've suffered for so long to continue. 

Our Government is Shit

In February, I posted a blog about this being the Final Season of the Tories or words to that effect, because back in February, under Boris and with things starting to go wrong from almost every direction. At the time, the Tories looked rudderless, directionless and a little bored with being in power and yet now six months on under Rishi Sunak, the third leader of the UK in roughly the same time, it's just got worse and when the Tories aren't absent they do things that make the average person reel in horror.

The racist rhetoric, the lack of empathy, no help in a cost of living crisis, allowing corporations to strip mine once nationalised industries or defile the countryside and rivers. The latest is Robert Jenrick having a cartoon mural painted over in a children's asylum centre in Kent because they need to realise this is a law enforcement establishment and not a creche. What a heartless bastard! Yet, these low level snake shit salesmen do this almost on a monthly basis - stop benefits rises, stop free school meals for the poor, stop benefits, stop the boats, stop foreigners, stop protests, stop anything that means they're not paying money to the poor and happily give it to the rich, who hoard it and force interest rates up so high that thousands of people, already facing huge costs now have seen their mortgages increase almost double in some cases.

Just what are this mob doing? And why are they so uninterested and callous? What makes them think that the way forward is through division, racism and corruption? Sunak is always absent and when he isn't he says things that can be interpreted in a number of evil ways. There's a big bunch of Tory MPs who think the country needs to be more racist and prevent foreign care workers from wiping the old and disabled bottoms because some feckless 18 year old unemployed kid from Wisbech will do it or won't get any benefits - the perfect storm of disregarding safeguarding.

We have shit roads, dead rivers, more food banks than Big Mac outlets, rotting schools, rotting rented accommodation, the NHS on its knees, businesses going under because of lack of staff because locals won't do the jobs. Then there's the climate crisis and we decided not to spend the £11.2bn we pledged to it - not only does that infuriate the rest of the world it makes us look like liars and not Statesmen. I can list so many things that the Tories have fucked up since 2010 it makes depressing reading considering they're constantly voted in despite the destruction they bring; it's madness.

What we're witnessing is a dereliction of duty. They have given up. Loads of MPs are standing down at the end of this parliament - some are going because they know they're going to lose their own seats, some because they feel Parliament is now a toxic environment with undercurrents of sexism, misogyny, nepotism and corruption and to all the people who say 'what else can they do' or 'it's not their fault' - these scumbags gave away £40bn at the start of the pandemic on shit PPE, their mates and let's not forget the parties and the One Rule For Them But Not For Us lifestyle. They had the money to fix everything but they pissed it up a wall.

Just for parity - Keir Starmer and his cadre of Deep Blue Labourites have done so many policy U turns in the last year they sound like they're now selling themselves as Tory Lite just to attract the votes of about 12% of the population who are racist and want the country to suffer as much as possible by not blaming Brexit. Labour has no progressive ideas any more, they just offer Not The Tories.

Politics is fucked. No one seems to be able to do any good because of the scandals, corruption, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Cancel Culture - no one is doing anything because they're too busy obsessing over each other. Mhairi Black - at 28 - is quitting her SNP seat because she's had enough of the horrible atmosphere and hateful vibes parliament spews out. We're losing the good as well as the bad and I suppose we're going to have a much different parliament after the next General Election. This might be good or it might be an influx of new serial politicians who are there for their own benefits before those of the people who voted them in.

We need a party to win the election and then say everything needs reforming; that parliament and the way it is run needs overhauling; that they need an independent ombudsman to police the MPs; they need to stamp out second jobs and lobbying. Someone needs to get into power and change the way we do and participate with politics. We need the education system overhauled with more emphasis on years 9 thru 11 about life and how to live it and how to understand how we fit into society and how others do as well. We also need proper leadership for the people.

Time to Change?

Before any of my 'not lefty' friends baulk at the title of this expecting it to be another attack on the Tories and why we should all vote Labour, you can put that notion to bed straight away. No ordinary Tory should be fearful of voting Labour at the moment unless you thought Ted Heath's Tories in the early 1970s radical loose cannons. Left wing political representation is almost non-existent in UK politics at the moment, so you can put that 'woke socialist takeover' on hold and concentrate on which party will privatise National Health first.

