The Gift

For many, Brexit is like being given the truly awful present of a colourful tank top by your favourite auntie who lives on the next street and who you bump into at least three times a week.

It is the gift that keeps on shitting on the mat.

It has been over four months since I wrote a politics blog; a large percentage of that time has been spent writing a massive tome about why leaving the EU might not be such a stupid idea, if the right party is in power when it happens. However, since I last did any work on it, Boris Johnson has become PM (by default); Brexit has gone up several ladders and slid down as many snakes; we've gone from Treeza's 'Brexit means Brexit' and 'Nothing Has Changed' to BJ's 'Dead in a Ditch' and the Libdems abstaining from a vote which, in the event of a shit Brexit deal would stop the NHS being sold off to the highest Yankee bidder (thus proving the LibDems really can't be trusted with anything apart from taking the trash out - themselves).

What I can't understand is why Boris's first 10 attempts at getting a GE are not as important as the current one, which has the media going full scale nuclear on Labour's arse. Unless this is a rouse?

Boris is high in the polls (nearly where Treeza was when she called a GE in 2017) and everyone continues to try to demonise that Corbyn fella, blaming him for everything and then a bit more. BJ's trying every possible way to call a Christmas General Election now that's he's failed to get one any earlier. In many ways he sounds like an opposition leader trying to get the PM to resign and call a vote, and I suppose in a way he is in opposition. The thing is so many Tories (who voted for the Fix Term Parliament Act) are so desperate for a GE they really are sounding desperate; but is that desperation because they're so confident they can win big or is it, for the rather surreal reason, that they think they might lose.

There's a reason for this, which I'd like to explain because it does sound a wee bit crazoo...

There is a very good chance that a General Election will deliver us with another hung parliament; in fact, talk to any pollster and despite their affiliation to the Tories they will honestly say they couldn't put their hands on their hearts and forecast a massive Tory win. If we have a hung parliament then there's going to be a huge chance that there will be too many anti-Brexit MPs for whoever forms a government to achieve Brexit without, at minimum, a second referendum. The constitutional dilemma facing the Brexiteer Tories is another hung parliament pretty much guarantees more Brexit deadlock and can you imagine if we're still trying to sort out extracting the eggs from a baked cake in 2025? Can you imagine what the population will be like?

In a poll held in the last week of 1000 Leavers and 1000 Remainers, 63% of Leavers felt that civil unrest, violence and another MP's death was 'a price worth paying' to get Brexit done. Rather scarily (because it flies in the face of my belief) 53% of Remainers feel the same way... It might not be obvious - apart from the rise in hate crime - but tempers are simmering; hate and vile comments are increasing and it won't be long before something boils over. The division is now so great, I reckon we're on the brink of an existential civil war.

But back to the deadlock... Would Boris really want to be PM in charge of the same parliamentary numbers? Would Boris keep trying with subsequent general elections in the hope that eventually he gets the result he wants? That is a joke, but given this PM and his (lack of) success rate, I wouldn't put it past him. There's also the fact that despite being Mr Popular, he's also not particularly trusted, even by his supporters. He's seen as a slightly Machiavellian character and while that appeals to some people, he needs some victories to make him truly electable and for people to stop scrutinising him and his flippy-floppy nature.

Fortunately, he has the Mainstream Media on his side and they're not going to scrutinise him as much as they scrutinise Labour and Corbyn, but as we learnt from Treeza's botched effort in 2017, the MSM stopped trying to besmirch Corbyn because they realised it doesn't do much but make people wonder why everyone attacks this gentle man, who has an allotment and wants a fairer country for all - yes, they can call him a terrorist sympathiser (it's a shame Mo Mowlam isn't still alive to tell the wankers who keep perpetrating this myth that we wouldn't be where we are in Northern Ireland if Corbyn hadn't been on her team forging the Good Friday Agreement; but why let a fact get in the way of casting aspersions?) or they can call him a socialist or a commie, but people might also start thinking, "Well, we've had the Tories for 10 years, I'm worse off, no one trusts politicians any more, no one knows who to believe - why should I give them another go at screwing up the country they've made a good fist of screwing up already?" Labour won a lot of votes in 2017 on this fact alone; we're three years down the line and the Tories don't exactly cover themselves with glory, do they?

