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.