However, what I am going to talk about is trust in politicians and politics, because no one has trusted politics for about 15 years now and it doesn't matter what colour you wear, the average man in the street thinks you have yourself, your party and your party's friends interests at heart and the rest of us will have whatever's left of their time and inclination. The idea that a local MP has entered politics for altruistic reasons might have been the original narrative, but most MPs become so corrupted by what's on offer to them that principles often get thrown out with the rubbish and if you remain a man of principle then you're often the target of ludicrous smears and accusations.

Just remember kids, if you call your neighbour a cunt and then write it down on paper and post it through other neighbours letterboxes, at least two things you'll have is libel and slander; your neighbour can have you on those two things without hesitation. In politics, decent people can be called anything the press fancies and the victims have zero recourse unless they want their careers replaced with long-running libel/slander cases. The haters always win this scenario because if you want to stay true to your beliefs then you have to accept and ignore the shit that is thrown at you and if you decide to argue with these people you're therefore prevented from doing what you want to do, so your opponents always win.

Today's episode of 'What the fuck has my politician been up to today?' is about the Tory MP who thought he could put the cost of his own birthday card on his expenses. Remember something here, there are actual genuine cases of poverty and hardship out there that even gammons accept are not dole scroungers or liggers, but all Tory MPs for the last umpteen years have voted consistently to prevent the poorest people from getting more in benefits, yet he thinks he can put the cost of his own living as an MPs expense?

If it wasn't so horrendously stupid and ignorant it would be offensive. These people are on a minimum of £84,000 a year; they only have to breath and it can go on expenses. More than half of them have other jobs, whether actual physical jobs or acting as 'consultants' and some of these people get £3000 an hour for doing these extra jobs. They'd rather see a child starve than pay £2.50 for a birthday card (let alone try to claim someone else's expenses as your own).

What we need, whoever is in power, is a code of conduct for MPs that strips away all of the things that make being an MP a cushy job with no need to do much apart from say 'hear hear' or laugh at the opposition. No subsidies on second homes; no jobs for the wives and children if they're not actually working; no putting everything from cards to stables to coy carp ponds as MPs expenses. We need to stop normalising this kind of casual corruption, especially as these people would be the first to fire someone if they nicked so much as a Post-It note. 

MPs are elected by US to serve US and be responsible to and for US. That seems to have gone. It now seems to be we elect these charlatans to go and do whatever they want with no fear of recriminations. This is wrong and needs to stop. Then people might start to trust MPs again.

Subdivisions

One thing that most people in this country would agree on is we've never been so divided as a nation. I'd rather not spend time trying to separate all the different Tribes of Britain, but we have a new kind of politics in this country, one that embraces certain elements of Conservatism but also has a many Labour ideals, such as social justice and equity - these people aren't Liberals; let's get that straight from the word go - a liberal isn't what a lot of citizens of England have become. 

I know people who you would call Conservative through and through calling for more support for the poor and disenfranchised, while there are people who call themselves Labour supporters who display all the traits of racists and intolerant bigots towards selective audiences. I know socialists who had meltdowns when one of their children came out of the closet, while I know a Conservative who thinks voting for Brexit was a stupid thing and he wishes we could have a referendum again. Politics isn't simply red and blue with a dash of yellow thrown in; politics is multi-coloured and people are allowed to be socialists and not like European people.

Oddly enough I've never met a single person who thinks food banks are good and I've met no one who thought Gary Lineker was out of order for being a decent human being, but that might be down to the fact that in real life you rarely meet anyone with the specific views you often see on social media and where I live you rarely see anyone doing something like protest, not because we're following the example set by hypercritical newspapers, but because in the stick protests are few and far between; in fact the most contentious thing to happen to me in my quiet rural corner of Scotland has been the upcoming Coronation of Chaz the Third.

You see I think people have learned over the last few years that sometimes keeping what you think to yourself is probably the best thing to do. I saw this happen on Twitter when the Queen died; the people most likely to be disrespectful to a family about their deceased mother took a few days off, let the world do its thing; they ruffled no feathers. It was a wise decision. So as my very loyal Royalist 'town' is gearing up for the kind of public participation event we haven't seen since the Queen's silver jubilee in 1977, it's interesting to see what the anti-Royal and the ambivalent will do or say. Probably nothing because a lot of people in rural communities live and let live; there's plenty of other things to do. Obviously the same can't be said the closer you get to London and as you get closer to ground zero the veins in people's necks begin to pulse and twitch; more people froth at the mouth and talk about respect like it isn't a two-way street, because in 2023 respect isn't; it's a weapon used by whoever wants to take the moral high ground in a divisive issue.