So, would Boris and his ERG buddies really want to be in charge of a parliament that will be as intransigent as it currently is? Or would they maybe think, 'Sod this for a game of soldiers, let's see if Commie Boy and his band of cultural misfits can do any better. If he fucks up we'll win by a landslide and can do all the things we wanted to do but legitimately and hey, we're all still young enough...'

I know this is an unlikely scenario, but Treeza's 16 point lead over Labour disappeared faster than a Boris Johnson prediction and Boris hasn't got that lead. When people start talking about the country's issues rather than Brexit, the Tories have a problem because no one really trusts them, not even their largely intelligent middle class supporters (forget working class Tory voters; they could have their children put up chimneys and they'd still vote Tory, because... [insert utter bullshit here]).

Plus there's the 1945 scenario. At the end of the Second World War, Winston Churchill - a hero of BJ - was walking on water; if there were personal approval ratings in 1945 he was as popular as Jesus and the election was going to deliver a Tory government who would do whatever Tory governments did in the first half of the 20th century, except they got annihilated. People decided they wanted something new to rebuild the country; to build houses, hospitals for the new NHS, more schools, more infrastructure - create jobs so that everybody post-war could contribute to the return of GREAT Britain. This current situation isn't much different than then, or at least that's the way it's being painted.

One last thing for the benefit of the moaners - not the remoaners, but the people fed up with it all, fed up with MPs for spoiling life by dragging Brexit out. I know there's a lot of people who think we should just leave; tell the EU to fuck off and go it alone. Even if that were possible Northern Ireland is part of the UK. I know that English Brextremists couldn't give a shit about the Irish, but there are a lot of people who do, not least some of the people we hope to make free trade deals with. If Northern Ireland is even in the same universe as a return to the troubles then we really would be fucked. You can dismiss this as project fear or say I don't know what I'm talking about, but pretty much all of the problems now to do with Brexit is how to extricate Northern Ireland from the Irish Republic without causing a civil war and how to do it to keep 10 fruit and nutcase DUP MPs happy. This is akin to giving a chimp 10 Rubics cubes and telling him in Cantonese that he has 10 seconds to solve them all - pretty much impossible without some shit being thrown first and a lot of anger.

This, along with the actual fear of economic oblivion, are the two reasons why so many MPs have thwarted Brexit. We elect them to serve us, yes. But we also elect them to do the best for us; to make the decisions that are not going to cause us great hardship and that's all of us, including the people who voted remain and those that through whatever reason didn't vote at all. I know that Leave voters hate the fact that they didn't win by 99% to 1% but dem's da facts; the referendum 'victory' wasn't a win-all-and-exterminate-the-losers kind of deal; concessions have to be made to try and make as many people reasonably happy as possible and to make sure that even the most rabid of Brexiteers don't starve to death, die of a lack of medicines or most likely get blown up by an Irish Republican bomb while Christmas shopping in Sunderland.

Most people say, 'I don't do politics' but in 2019 most everyone does, even if it's to call MPs 'wankers' or wonder when it's all going to stop. What is even more crazier than my belief the Tories might actually want to lose the election is that all those people who convinced Leavers that the sunlit uplands of Britain would be awash with diamond encrusted Unicorns dispensing money and free sex to everyone are now the same people claiming they never said it would be better and people actually voted to be worse off and culturally bereft. If Aaron Sorkin introduced this kind of story when he was doing The West Wing he probably would have been told the show was trying to stay as realistic as physically possible.

Whatever happens, just remember most of the MPs have been pissing you off to ultimately save you. You might not see it and you certainly don't appreciate it, but at some point in the future you might wish they'd succeeded.