Nothing is proving more divisive at the moment than the Royal family and the crowning of a man with quite a lot of money that's being paid for by his subjects, who currently are struggling to rub two halfpennies together. If this was 11th century Britain you'd understand it, but in 2023? 

British politics is also at a crossroads; the Tories are now slightly right wing of UKIP, while the Labour Party in a desperate attempt to please as many people as possible have morphed into a kind of Cameron-lite Tory Party, leaving the Libdems to feel a bit left wing and the Greens hoping they'll pick up votes from disgruntled left wing Labour voters who would rather remove a testicle or ovary with a rusty spoon than vote for Obi Wan Keir. 

Monarchists however are a curious subdivision; it crosses the political divide and becomes more of an us and them issue with people who do not have the same fawning worship of a bunch of ancestral Germans who gained the thrown through probable unfair shenanigans back around the turn of the 19th century. Where I live there are a number of devout Monarchists who put Pope worshippers to shame and I'm ambivalent towards them as I am towards it all. However, I don't think Monarchists feel the same way; there's a fealty between them that is almost as strong as the one they hold for the crown and they will fight for them; they will stand with hand on heart and recite the pledge of allegiance on Sunday and they will expect every other person in the country to be doing the same or they will be classed as traitors or worse, not British.

You can now be tarred with a brush for not wanting to be involved. I didn't realise that life was a case of choosing sides and if you opt out it's an offence?

Another Reason Why the BBC is Shit

The fact that BBC News now has about 30% outside content suggests the channel is desperate to stay on air with all the cuts being aimed at them. The weird thing about this is BBC News has, at least for the last eight or nine years, been a mouthpiece for the Tory government. Scrutiny has been in short supply of the Tories, the focus has been on anyone but them. So you'd imagine the BBC, in the knowledge that there's a good chance their evil overlords will be ousted from power next year, would be more 'inclined' to be a little more circumspect of the government and not appear to be gaslighting the country for them, still.

I know that theories abound about the BBC and how their impartiality, especially towards the Conservatives, has never been more absent, but one wonders if the actual standard of journalism has been reduced to a level that the average intelligent person will switch off?

This morning on the offensive Nicky Campbell radio phone in - now televised on the news channel for two hours a day to cut costs - one of the many arseholes they invite on to spout bullshit made the comment: 'I completely support the teachers, nurses and other public sector workers desperate for a wage rise, BUT surely there's a more effective way of getting what they want rather than going on strike and effecting the lives of the people who support them?' This is a passive aggressive form of attack, something the right wing has become very good at. It used to be called whataboutery, but now it's more subtle. 

I wanted to be on that show, I wanted to have Twitter open in front of me or my mobile to text the programme. I wanted to say, "If striking doesn't work, what do you suggest they do? Writing a strongly worded letter to the Health Secretary? Stop caring about their patients? How does the caller think a pay issue will be resolved unless the people wanting a pay rise roll over and show their employers' their bellies and hope that's enough?" What an absolute fucking wanker and what a shower of cunts the BBC are for even allowing this idiot onto the show; but what should we expect? Yesterday, Jonty from Chichester phoned up to tell the listening public, in his posh voice, that nurses were greedy, already paid enough and need to stop being greedy! This was like when they invited Nigel Lawson on to argue the case for why climate change is a myth...

I love the way the BBC has managed to make people we were cheering for three years ago into villains now. Every time there's a strike, it never focuses on the needs of those on strike, but always attaches itself to the selfish wants and needs of the individual. "This strike is affecting my life and I don't like it!" Well tough shit, it's ruining the lives of the people who want more money, but don't you worry about them, until you need to have your life saved.

Electable at What Cost?

Disclaimer: I have not voted Labour for five and a half years and haven't been a member of the party for six years. I did vote for them at virtually every other election.

Did you know there's this thing called the Forde Report, commissioned by Labour leader Keir Starmer investigating the antisemitism allegations levelled at Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party at the time. You might not have heard of this report because once it was released it got buried, by the Labour Party. The reason? It proved categorically that the allegations against the former Labour leader and the rife antisemitism were a load of hogwash and that there was ONE example of it, originating from an old tweet made by a Corbyn supporting councillor in Merseyside. Considering there are still Tories who would throw their support behind any of the previous PMs we've had, one lone dodgy bloke does not make a political party rife with racism and corruption.

To put some perspective on it, there were 36 recorded examples of Tory Islamophobia in the same period of time, suggesting that it's okay for Tories to criticise Muslims but it's not okay to criticise the right-wing Israeli government and its systematic eradication of the Palestinians? I mean, we know the world isn't a fair place, but that's a bit crazy isn't it?

Anyhow, one of the news channels I usually throw scorn towards, Al Jazeera, released a series of films called The Labour Files, which broke down and investigated the entire incident from the election of Corbyn as Labour leader to the invention of allegations, which originated inside the Labour Party and until the removal of Corbyn, which it basically claims was a centre-right coup. It named all the newspapers as being culpable in the persecution of Corbyn, but focused it's attention at The Guardian, which it accused of adding imaginary meat to the bones of a non-existent story. The Guardian currently moderates or blocks any comments that mention the Labour Files.

These documentaries also go as far to suggest that the right wing of the Labour party deliberately sabotaged their own party's election chances to get rid of Corbyn from the party and that these MPs and party workers were responsible for everything that has happened since 2017. I find it quite crazy that in 2017 when Theresa May looked like she was trying to lose that election that members of Corbyn's party were leaking lies to the press or deliberately starting arguments about non-existent issues. I can't believe these people sacrificed us because they didn't like this old bloke with a beard and an allotment. Everything said about Corbyn for years was a lie; it was a scam and an organised destruction of a decent man.

Incidentally, Starmer has announced that Jeremy Corbyn will not be standing at the next election as a Labour candidate - an election liability, apparently - and the Constitutional Labour Party (CLP) - the mob who basically did Corbyn in - are now considerably more dangerous than Corbyn could ever have been because they are forcing the party to the right, just not as right wing as the Tories. Starmer continues to drive Labour down this centre-right path in an attempt to win floating Tory voters at a time when all he needs to be is competent to win the next General Election - it makes no sense.

Now this isn't designed as a hatchet job against Labour; far from it. The last thing I want is for people to think I've been an enabler to another Tory government, but I'm not sure the Labour Party are very nice people at the moment. Wes Streeting, their Health spokesperson is more for privatisation than any Tory has ever openly said; Rachel Reeves, the Shadow Chancellor, has some ideas that Thatcher would have applauded and opinions on the economy, Europe, immigrants and other things that would have some of us frothing at the mouth if it came from a Tory's mouth. 

Labour's CLP believed the only way the party would be electable again was if it swung slightly right of Tony Blair and they completely ignored the fact that in 2017 more people voted for a left wing Labour leader than anybody had ever voted before. Corbyn might have lost, but his policies still resounded with people, especially the young - he probably lost because the press had already character assassinated him; had someone young and exciting gone to the polls with his policies I'm betting we wouldn't be having this conversation now. 

There are a lot of unhealthy links between top people in Starmer's Shadow Cabinet and regimes around the world we don't necessarily want to be seen aligning with and too many of their opinions seem to agree with the government rather than oppose them. I know a lot of people are saying they're saying this that and the other to win votes, when they get in they'll be far more radical and to these people I say the Tories don't do that; they don't promise one thing and deliver the diametric opposite; even if they don't fulfil any of their election pledges it's usually because of profitability or being ignored, Even if the Tories can get away with lying, the right wing media will never let you forget it if Labour did it. It doesn't matter how good they might prove to be they'll never be forgiven; it would be on every Tory election campaign leaflet for 100 years.