We probably need to leave to shut down the right wing; to stop all this talk and focus on how to fix the country. That depends on who is in charge when it happens. If you work for someone be very careful about who you vote for when that day comes, because one of the parties actively talks about how citizens rights prevents the country from competing with Tiger economies; that same party would be happy to see sickness, maternity and holiday pay outlawed, because it would mean employers could get rid of whoever they didn't like and replace them with people equally as expendable. That same party thinks the NHS is a drain on resources and would like swathes of it privatised and that same party wants to keep reducing public spending while giving the richest 10% more money (which, if you are a Tory voter can you explain to me how that benefits anyone apart from the already very rich?)

If you want a future of uncertainty, fear and no security, you know which party is already offering you this. It's led by a buffoon and his army of posh wankers who wouldn't piss on the average Brit unless there was a fat cash bonus involved.

You don't do politics? Maybe you should. It's as important to humans as breathing; it affects every aspect of your life whether you want to believe it or not and 99% of the time it's instigated by ourselves and has nothing to do with 'unelected' (they are) 'bureaucrats' (aren't all politicians) in Brussels. People need to understand how it works otherwise they will continue to rage at all the wrong things.

The Road to War

We know from history that nationalism [read: jingoism] rises in cycles and usually ends in conflict. Once it was an easier model because minorities were just that - in the minority - so creating a common [read: beatable] threat. Throughout history - modern and ancient - there have been crusades, cleansing and genocide all in the name of a god or a cause [read: money].

Quatermass and the Pit was originally a TV series and then made into a movie with Andrew Keir as the eponymous scientist. It told of a strange craft found under a tube station in London, but eventually it veered off into a quite existential idea that half of humanity was gifted genes from Martians, while the other half weren't; so when an extraterrestrial invasion starts, half of the world is crazy and the other reasonable, understanding and non-violent. It's a bit of a SF classic and the author, Nigel Kneale, was responsible for a lot of prescient SF in the 1960s.

Could it be something as simple as genetics. Are some of us predisposed to being gits, while some of us are just pinko liberals and the rest sit somewhere between the two. You know, the people who campaign for cancer, MS, missing dogs and Library closures, but will repost some thinly-disguised racist BS, while not having a moment of cognitive realisation.

I'm most certainly not an angel because I place intolerance, right-wing extremism and hate in a prejudicial category much like some people put blacks, Asians, the disabled, the unemployed and gay people in and I have been known to attack these weak-minded, racists in much the same way they might have insulted someone else who's inside their own personal hate bubbles. The irony is these people can't see it. They cannot see that what is happening to them is what they do all the time to people who already feel they have to work harder than most to stand still. That's when backlashes start.

The cause is quite simple. Over the last 20 years, a good friend of mine (who has been active on line since the invention of the Internet) and I have talked about the changing face of the net. We've been quite prophetic at times in our casual email discussions and regularly, my Kent-based friend, has sworn that he's quitting the net because it has become like an unwelcome addiction (and many other reasons). The success story here is that when I first met this person, he was pretty much a Tory voter with a deep mistrust of Labour. I'm of the opinion that he's now pretty much as left wing as I have ever been and without wishing to insult millions of people, that's because he did more than just read his news feeds and social media. He did things like investigate claims, debunk myths and through his work, he discovered that we really do persecute the disenfranchised. He also discovered that he was a decent and fair man who could easily beat himself up about someone else's misfortune. I wouldn't call him a hand-wringing leftie like I'd probably call myself, at times, but he's one of the more decent human beings I have known.

He was the first person to signpost to me how the Internet is a very dangerous thing. Back in the late 90s when we first met, he was using a pseudonym and had arrived at my Yahoo Group with the intention of 'kicking off' about my then boss's rather lackadaisical way of responding to correspondence. He was, according to him, an angry young man, but within months he'd become one of my generals, policing the group and ensuring that in those pre-Facebook days, things continued to 'happen'. Over the years, he witnessed life through the fish-eye lens of over 500 comic fans, made many real friends and discovered a world that wasn't quite as he thought it was. The early days of the internet allowed people to be honest with each other in environments that didn't need falsifying. Yet, even by the turn of the millennium opportunists, scammers, spammers and infiltrators were on the rise. There wasn't much difference between a 'troll' and his original role of 'agent provocateur'.