Reeves has said there isn't enough money to do anything really radical and it could be that instead of changing things, Labour could get into power and just hope that it coincides with an economic recovery, because the more to the right they shift the less likely they're going to actually do anything or enable something from being built, which means the decaying country in front of you will continue to decay, but at a faster rate. I must share this with you, I heard this the other day and figured it just about sums up this country in a nutshell at the moment: it would cost £14bn to fix all of the UK's roads, but the amount of time it would take would man the cost would eventually be £17bn. However, if the UK was to completely resurface every single road with more than 20% erosion and decay it would only cost £22bn. I know that's £5bn more, but the £17bn 'repairs' cost would become £22bn by the time the 'repairs' finished because there would then be the new repairs to repair. The cost would increase every year - a painting of the Forth Bridge scenario - however, spend the £22bn on resurfacing 80% of the road network, the annual repair costs nationally are in the millions not the billions for at least ten years. 

If people are worried about the UK borrowing money, if that money is used to repair the country, build new schools and hospitals and drag it back to where it should be, ending years of Tory corruption, then that is money well borrowed because it will generate jobs, it will be ploughed back into the economy and the country will prosper again. Fuck your tax breaks and contracts and inflation-busting interest rate rises; create a country that needs people to work in it and if that means extending 1 to 5 year visas to Europeans or Africans or even Asylum Seekers to help do that work and pay more into local communities and wow... suddenly you have happy thriving societies where dislike and xenophobia are a small minority not the overriding majority. This is the message Labour needs to be sending out to every one.

The last seven years have effectively ended the idea of hung parliaments and rainbow alliances; with the exception of the SNP - who are an entirely different blog if I understood enough about them - no one really looks like they can offer any real opposition nationally. The Libdems are basically where the Liberal Party was in the 1970s and the United Kingdom will never elect Green MPs unless it's in places like Brighton; so we're a two party nation and one party is now like the Tory party and the other is like the BNP. What a fucking choice?

Interest-ing (for some)

I like to think I know more than others about politics and how it works. I mean, I've spent enough time reading, writing and ranting about it, so sometimes I'm genuinely confused. I'm none the wiser when it comes to the subject of interest rates and how raising them prevents inflation. I think this is because we've had eleven consecutive interest rate hikes and I've not seen the price of a tin of beans drop; tomatoes and peppers are still going up in price and the cost of a refill pouch of Kenco decaf 'koffy' increased 75p in one week, which is about a 20% increase.

The Bank of England has just put it's rate up again and the explanation for it was this: "This means people have less money to spend on the economy, subsequently causing inflation to drop". There are other reasons given, such as bringing down prices of imports and discouraging people from borrowing, but the obvious fact staring most of us already have less to spend and this is coupled with high interest rates meaning only people with savings are making more money and the prices of food continue to go up - as the latest 10.4% inflation figures clearly proved. Raising the interest rate increases the profits of people with savings and forces more and more people into having to make difficult decisions. These rises have not stopped inflation because these interest hikes benefit the companies already profiteering from it. It's like giving all the energy companies control of their own watchdog, said watchdog will always err towards the shareholders than you or I (a bit like in real life). The bottom line is big business doesn't give a shit if you live, die or starve and freeze because someone will take your place and require the services/food they provide and they'll find a way to pay the bills.

How is this even remotely helping? The Bank of England lackey Andrew Bailey has urged retailers to curb their profits and stop putting prices up - in other words 'give more back to your customers and less to your shareholders', which we all know has as much chance of happening as Boris Johnson being kicked out of the Tory party. Prices of food, fuel and therefore everything connected will continue to rise leaving the UK in a perilous position by the time next autumn rolls around.

Yet the Tories have reduced the 30 point deficit in the polls to less than 10 points suggesting what we're headed for next year is a hung parliament - which must make depressing reading for the 'I'll roll over if you tickle my belly' leader of the opposition. Surely the British people deserve a brighter future? At the moment they have a choice between a Tory party that has somehow convinced people it's not really as shitty or nasty as people thought, or the Labour party, who had their chances of power scuppered by their right wing in 2017, are now bemused as to why the left wing of the party is trying to scupper the next one. This is a party that is so right wing now they approve of what Israel is doing more than many Israelis.

Surely it's time people started to want their politicians to work for the people and not just their mates and surely it's time to be able to sack our local MPs if they are not seen doing a minimum amount of work for their constituencies or are claiming too much in expenses while stymieing the chances of the disenfranchised. We need a new politics at a time when people are becoming resigned to living in a world that is continually butt-fucking them. It has to stop because we're going to be here in 12 months, when the price of that decaf will be £6 for a refill (instead of the £3.25 it had been for years) and there will still be fresh food shortages in the winter because we're still going to be last in queue of EU suppliers, even if we are paying much more. We'll look at the price of petrol and think £1.50 a litre is cheap, the same way in a few years we'll think £2.00 is cheap and filling the car up will become a luxury for some people.

I get the argument from right wingers; there is no other way; people won't pay for the people who won't work, people don't want high taxes - but think about this for just one second; we used to have councils that did everything, low prices, high employment and a lot of things were state owned. In 2023, because of capitalism at its most rampant and uncaring, we have almost a quarter of the country in need of some kind of handout and it's all to do with rising prices and costs and profits. Your rates pay for fewer things every year and if the rich are going to remain very rich then someone's got to pay for it and that someone is us. Yeah, it's always been like this isn't an argument, it's barely an excuse and no, actually, it hasn't always been like this; yes we have rich people and poor people, but we didn't have so many poor people to the point where a company's profit is more important than the welfare of its workers (and therefore it's users/customers).

If you were told by the government that we'd have to share our waterways with a lot of the stuff that comes out of bottoms and pay for the privilege, so that the shareholders of the privatised water industry can buy a bigger and more vulgar yacht to moor in the Bahamas, I'm sure you'd find a lot of people opposed to that and when you find out that the companies that own the water companies have made it increasingly difficult for the government to impose any rules or sanctions on them and have actually been pumping bottom product straight into our seas and rivers do you still feel really confident and happy about privatisation in the 21st century?

Take the rail strikes; yes 50% of the industrial action was about pay, but much of the other 50% was about safeguarding, protection of jobs and customers and rail workers' bosses were not allowed to discuss certain aspects of what was being asked for because the government was pushing for the changes more than the companies that 'own' the railways. That included disposing of almost all staff outside of the train drivers - reducing the service, putting people at risk and allowing trains and stations to become empty and automated, cold and unhelpful. You don't hear about that, you just get told about the evil strikers making people better off than themselves angry at being inconvenienced, even if that patently wasn't the case this time around.

It might have always been like this but I think when you hear bemused Tories and Brexit nuts droning on about how much better the past was, I actually think what they want is for the UK to return to a time where their memories have simply polarised aspects and forgotten other, less wondrous, things. People want councils that fix the central heating, pick up bins, sweep the streets, discourage litterers, they want the police to keep the streets safe and clear of undesirables, who would only exist in small groups and could be targeted by community workers, who like everyone else is an arm of one organisation, not one of 50 private companies trying to think of the cheapest way of helping someone.

A time when people seemed happy and summers were proper long is what people yearn for this and yet are unaware of the fact that it's their own fault we're even further away from what they want because we've bought into all the capitalist bullshit fed to us by whatever political overlords sit in parliament. And it's all the fault of the generation who literally never had it so good; the generation that ensured no one ever had it as good as them again.

Tory Britain Season Finale

I remember declaring in these pages back in 2016 that world events are becoming like an Aaron Sorkin [West Wing] drama that simply wouldn't have been commissioned because it was too far fetched. Everything from Brexit to Trump to the political craziness that followed and to Covid 19 and Boris Johnson - the news has felt more like a wondrously surreal soap opera at times and social media has divided the country even more with lots of people standing round with I Told You So T-shirts on and those furious sunlit uplands believers who are further away from them now than they were in 2015 trying to justify all the shit that's happening and all sounding increasingly bewildered and... well, frankly, stupid.

A few months ago they had become beyond farcical. It's like the scriptwriters, with a desperate need to beat all the events of previous seasons, had gone utterly mad and decided that the Tory party needed to properly explode/implode - again - but this time so catastrophically it would give them wiggle room to set things up for a all-new, all-different new season of Britain. Short of the alien invasion (which I have twice before suggested is on the cards), we've long been in a situation where we are actually the laughing stock of much of the rest of the world. I'm expecting the Rwandan government to start offering advice within the week, followed by North Korea and the Andaman Islands...