Yahoo groups, noticeboards, such as Delphi and Usenet had 'moderators' who kept things clean and then kept things tight and then allowed their small kingdoms to create megalomaniacs who began their own agendas and yet maintained control because it was easier not to challenge what some people either liked or had no desire to argue against. So when Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and the rest all appeared there was already a huge number of people who felt they could say and do anything they wanted while sitting behind a monitor or a fake moniker.

I'm a member of a Facebook group created in 2010 with a closed profile. It is a hidden group and cannot be searched through the Facebook database and fizzled out to maybe one post a year by the time I write this. It is innocuous and bothers no one, but because of its nature it could be used for all manner of incitement, subversion and mobilisation - no one else would know; it's secret, but it could have 200,000 members and be plotting the downfall of society. In many ways Facebook is the epitome of Internet freedom done commercially; it's more insidious than the Dark Web, more accessible and sits hidden in full view of the rest of the world. Some of the hate that pours out through Facebook is amplified beyond reason in hidden groups because I know people who have purposefully infiltrated some of these sites (for research). I also know people who are on these sites, through choice. It isn't just Facebook - anywhere with a populated comments section is full to the brim with people trying to be reasonable in the face of blatant ignorance, lies and hate. If you spent an hour on some of the BBC political pages' comments section you'd need to steam clean your brain afterwards.

A simple solution would be to simply turn off the Internet or stop people from being allowed to comment, thus discriminating against everyone, but we'd have more time for other trivial pursuits. Once upon a time when you said to a troll on a noticeboard that I bet he wouldn't be such a c*nt if he was standing in front of you. Now? Not so sure...

The biggest question I have, often asked recently, is what the people who could legislate against things such as this or refuse to comment on it feel, ultimately, the world will gain from the allowance of intolerance, hate and discrimination to become the norm? What does Paul Dacre (E-i-C of the Daily Mail) see in two or three years time as a result of indoctrinating the middle class to believe that all their problems lay at the feet of anyone who isn't like them? Do they want isolationism? Are they that deluded they believe we can return to 1950s booming Britain again, with all the trimmings [read: rationing]? Or do they see war as the ultimate goal? I've said it before, it solves a multitude of problems - in the short term - and some people are guaranteed to walk away from it with loads of cash, even if there's bugger all to spend it on other than surviving.

A lot of my 'disguised' optimism in the last blog is still there, the problem is the world's mood isn't loosening, the polarisation hasn't finished and the divides are becoming too broad to cross or bridge the gap. To some it would appear the world needs to crash and burn to be able to build a new order and that is a price worth paying, for generations.

Is this the pinnacle of Thatcher's 'me-me-me' ideology? The drive to 'self' over 'community' has yielded a world where some people really don't care what happens to others, or even themselves, as long as some misguided idea eventually comes to pass. When network news channels give time to ultra right wing people who make Nazis look subtle and the amount of hateful comments begins to outweigh the comments of reason, we have to start worrying about our safety - really. I realised the other day that I speak more when I'm out, but not solely out of politeness, so I can assure people that I'm not foreign. I've heard so much casual and overt racism in the last year I'd rather not try and alter these idiots perceptions. We've discovered that 'feelings' dictate now and 'facts' are just statistics given by people with a vested interest in what you don't want, so trying to appeal to any shred of humanity some people might have lurking somewhere inside is like trying to find the 10p you drunkenly lost on a pebble beach.

Oddly enough, some of the people I know who voted Leave on June 23 are gobsmacked about Donald Trump. A friend echoed what I've heard, the wishful thinking that Trump will be assassinated before long. I'd opt for indicted, but the fact that more people have said 'he'll be killed' than I would have possibly believed suggests to me that we're not actually becoming more civilised at all. If someone says it to you, just remind them who the new VP is going to be and the fact he thinks you can cure gays by electrocuting them.

If war is what some people [read: The Establishment] want, how exactly do they want it? Civil or nuclear? Wipe a few million out or a few billion? If there was only a billion people left on Earth in 2050 there would be a lot more money for the rich and powerful and just enough slave labour to keep them happy.

There are 6 weeks of 2016 left. That's plenty of time for some more surreal and stranger-than-fiction events. Strap yourself in; we're on the home straight.