About four months ago, I wrote this: There is no way to get a General Election. That's the frightening thing about the current situation. Only Liz Truss has that power and I think - conspiracy theories aside - she's barking mad and is more akin to Game of Thrones politics than British democracy and she's no longer in charge - literally and metaphorically. Plus, a General Election would be so disastrous for the Tories they could be reduced to no longer being the opposition - it really is that bad. 300+ MPs are not going to want to give up their jobs for a matter of principle, so we're stuck with them for as long as another two years plus. 

In the last three months, Sunak's government hasn't really done much to address the laundry list of problems the UK has at the moment; he's set a few targets, which even right wing newspapers have suggested would happen if we had a corpse in charge, in the hope that the gullible public will forget about the massive corruption and general piss taking that has been going on for best part of the last eight years. Part of me thinks that they tried to throw the 2017 election; actually physically gave up about half way through it because they knew we were fucked, but they didn't lose and have been stuck with this massive fubar with no idea how to fix it so have been milking it for whatever they can. The Tories don't care about Britain or you, they care about themselves and will do it all again in 12 years time when you get fed up with having extra balloons with your capitalism.

I remember lots of events in the last 50 years where I've asked floating voters to remember when the Tories did this, that or the other - to remember the NHS or COVID or PPE or Windrush or Grenfell or HS2 or Levelling up or tax evasion or fridges or [insert umpteen more embarrassing fuck ups here], but often time is a healer in the worst kind of ways and people think that they deserve another chance. They don't. They basically prove that around a third of the population are masochists. We put the pain they inflict out of our minds because, you know, it's politics. But this time I think we're witnessing the bottom falling out of the Tories. I think even Tories are fed up with them. This current mob are not Conservatives, not how I remember them and I remember nasty Tories from the Thatcher era. No, this lot are Libertarian neo-Fascists and that is a massive danger to anyone in this country who isn't wealthy.

What we're witnessing is strip mining of the economy by MPs and their cohorts because they're not going to be able to do it very soon. They're in a win-win situation; they're fucking up the UK so much that whoever gets in power is royally screwed economically and if some miracle happened they retained power somehow they could literally continue treating the country like their very own Baby Daddy.

Sleaze and corruption is coming out of Westminster like a running sore; it's like they have spent the last few years normalising it; making the general public relatively immune to the ridiculous and at times farcical goings on. 'Oh it's just politicians; you know what they're like, ennit?' What is incredible is they've almost stopped trying to defend themselves, now it's all about saying 'Yeah, we're bad but can you imagine what that lot are going to be like in power, doing all that woke stuff and spending money on people who aren't YOU!'

The media still try to set the agenda by attempting to dictate to the people just who the enemy is, unfortunately, the media has forgotten that the general public who they depend on is actually the enemy. Apparently at much as 78% of the country defend the strikes; most people accept they're a pain in the arse but support the people doing it. The unions have swapped bluff, bluster and shouting with co-ordinated responses; calm, cool and calculated and have not risen to the bait. 

I still see people - I presume they're real people - who would rather remind us all of that great hypothetical of how it would be much worse under a [insert political party that isn't right wing here] government and you have to wonder what rock these people are living under. Have none of them looked outside? Do they never go shopping? It must take a special kind of person who will swallow every sentence a government speaks and truly believes that it's everyone else's fault.

The problem I have is I'm not sure a Labour government will be much better. For starters there will literally be no money and to dispel a myth - did you know that every outgoing chancellor leaves a note to the incoming one saying all the money is gone; it's a joke; a bit of banter between the old and the new; like the letter an outgoing president leaves the incoming one. David Cameron chose to weaponize it and we are where we're at all because of that overblown bit of political rhetoric. Do not forget when you think about the last four PMs trying to think who the worst one was, don't forget Cameron, because it really is all his fault. 

Cameron and Osborne have changed the way politics is done in the UK; they exploited every single loophole they could and opened the door to ultra right wing politics becoming normal within a faction of the Tory party. They might have been neo-liberals themselves, but in their greed they allowed a nastier ideology to foment and by pandering to the incredibly minimalist anti-EU side of their party they doomed us. The Labour Party now seem to think their path to power lies in pandering to the shrinking amount of anti-EU people left in the country and by telling people they might have to be the ones who privatise the NHS. The future of British politics has never looked less appealing.